A few weeks ago an unexpected email arrived from Germany. A physics postdoc and had come across an ancient transition radiation detector in storage at CERN a few months before. It seemed like it could be useful in an experiment her group was thinking about. She had a few questions and it turned out I was the best person to talk to.
Many people think science is done with sparkling new state-of-the-art kit. A few pieces perhaps, but very old equipment is updated, repaired and repurposed where it might be useful. An experiment I was part of in the early 80s required a very large magnet. The best bet was one that had been a cyclotron at Berkeley fifty years earlier. It worked well, but we had to tap into institutional knowledge that had migrated out of physics entirely. That knowledge combined with technology that hadn't been invented at the time gave us something fantastic.
I have no idea how my old detector made its way from Brookhaven National Laboratories to CERN. The documentation and lab books were packed with it, but they made assumptions that the people who built it would be involved. That meant me. I asked for photos of some of the lab book pages and then it came back. I listened to her ideas, offered some suggestions and wished we had her experience back then.. Of course that experience came years later.
These interactions spanning several decades may not be common, but twenty year interactions of hardware, software and people. It's all a mesh. Old apparatus islands that have been repurposed and grafted onto new apparatus. It's an organic process that's difficult to map out and impossible to predict. Diagrams it would look like flocks of meshes that are grafted together with a lot of institutional knowledge. No one has a complete picture and local expertise is critical. A team sport spanning decades. It isn't easy, but it works.
Last week I came across something by Frank Oppenheimer in the 30s:
It's one of the better commentaries I've seen on how science progresses. The same is probably true for many other fields. I suspect it's true for any infrastructure involved in messy and complex endeavors where creativity and insight come into play.
I've been fascinated watching the techno-solutionist approach to cities - the so-called smart city. These are often based on a "start with internet and build up" model. They try to measure everything and automate control. Sensors embedded everywhere and tree-like computational structures making decisions to smooth out - well - everything. A fundamental problem is we don't know what is being measured and what the biases - social and technical - are. A simple truth I've learned from my exposure to sports science is you have to know exactly what's being measured and exactly where it is useful. (duh!) Often current measurements and/or models just don't work. Something complex like a city is that on steroids with the tree-like information structures introducing a certain rigidity.
There are a few types of people who thrive in the messy environment of a city. Impedance matchers - those who can connect and explain across disciplines, and synthesizers come to mind. (many others too - artists for example) They respond to intellectual and system friction and help spark creativity. They're ground zero essentials for creativity and invention. I have doubts that the techno-solutionist cities can be terribly creative in the long run.
a song by Malvina Reynolds comes to mind
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