Category Archives: History

Is Secrecy Worth It?

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A tale of openness and secrecy: The Philadelphia Story

The former Manhattan Project scientists who founded what would eventually become the Federation of American Scientists were adamantly opposed to keeping nuclear technology a closed field. From early on they argued that there was, as they put it, “no secret to be kept.” Attempting to control the spread of nuclear weapons by controlling scientific information would be fruitless: Soviet scientists were just as capable as US scientists when it came to discovering the truths of the physical world. The best that secrecy could hope to do would be to slightly impede the work of another nuclear power. Whatever time was bought by such impediment, they argued, would come at a steep price in US scientific productivity, because science required open lines of communication to flourish.

At the University of Pennsylvania were nine scientists sympathetic to that message. All had been involved with wartime work, but in the area of radar, not the bomb. Because they had not been part of the Manhattan Project in any way, they were under no legal obligation to maintain secrecy; they were simply informed private citizens. In the fall of 1945, they tried to figure out the technical details behind the bomb.

This basic problem hasn’t gone away. The conflict between the desire for secrecy and progress’s need for communication is still there.

You Don't Look a Day Over …

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Happy Birthday, Electron

This month marks the 120th anniversary of a profound and influential creation, the electron theory of Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz. His electron was not merely a hypothesized elementary particle; it was the linchpin of an ambitious theory of nature. Today physicists are accustomed to the notion that a complete description of nature can rise out of simple, beautiful equations, yet prior to Lorentz that was a mystic vision.

The Evidence is Pretty Thin

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The secret molecular life of soap bubbles (1913)

Most of us would look at a soap film image and marvel at the beautiful rainbow colors; others would investigate the optics underlying them. But it took an exceptional physicist, Jean Baptiste Perrin (1870-1942), to realize that these colors concealed something more: direct evidence that matter consists of discrete atoms and molecules!

Today we take for granted that all material objects in the universe are comprised of discrete “bits” of matter, which we call atoms; however, even up until the early 20th century there were still proponents of the continuum hypothesis, in which all matter is assumed to be infinitely divisible.

Tug-o-War, Physics Style

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Physics demonstrations: Magdeburg hemispheres

The premise is simple: with the hemispheres pressed together, air is pumped out of the interior, creating at least a partial vacuum. This seals together the hemispheres with a remarkable force.

Guericke first demonstrated this force in 1654 for the Emperor Ferdinand III. Thirty horses, in two teams of 15, were unable to pull apart the evacuated hemispheres! He performed a smaller scale performance in 1656 in his hometown of Magdeburg, using two teams of eight horses.

The Essential Parts are Not Too Complicated, and the Principle is Easily Explained

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You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

A film produced by the NPL Film Unit in the 1950s explaining the principles behind the first accurate atomic clock, designed by Louis Essen and built at the National Physical Laboratory in 1955.

I notice they were talking about achieving good vacuum while showing someone handling a vacuum component with their bare hands, which you wouldn’t normally do — fingerprints outgas. But it was the oven, so all of that junk gets baked off pretty quickly.

The mention a performance of a ten-thousandth of a million, or a part in 10^10. Clocks/frequency standards in use today (i.e. part of time scales, reporting their values) do ~100,000 times better, and experimental ones do even better than that, albeit for relatively short durations.

That device, which is a “physics package” (all the fun stuff) plus 6 equipment racks, now fits into about 6″ of space in a single equipment rack … and the devices are orders of magnitude better.

via BoingBoing

Attention, Private Casper!

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FUSAG: The Ghost Army of World War II

The Allied intelligence services created two fake armies to keep the Germans on their toes. One would be based in Scotland for a supposed invasion of Norway and the other headquartered in southeast England to threaten the Pas-de-Calais. The northern operation relied mainly on fake radio traffic and the feeding of false information to double agents to create the impression of a substantial army. Fortitude South, though, was well within the range of prying German ears and eyes, so fake chatter alone would be uncovered too quickly. The Allies would have to make it look and sound like a substantial army was building up in southeast England. They needed boots on the ground there, without actually using too much of their precious manpower.
When intelligence officers learned that the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) was to be redesignated the 12th Army Group, they knew they had their Pas-de-Calais invaders. The FUSAG was kept alive on paper, and the phantom army was given a few real soldiers and placed under the command of one of the era’s great military leaders.

More About the Non-Race of Technology Adoption

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I wish I’d seen this before the Boom-Box adoption story, because it ties in: The 100-Year March of Technology in 1 Graph, though the overlap of the technologies under discussion isn’t complete.

You can see the effects I previously mentioned, namely cost, infrastructure and quality of the new product — most adoption that requires infrastructure to be developed alongside sees a change in slope once you reach critical mass.

Some tidbits I find interesting: The depression and WWII dips, from the economic pressure of high unemployment and then “we’re building tanks, not cars/washing machines”, but that refrigerators and radio did not experience the same effect. Refrigerator penetration was low during the depression, so the well-off could still afford to adopt the technology and it does see a slightly slower increase during WWII but doesn’t drop. It was just that important of a technology. Radio was a source of cheap entertainment and got its start enough before the depression to be unduly hampered by it.

Another is the double-kink timeline of the computer. The first being around 1982, which would coincide with the first Macintosh computer, probably along with adoption of word processing machines in the business world. The second looks to be 1995, which is probably driven by Windows 95 being introduced.

The article also discusses the notion of what it means to be poor. I know there are those with the attitude that if you own a few gadgets, you can’t be considered poor, but I disagree. Having some disposable income at a few interval of your life, or being able to save a few dollars up to eventually buy something, does not move you from those ranks. Because of the way your surroundings develop, what was once considered a luxury becomes a necessity. Once upon a time cars were a luxury, then one car was middle class and having two was being well-off. But as having a car became the norm in most places, that economic reality helped drive things like the rise of strip malls, and suburban sprawl. The ubiquity of cars meant the ability to skimp on public transportation. The result is that cars are much more of a necessity, and the divide is now not simply owning a car or not, but whether/how often you can buy a new one, or whether you have to make do with an old beater of a car, and all the problems inherent in owning a less-than-reliable vehicle. Refrigeration is another example. At some point the adoption of electric refrigerators meant that selling blocks of ice was no longer viable and those businesses closed, which meant that iceboxes had to be replaced with refrigerators. It’s no longer a choice between the two, with one for the middle class and above and the other for the less fortunate.

I Didn't Know it was a Race

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Guess What’s the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years

I think there are a few criteria to look at here, beyond the price of the new toys: the level of infrastructure for the device and the maturity/level of the quality during early adoption, among other barriers to adopt a new product. CDs, for example, represented a new format for music, but the quality was as good as it was going to get, and required no new infrastructure to deliver. Same for DVDs and video cassettes. Digital cameras did not deliver the quality to challenge film for quite a while — we had our Megapixel growth boom last decade — and the early cameras had other issues that detracted from the “film is free” advantage. Cell phones needed a network, and fax machines needed someone on the other end to fax to you — mass adoption required a critical mass.

Boom boxes? We already had tapes to play, no infrastructure was required, and the quality was pretty much as good as it would get. No hurdles to adoption.