Drop two pieces of bread into the toaster and push the lever down. You go about your business getting the rest of breakfast ready and then, after a few minutes, two pieces of toast pop up. Have you ever thought about what's going on?
We usually think about the toaster receiving the bread and giving it back to us after a few minutes - electric heating somehow. Someone from a few thousand years ago might wonder where the bread came from and what kind of magic transformed it into something similar but different after a few minutes. He might wonder if the lever was some kind of prayer or incantation. We can examine the process at a variety of levels and can find considerable depth. We know the cord is plugged into a socket which has a path though a series of transformers and wires that usually lead to a generator that is turned by spinning a turbine with falling water or steam superheated by nuclear fission or the burning of fossil fuels. When the switch goes on the load on the generators increases by a bit more than we're using. The steps required advances small and large over the decades in science and technology. For example getting the of generation and transmission of electricity to work efficiently depends on an understanding of Maxwell's equations and a fair amount of math.
We don't think about these things because we trust them. There's a solid bedrock of reliable knowledge in much of our technology even though we're not one hundred percent sure of the science. Our trust in science is nearly universal even though some of us chose to deny certain aspects. Global warming deniers and flat earthers have no problem using the Internet - computer mediated communication built on silicon based semiconductor technology, fiber optics and much more. Their mistrust is often based on something in their personal value system that to first order may seem orthogonal to the scientific arguments.
Not many people have a good handle on how science is done and how it progresses. Many of us had to memorize the steps in "the scientific process" in elementary school, but it turns out it's messy and there's no formal process. In college you may have come across Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts. Both of these models have been shown to be wrong. The view among many scientists and philosophers of science is science is more or less makeshift, but produces reliable knowledge and tends towards self-correction and reliable knowledge over time.
A few years ago a few lectures by Naomi Oreskes at Princeton gave me the basis of something I'm more comfortable with even though it's not complete. She argues reliable knowledge is based on five factors: method, evidence, consensus, values and humility. I won't go into these as each is a deep subject, suffice it to say that the last three are deeply social - something many "hard" scientists tend to have a difficult time admitting. Science is deeply collaborative and these social aspects often determine what is worked on as well as how it, and the people who did it, are perceived.
Although most people trust much of science, personal and group values can get in the way of trusting certain aspects as well as certain scientists. We've witnessed this up close with the pandemic, global warming and evolution. I worry that many scientists have made a mistake by hiding their values (that's changing with some of us) as well as separating science and technology. The separation of science and technology was value based and began to become dominant after WWII. Somehow science was to be the pure pursuit of nature even though it's linked to technology at the hip. Often technologists are well versed in the science underlying their work and some venture into applied science. Scientists, particularly experimentalists, are by necessity amateur technologists. I've done some technology and have a bit of a feel for it, but I'm certainly not skilled - I do much better on the science side. I'm in as much awe of great technologists as I am of great scientists.
A final point. Who should you trust to do science? If the light in your house keep going out when you plug the toaster in, it probably makes sense to call a licensed electrician. When a pipe in your house bursts spewing out gallons per minute, you call a licensed plumber and not an electrician or dentist. A trip to the dentist and not the Ghostbusters is in order when you hit a cherry pit in a piece of pie and a tooth falls out. And when you're thinking of the long term - say your children's lives - listening to experts on global warming makes sense while listening to Mobil-Exxon or the Farmer's Almanac doesn't. In each of these areas there are mostly good players and a few bad ones. You find the good ones from the consensus of their community.
building blocks
Watching Apple's Mac Studio announcement yesterday took my mind to something Carl Sagan said in the Cosmos series.
The Mac Studio's underlying technology goes far beyond the many tens of thousands of person-hours Apple has invested. The semiconductor industry that stands on the shoulders of Bell Laboratories back to the fundamental work of James Clerk Maxwell and before. Apple and others are able to come up with advances that strike us as dramatic as they make an impact on our lives. The impact of some innovations like the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, powered flight, radio, the atomic bomb and the Internet have changed how we see ourselves. But take a look and they're all built on long chains of invention and innovation that are often forgotten.
This comes to mind with the horrors going on in Ukraine. Russia has always had brilliant minds. They've made stunning advances in physics and math, but they haven't been as successful as the West in building on that. A good deal of their technology is derivative. In the past 25 years this may be by design. Most of the export value comes from extraction - oil and other natural resources. These industries seem to fall under the direct control of Putin's friends. More technical industries are still under oligarchs, but these aren't super high profit. As long as the core players can control them, the real focus of the economy is what can be run by shear force and power rather than technology and sound business practices. (note - this is speculation as I'm certainly not a Russian expert.. so take it with a grain of salt).
High tech industry is required for the military and some consumer use. Although that is supposed to be home-brew there is a lot of importing and rebranding. I've seen that in electronics used in physics experiments and am told is standard operating procedure.
So imagine you can't important and rebrand the CNC tools necessary to make jet engines. Can you make the tools yourself. What if you can't even make precision bearings? What if China doesn't allow electronics into the country (they probably will, but now they can be the Mafia dons)? Sanctions can make a medium and longterm impact.
You don't need to make your Apple pies from scratch - we have our universe - but few companies or countries have the capability to build objects of the modern world without technologies that exist outside. All of these long threads few of us think about until they aren't available. Think about all of those high value products waiting for fifty cent ICs that were designed twenty years ago...
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PS - I'd love a Mac Studio, but it's way beyond my budget.
Posted at 04:57 PM in general comments, history of science, history of technology, manfacturing, society and technology | Permalink | Comments (0)
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