"A New Manhattan Project"
My anti-war relatives and friends and I agree on one thing: America is weakened by its dependence on foreign oil.
Our moral case for overthrowing religious fundamentalists and sadistic dictators in the Middle East and South Asia is open to an attack from those who say we're just a nation of oil-junkies trying to insure a pipeline to our fix. Our political and military power itself is based in too large part on the unreliable and false friends who happen to own land atop the world's oil reserves. Those supertankers that ply the high seas from the Persian Gulf to New York are slow Trojan horses.
So, after disgreeing on nearly everything else, my friends and family and I usually end up restoring civility by finding the common ground of decrying American dependence on oil.
Gods know, it frustrates me, as one who thinks we should take this war, and this threat, as seriously as we took Hitler and Japan in 1941. Yet instead of gas rationing, I see my next-door neighbors, a family of five, with five cars parked in the lot and never more than one person in a car at a time when it pulls out. At my girlfriend's apartment complex, an air conditioner has been running non-stop for weeks now -- in an empty apartment.
One of the phrases I've heard, and seen in print, is "a new Manhattan Project." As in, "we need a new Manhattan Project to develop a new energy source." I wish it could be that simple. But ordering up a new technology, even if price is no object, is unlikely to succeed.
There must be a foundation of knowledge before a new technology can be erected. And this work of foundation-building often is done by men or women working on the fringes of science, untangling mental knots out of sheer intellectual curiosity with no practical aim in sight. They are hardly the kind of people who would be appointed to high-profile government-sponsored committees. They usually don't work well on committees at all. And their work is the kind that's a sitting duck for Congressional yowls about "waste of taxpayers' money."
For instance, the original Manhattan Project grew out of the theories of Albert Einstein. When he did this work, he was a young Swiss citizen with an undistinguished academic record, who had failed to find a teaching job and instead accepted a position as technical assistant in the Patent Office in Bern. How likely would Congress, in 1905 or today, be to grant money to an uninspiring Swiss Jew who wants to use it to support himself while he imagines what the world would look like if he rode on a beam of light?
The Manhattan Project came about because scientific developments had reached a point where a concentrated effort to produce a fission "atomic" bomb was likely to yield a practical result. That's when Einstein, Teller, and Szilard gathered in July 1939 on Long Island and wrote to Roosevelt. But ultimately, it was nothing more than a practical application of what began with the work of the obscure patent clerk in Bern.
Carl Sagan, as part of "The Demon-Haunted World," wrote a digression into imaginary history. He wonders what would have happened if Queen Victoria in 1860 had sought some medium to communicate words, sounds, and pictures throughout her far-flung empire. She would have called together the most prominent men of science in the land, and they probably would have tried to develop something based on the telegraph, which was then the height of technology.
Then he describes J. Clerk "Dafty" Maxwell, the socially inept man who would in fact develop the equations that lead to radio and television. He makes it all too clear that Maxwell never would have come to the attention of Victoria's committee-choosers of 1860, much less been offered a seat at the table. And if he had been, it likely would have deflected his research and rumination down an unproductive path.
If the next energy breakthrough happens in our lifetimes, don't look for it from a New Manhattan Project. Such an effort would be useful for turning a breakthrough discovery to practical use. But getting there will require a first step of imaginative genius, probably from a mind you wouldn't suspect. For the U.S. to support that, it would have to be willing to pitch money into open-ended research by intellectually curious Poindexters who can offer no practical justification for their staring at the stars.
Our moral case for overthrowing religious fundamentalists and sadistic dictators in the Middle East and South Asia is open to an attack from those who say we're just a nation of oil-junkies trying to insure a pipeline to our fix. Our political and military power itself is based in too large part on the unreliable and false friends who happen to own land atop the world's oil reserves. Those supertankers that ply the high seas from the Persian Gulf to New York are slow Trojan horses.
So, after disgreeing on nearly everything else, my friends and family and I usually end up restoring civility by finding the common ground of decrying American dependence on oil.
Gods know, it frustrates me, as one who thinks we should take this war, and this threat, as seriously as we took Hitler and Japan in 1941. Yet instead of gas rationing, I see my next-door neighbors, a family of five, with five cars parked in the lot and never more than one person in a car at a time when it pulls out. At my girlfriend's apartment complex, an air conditioner has been running non-stop for weeks now -- in an empty apartment.
One of the phrases I've heard, and seen in print, is "a new Manhattan Project." As in, "we need a new Manhattan Project to develop a new energy source." I wish it could be that simple. But ordering up a new technology, even if price is no object, is unlikely to succeed.
There must be a foundation of knowledge before a new technology can be erected. And this work of foundation-building often is done by men or women working on the fringes of science, untangling mental knots out of sheer intellectual curiosity with no practical aim in sight. They are hardly the kind of people who would be appointed to high-profile government-sponsored committees. They usually don't work well on committees at all. And their work is the kind that's a sitting duck for Congressional yowls about "waste of taxpayers' money."
For instance, the original Manhattan Project grew out of the theories of Albert Einstein. When he did this work, he was a young Swiss citizen with an undistinguished academic record, who had failed to find a teaching job and instead accepted a position as technical assistant in the Patent Office in Bern. How likely would Congress, in 1905 or today, be to grant money to an uninspiring Swiss Jew who wants to use it to support himself while he imagines what the world would look like if he rode on a beam of light?
The Manhattan Project came about because scientific developments had reached a point where a concentrated effort to produce a fission "atomic" bomb was likely to yield a practical result. That's when Einstein, Teller, and Szilard gathered in July 1939 on Long Island and wrote to Roosevelt. But ultimately, it was nothing more than a practical application of what began with the work of the obscure patent clerk in Bern.
Carl Sagan, as part of "The Demon-Haunted World," wrote a digression into imaginary history. He wonders what would have happened if Queen Victoria in 1860 had sought some medium to communicate words, sounds, and pictures throughout her far-flung empire. She would have called together the most prominent men of science in the land, and they probably would have tried to develop something based on the telegraph, which was then the height of technology.
Then he describes J. Clerk "Dafty" Maxwell, the socially inept man who would in fact develop the equations that lead to radio and television. He makes it all too clear that Maxwell never would have come to the attention of Victoria's committee-choosers of 1860, much less been offered a seat at the table. And if he had been, it likely would have deflected his research and rumination down an unproductive path.
"Maxwell wasn't thinking of radio, radar, and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn't dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon. Roentgen wasn't contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it 'X-rays'; Curie wasn't thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn't planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mold; Watson and Crick weren't imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA ...."
If the next energy breakthrough happens in our lifetimes, don't look for it from a New Manhattan Project. Such an effort would be useful for turning a breakthrough discovery to practical use. But getting there will require a first step of imaginative genius, probably from a mind you wouldn't suspect. For the U.S. to support that, it would have to be willing to pitch money into open-ended research by intellectually curious Poindexters who can offer no practical justification for their staring at the stars.
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