Where Science Went Wrong (hilarious web site)

On Tue, 11 May 2010 18:08:21 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

My father worked on the Manhattan Project as a very junior scientist,
and he never believed all the paranoia and propaganda about "Soviet
atom spies," to the point he wasn't entirely sure there WERE any. He
said that once you knew a bomb COULD be built, actually doing it just
wasn't that big a challenge, and certainly wasn't too much for the
Soviets to figure out. They weren't stupid.

(Yes, I know the Soviets really did steal the information, but when
Dad was talking about this forty-five years ago that wasn't yet
established beyond all reasonable doubt. American propaganda was
usually less blatantly false than what the other side produced, but it
still wasn't very trustworthy.)

Your father probably didn't realize what many people still don't
realize today - that even though the *science* of a bomb is fairly
straightforward, the *engineering* is anything but. The two are often
confused even though they are radically different things.

Since he was involved in engineering Fat Man, he SHOULD have realized
it, but I can't swear he did.

Dad's lab group was responsible for the shielding, so the infernal
thing could be made small enough to fit in a bomber without giving the
entire crew a fatal dose of ionizing radiation. Actually making it go
boom wasn't his department, but obviously his bunch needed to know the
basics so they'd know what it was they were shielding.




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My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm selling my comic collection -- see http://www.watt-evans.com/comics.html
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html

In article ,
Martin Brown wrote:

Quadibloc wrote:
On May 11, 2:36 am, Martin Brown
wrote:

Not necessarily. I know an amateur cactus grower held in such high
repute that for very rare new discoveries he is given some seed on the
very rational grounds that he is more likely to be able to propagate it
to flowering size more rapidly than the professionals at Kew.

I am not trying to give an absolute rule that says that all amateurs
must be incompetent. Merely that those whose works are published in

I am fighting against the common misconception that amateurs are
necessarily incompetant. An idea that you seemed to be espousing.


It is necessary to assume amateurs are incompetent until they
proved otherwise (I see that this is cross-posted to
sci.astro.amateur, and while I will freely admit that many amateurs
have contributed to astronomy, I will point out that all had
demonstrated competence). Professionals, almost by definition, have
convinced either teachers, employers, or both that they were
competent.

--
Robert Woodward
http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

On Tue, 11 May 2010 18:08:21 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

My father worked on the Manhattan Project as a very junior scientist,
and he never believed all the paranoia and propaganda about "Soviet
atom spies," to the point he wasn't entirely sure there WERE any. He
said that once you knew a bomb COULD be built, actually doing it just
wasn't that big a challenge, and certainly wasn't too much for the
Soviets to figure out. They weren't stupid.

Your father probably didn't realize what many people still don't
realize today - that even though the *science* of a bomb is fairly
straightforward, the *engineering* is anything but. The two are often
confused even though they are radically different things.

Since he was involved in engineering Fat Man, he SHOULD have realized
it, but I can't swear he did.

Dad's lab group was responsible for the shielding,

Fat Man didn't (intentionally) contain any shielding, nor did it need
any. The tamper and some other odd bits and bobs may have acted as
shielding, but that was a side effect of their primary purpose at
best.

so the infernal thing could be made small enough to fit in a bomber without
giving the entire crew a fatal dose of ionizing radiation. Actually making
it go boom wasn't his department, but obviously his bunch needed to know the
basics so they'd know what it was they were shielding.

Shielding doesn't decrease the size of the weapon, in fact rather the
opposite.

At Trinity, they handled the bare core with bare hands, which implies
they weren't too particular about the radiation hazards.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Wed, 12 May 2010 06:44:21 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

On Tue, 11 May 2010 18:08:21 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

My father worked on the Manhattan Project as a very junior scientist,
and he never believed all the paranoia and propaganda about "Soviet
atom spies," to the point he wasn't entirely sure there WERE any. He
said that once you knew a bomb COULD be built, actually doing it just
wasn't that big a challenge, and certainly wasn't too much for the
Soviets to figure out. They weren't stupid.

