I ran across this photograph somewhere in the last couple of weeks:
It was from the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. IIRC, 16 of these gentlemen and one lady received Nobel Prizes. There are only 29 people in the photograph, so that's a 58% Nobel rate. I suspect that's a world record for a scientific conference.
Aesop says that we are in a Scientific Dark Age,* and I agree. He says we may have been in it for a couple hundred years, and that's where our opinions part. I think that it's been since July, 1969.
I am currently reading Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feinman. Feynman will need no introduction here, but for those unfamiliar with him he worked on the Manhattan Project and then taught Physics at Princeton for Decades. He was the guy on the Space Shuttle Challenger Investigation Committee who showed that O-Rings lost their ability to seal pipes when they were cold.
He had a fascinating career - one of the world's greatest scientific minds, he rubbed shoulders with the rest of the world's greatest scientific minds. One theme that continually comes out in his memoir is a passion to question why things work the way they do. He independently derived methods of solving mathematical problems that in some case were superior to the "Official" ones. His was a strict allegiance to experimental proof:
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.
This is from the 1960s. That's gone now. Exhibit A for the Prosecution is my last post's reference to the chief of CERN - the world's most prestigious physics lab - and his command to his staff not to comment on the Svensmark experiment (because it calls into question the Scientific Orthodoxy of Global Warming). Exhibit B is the fact that for multiple reasons the climate databases are "seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted." Exhibit C is how NASA administrators are prohibiting NASA scientists from publishing papers that run against current Global Warming orthodoxy. There are many more examples of this in yesterday's post, and many, many more (over 500, in fact) here.
So something happened between July 1969 and today. Back then we were able to make atomic bombs, invent integrated circuits, and land a man on the moon. Now it's arguments over string theory and why we can't detect more "Dark Matter".
Feynman could have told people about that last one. I suspect that today they wouldn't listen, because they don't want to listen. Careers will be lost if the scientific grant gravy train gets upended.
And the funniest part? That gravy train is controlled by the same Government Leviathan that challenged the scientific community to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.
Mission accomplished. But what to then do with the gravy train? Well, never let a gravy train go to waste. And thus the beginning of the Scientific Dark Age dates to July 1969. It sure as shootin' hadn't started when the 1927 Solvay Conference was fresh in the rear view mirror. It took the Feb.Gov to royally screw up Science.
They're still having physics conferences at Solvay. There's a table here showing who chaired each conference. After Oppenheimer in 1964, the roster lists a bunch of nobodies.
* Interestingly, the picture that appears at the top of Aesop's post is of Percival Lowell in his Flagstaff observatory. Lowell is best known for his maps of the Canals of Mars, so this shows that the scientific rot had set in well before 1969.
11 comments:
Geniuses, all.
I agree with your comment re July 1969. After these traditionally-educated geniuses (and other scientists) built the systems that landed men on the moon, FEDGOV decided that they needed to do a "better job" edjumacating da population and established the Dept of Education.
Now the question arises: what new concept, inconceivable in previous times, has been invented and perfected since the FEDGOV started indoctrinating children.
I can't seriously name one.
But I propose, probably without argument, that the FEDGOV, having destroyed traditional education by allowing unions and political expediency to control the education process, has pushed us backwards - by at least 200 years.
To underline the point, I don't think it went everywhere all at once mid-19th century. Some sectors and disciplines held out until quite recently.
But the rot started in the middle-1800s, and oozed into everything, until now, there's no escaping it in even the hard actual sciences.
And I celebrate July 20, 1969 as Peak Of Western Civilization Day every year. We still haven't surpassed that moment to date, and some people are actively building berms to prevent overtopping that civilizational highwater mark anytime in the next century.
These people should have a sack thrown over them, be quietly strangled, and their carcasses thrown into hog pens overnight.
Something like 10,000 of them, done onesie-twosie, wouldn't arouse any suspicion at all, and the subsequent leaps and bounds of science unfettered by the woketard idiots and superstition-mongering moonbats would astonish the giants upon whose shoulders we stand.
And it would lower their carbon footprint.
Eagle, it's said that it only takes three generations to destroy a system:
The first generation knows the system intimately because they built it.
The second generation knew the system well, because they saw it being built and knew the founding generation. They could use the system's main functions decently well.
The third generation is worthless - focused on office politics and administrative bloat, they can't make the system perform very well at all.
A shorter way to say it is that the first generation wanted to DO SOMETHING, while the third generation wanted to BE SOMEONE.
