Jonathan Last has a piece at The Weekly Standard on the subject, with a quote from yours truly.
8 thoughts on “Lost Technologies”
Comments are closed.
Jonathan Last has a piece at The Weekly Standard on the subject, with a quote from yours truly.
Comments are closed.
Yes, but in a way this has little to do with Fogbank or lost tech or retired engineers.
What it has to do with is the ban on weapons tests. Someone can fill me in on whether the ban is a treaty requirement or self-imposed.
If you could test, it would be a simple matter to substitute Fogbank Lite for Fogbank and light one of things off to see if it works. Even if the W-whatever were no longer in production, I am sure there is a big enough inventory (the alleged ability to blow up the World many times over) to use up a few in such tests.
But the whole point of a test ban, whether by treaty or self-imposed, is a kind of long-term slow-motion nuclear disarmament.
It is kind of like the Kyoto CO2 reduction thing. The major industrial powers are supposed to accept limitations on CO2 with the up and coming industrial powers (cough, China, cough) free to release as much CO2 as they chose because the major powers are supposed to be the grownups acting in a grownup way so the teens and children can learn by example.
The test ban is our way of disarming ourselves to set the example to the children (cough, Iran, cough) to not go down the road of developing nuclear weapons. Whether this makes any sense, I am sure there are those who will weigh in that it does.
I still hear Lefties cough up that “if we can put a man on the moon…” line as some sort of profundity. My immediate reply of “we can’t do that anymore” usually leaves them sputtering as they are suddenly forced to work off script and find a new line on their own.
In a way, it’s also an example of a “lost technology”, the idea that anreasonably intelligent product of a middle-class education could think for themselves.
Heh, Raoul. I was just watching a “Mythbusters” rerun where Adam Savage says, “If NASA can put a man on the moon, we ought to be able to find a needle in a haystack.”
And I turned to my wife and said, “These days, NASA can’t put a man on the moon.” I might need to explain that to her sometime soon, since she doesn’t read TM.
Oh, and they did find the needle. They even found one that wasn’t metal.
On the other hand, the creation of leisure time and discretionary spending allows for many technologies and skills that should be long dead or dying fast to live on in hobbyist and re-creationist circles. Think of black-powder hunting or developing one’s own camera film, or writing with a quill.
The lack of foresight is astonishing. Facilities and work forces may deteriorate over time, but the agency’s record retention system gets an “F” if the details of a process are lost. Art or no, why reinvent the wheel (even if we’re speaking of government)?
The issue of lost technology is an interesting one, and somewhat enigmatic. (I’ve recently posted on the perishability of technology: http://plasmawind.typepad.com/plasma_wind/2009/05/the-perishability-of-technology.html ).
One of the rebuttals that I often hear from those who deny that technology can actually be lost is that, “we could do that if we really wanted to”. In the story regarding the material “Fogbank”, ORNL folks did eventually recreate “Fogbank”, or a usable replacement.
However, having an existence proof that something can be done (“we landed on the moon”), is still quite different from being able to do it now (“we could land on the moon if our government program was sufficiently funded”). Eventually, you’ve got to actually get out there and “do it”.
I claim that technology, “know-how”, is perishable, that it comes and goes, and that it requires active usage to remain viable. Claiming that we can do something because we’ve done it before will not guarantee success, but it can keep you motivated to keep trying, knowing that what you’re trying to accomplish is not impossible. The enigma of lost technology, however, occurs when the separation between the existence proof and one’s existing knowledge base is too large. In that case, you may have an existence proof in the form of a tangible artifact, but have no idea how to reconstruct or reproduce the artifact from what you currently know how to do.
When I think about all the things that I do at my job (GNC) that you really can only learn by being personally, intimately, involved in building large aerospace systems, and when I look around and see how the workforce is aging and how much more difficult it is today to get college students interested in pursuing careers in aerospace, I fully understand the problem with Fogbank. Capturing the knowledge of the crusty old farts is very difficult, because you have to know what questions to ask.
John B, thanks for the link to your interesting post, which seems to reinforce Churchill’s remark regarding man’s failure to learn from history.
Maybe hobbyists, and housewives (who preserve everything from grandma’s cookbooks and folk remedies to time-worn formulas for de-skunking the dog) will one day prove to be the saviors of civilization.