Your father probably didn't realize what many people still don't
realize today - that even though the *science* of a bomb is fairly
straightforward, the *engineering* is anything but. The two are often
confused even though they are radically different things.

Since he was involved in engineering Fat Man, he SHOULD have realized
it, but I can't swear he did.

Dad's lab group was responsible for the shielding,

Fat Man didn't (intentionally) contain any shielding, nor did it need
any. The tamper and some other odd bits and bobs may have acted as
shielding, but that was a side effect of their primary purpose at
best.

The casing, then. "Shielding" isn't the right word, you're right.
The sleeve that went around the actual bomb mechanism.

so the infernal thing could be made small enough to fit in a bomber without
giving the entire crew a fatal dose of ionizing radiation. Actually making
it go boom wasn't his department, but obviously his bunch needed to know the
basics so they'd know what it was they were shielding.

Shielding doesn't decrease the size of the weapon, in fact rather the
opposite.

Well, yes; the trick was to come up with as small and light a casing
as would serve.

At Trinity, they handled the bare core with bare hands, which implies
they weren't too particular about the radiation hazards.

Yeah. Most of the people my father knew on the Project eventually
died of cancer. For that matter, so did he, though it took
thirty-five years.







--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm selling my comic collection -- see http://www.watt-evans.com/comics.html
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html

On Wed, 12 May 2010 03:12:13 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:

On Wed, 12 May 2010 06:44:21 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

Dad's lab group was responsible for the shielding,

Fat Man didn't (intentionally) contain any shielding, nor did it need
any. The tamper and some other odd bits and bobs may have acted as
shielding, but that was a side effect of their primary purpose at
best.

The casing, then. "Shielding" isn't the right word, you're right.
The sleeve that went around the actual bomb mechanism.

I have decided that I should stop trying to post about this stuff
working entirely from childhood memories. I'll see if I can't find
some documentation of just what Dad's group DID do, and get back to
you.





--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm selling my comic collection -- see http://www.watt-evans.com/comics.html
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html

On Wed, 12 May 2010 03:35:55 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:

On Wed, 12 May 2010 03:12:13 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:

On Wed, 12 May 2010 06:44:21 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

Dad's lab group was responsible for the shielding,

Fat Man didn't (intentionally) contain any shielding, nor did it need
any. The tamper and some other odd bits and bobs may have acted as
shielding, but that was a side effect of their primary purpose at
best.

The casing, then. "Shielding" isn't the right word, you're right.
The sleeve that went around the actual bomb mechanism.

I have decided that I should stop trying to post about this stuff
working entirely from childhood memories. I'll see if I can't find
some documentation of just what Dad's group DID do, and get back to
you.

Okay, I managed to completely confuse several different family
stories.

Dad was working on gaseous diffusion at the Nash building at Broadway
and 133rd Street in New York. The stuff about the casing/shielding
was me misremembering a couple of anecdotes my mother had told me
about the machinists on the Project. (She was a secretary on the
Project in '44 and '45.)

My apologies for the confusion.




--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm selling my comic collection -- see http://www.watt-evans.com/comics.html
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html

Wayne Throop wrote:
: Martin Brown
: Your "qualified" electrical engineer may have scraped a pass in an
: exam a couple of decades ago but I can think of some that I would not
: let anywhere near my own fuse box. I once had to administer hot sweet
: tea to an ashen grey electrocuted US service engineer who forgot that
: UK mains was 240v and tested for live with moist fingers! Another
: plunged the entire site into darkness by dropping a spanner into the
: wrong place!

Clearly, warning lights are flashing down in quality control.

No we didn't throw him in a hole. But the spanner did not look too good
after its encounter bridging two phases of the main factory supply.

However, I'm more wondering whether there's some conflation betrween
"electrical engineer" and "electrician" going on here. Sort of like
the difference between opthamalogist and optician, except more with
electrons than photons. But... maybe not.