Aesop, I think that Peak Of Western Civilization Day is an outstanding idea.
Borepatch
I once overheard a conversation at a diner, between two people who I know of (but didn't know personally), both of whom were (ahem) well off.
When talking about the rise and decline of family fortunes, one guy described the 4 generations using one word per generation. I think those 4 words also describe the multiple stages of societies - much as you stated in your post.
He said 4 words - and they have always stayed with me:
Thunder
Wonder
Blunder
Plunder
It's about as succinct as I ever heard.
My vote for the peak of Western Civilization is February 3, 1913; the day the 16th Amendment was ratified. Before that America was the last holdout in the West for 'big government'.
Borepatch, when I talk to people - almost exclusively men - of my approximate age (+/- 10 years) they are stunned that my dad and I watched Apollo 11 lift off live at the Cape. We drove up from Miami where our family lived. We watched numerous manned and unmanned flights from the Cape or even from Pompano Beach when the weather was just right.. I am still stupefied that we have now gone 50 years without a manned flight to the Moon. Not even a latter day Apollo 8 orbit and back trip.
It never occurred to me at the time that I saw PWC - Peak Western Civilization - that very week. Being 15 at the time, it sure seemed like Mars was less than the next decade ahead. I am blessed to have lived long enough that return to Luna seems within reach, and I sure hope I get to see American boots on lunar soil one more time.
Thanks for the Dark Age argument. Yeah, unfortunately, we're there.
James
A simple summation is that Science went from being a movement to an institution - it is no longer about the mission but about protecting the institution.
Greetings. To ones referring to generational changes - there is a book confirming the cyclic nature: The Fourth Turning:An American Prophecy—What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny
Years ago, someone had the story about a Roman villa that was unearthed somewhere in central Europe. (Yeah, I'm fuzzy on the details). Like the modern discovery of Roman mosaics, it was gorgeous, and one of the discoveries was the villa had a form of central heating. The people who discovered it were puzzled to find burned marks on the floors in some rooms. They came to the conclusion they were from fires set to warm the place.
The people who lived there a few hundred years later not only couldn't run the central heat, they had no concept of what central heat was or what it could do.
It's the analogy that you posted, Borepatch, come to life.
We're not at that point exactly, yet, but you can see it in the future.
The things that rely on real world science and application - engineering - are still relatively healthy, doing great and remarkable things, but a side effect of that is as the specialization of the knowledge required goes up, the number of people who can do it goes down. Take microprocessors - a tremendous invention that has improved the world in uncountable ways. Last data I have says there are only four places on Earth that can work at the smallest current geometries. Is another generation in the future? Processor speed hasn't really improved in a decade or more. CPUs were running at 3 GHz 10 years ago. If Moore's Law was still running, they'd be at 12 or 15 GHz by now. That's fundamentally too hard.
Think of analog signal processing. Yes, it still goes on and it's the same way. There's a small handful of places that can do it.
While the semiconductor foundries are still big and still have many engineers working there, the number of designers that can design the entire chip is shockingly small. The number in the world would fit comfortably in a conference center.
Can it keep going?
The age of big construction projects and civil engineering projects is apparently over, mostly because of NIMBY reactions blocking it. Could a modern Golden Gate bridge be built? A modern dam? I think of the bridge that collapsed at FIU a few years ago, apparently because of incompetent hires. Add in the Boeing 737 issues and you wonder if everything gets higher risk and more likely to kill you.
The slow down in big new physics discoveries is tied to the expense and difficulty of getting to the energy levels they need. The JWST discoveries depend on things that have never been done before - the size of the telescope, not just in space but at the L2 point so that it can get down to the temperatures required to see those wavelengths. I've read of creating particle accelerators so big they need to be put in space. Will any society do that?
Like Richard Feynman, I'm a hard-core, almost militant experimentalist. If it can't be demonstrated in a controlled experiment, it's not science, it's faith. Something like climate change that only exists in complex yet stupid computer models and can't be experimentally verified is bullshit. Same goes for the Big Bang, the Steady State model it replaced, that everything evolved from nothing, and far more.
A simple summation is that Science went from being a movement to an institution - it is no longer about the mission but about protecting the institution.
Jonathan H, that's an admirably concise description of Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
- Borepatch
Worse yet, a representative of the company that manufactured the boosters, present in mission control before and at liftoff, was pounding on the table that at the present temperature the seals would not hold.
That was the story soon after the 'accident'.
Post a Comment