These were graduate electronic engineers licensed to work on big
industrial plant and install scientific instruments at top laboratories.


The guy with the spanner was just a bit unlucky and a victim of Murphys
Law - the spanner really did fall where it could do most damage.

But the guy testing for live with a wet finger beggars belief!

The worst sin I have ever seen was by a physicist. A mains cable with a
male plug at each end used to power a 4way socket extention. A friend at
university who seemed to attract bad luck was very nearly killed by it.

Regards,
Martin Brown

Quadibloc wrote:

The trouble is that people like Velikovsky and von Daniken can spin
pretty impressive and convincing arguments to a naive layperson. To a
person otherwise helpless against them, while authority may be a weak
reed, it is better than having no defense at all.

The devil has all the best tunes. Showing where their claims conflict
with the known laws of physics is the way to do it and not by appeals to
authority. It should not matter who constructs the refutation, although
it helps if they are sufficiently articulate to win the argument.

Velikovskys interplanetary billiards is risible, but there are plenty of
credulous nutters who buy his books and believe every word

I find it very annoying when some nutter who claims to be an alien
abductee is given exactly the same credulity in a TV interview as a
scientist pointing out that the claims are bogus.

A huge number of UFOs have the same configuration as the triangular
landing light pattern on civil airliners.

Regards,
Martin Brown

Robert Bannister wrote:
Quadibloc wrote:

It is precisely the ability to confirm science by experiment that
distinguishes truth from dogma, the expert from the charlatan, and
progress from ignorance.

How then are we constantly bombarded with "scientific" studies that
"prove" that butter, red wine, meat, eggs, bread, you-name-it, is bad
for you, good for you, bad for you, etc.? Or that the world is warming,
cooling, changing? Could it not be a question of "he who pays the piper"

There is some element of opinion for sale available in science, but most
researchers are simply trying to find out and explain how things work.

Almost all foods are bad for you in excess. And in the USA it is
considered normal for a sizeable chunk of the population to eat a
massive excess and take no exercise. It is no surprise that the
milk/egg/beef marketing boards pay for research to prove their product
is safe (in moderation). It is harder to see why unfit couch potatoes
cannot understand that being morbidly obese is not good for them.

You do have to be a bit suspicious of tobacco companies research proving
that smoking does not cause cancer (a claim they can still just about
swear on oath with a very carefully crafted legal form of words).

And the US car makers vicious campaign against wearing of seatbelts is
still costing lives there even today.

Or the various sceptics in the pockets of big oil and the fossil fuel
lobby groups who spend an inordinate amount of effort persuading the
public that there is no risk to the climate from increased CO2 levels.

and that qualified scientists are playing the tune requested in many
cases without reporting on the rest of the symphony?

Typically what happens is the popular press mangle the research press
release to make a startling headline that bears little or no relation to
the actual research being reported. Scientific claims are generally very
cautious and supported by experimental evidence that others can verify.

I might trust the scientist, but I don't trust the person who is paying
him or her, and even university research is not above suspicion.

University research is generally pure and blue sky and mostly relatively
cheap. Large scale collaborative experiments like CERN are exceptions.
OTOH we would not have the WWW without them and Tim Berners-Lee.

It is the various industrial research complexes and their lobby groups
that you have to keep an eye on. How much money has been wasted on the
son of Star Wars programme now with hardly anything to show for it?

Regards,
Martin Brown

In rec.arts.sf.written Martin Brown wrote:

The worst sin I have ever seen was by a physicist. A mains cable
with a male plug at each end used to power a 4way socket
extention. A friend at university who seemed to attract bad luck
was very nearly killed by it.

Er. How does one even go about getting a male-to-male mains
cable? Is that the sort of thing you fashion yourself? I
didn't think such things were sold.

And here I thought it was bad enough a friend of mine built
something that deliberately uses USB A to USB A!

--