Progress

Or, How Some Things HAVEN'T Changed

A few examples …

Going to the Moon:

The Story: In 1961 Kennedy said we would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and in 1969 I saw it on TV.

Back then (60 years ago) it was done in 8 years, basically starting from scratch with almost zero space-experience, using pencil and paper, with an inflation-adjusted GDP of 3.4T$ while also fighting the Vietnam War.

Now our inflation-adjusted (U.S. Government numbers) GDP is over 5 times greater, we have 60 years experience in space, 3-D modelling, Super Computers, CAD/CAM, the Twitter-Web, Smart Phones and Google. And pretty much every president for the past couple of decades has said, “We’re going back to the Moon” but it was always going to take too long and cost too much money.

Progress?

Putting a man on a Space Station:

We’ve had Space Stations for 50 years now — half a century. And sent people to them.

Question: Why is it such Headline News that the genius Elon Musk has figured out how to send a man up to a space station ? Progress ??

Building the Boeing 737:

• 1965: Decision by Board to begin development

• 1967: First Flight and FAA Certification

• 1968: Entered commercial service AND mass production (105 planes produced).

Fast forward to today, over a half a century later. We have the 737-Max that crashes.

Back in 1965, 55 years ago, when people were using pencil and paper, the company was run by aeronautical engineers and the managers were also engineers (I’m of course talking about REAL engineers that could design amazing things and even do Math). Today it is run by very smart MBA’s from Ivy League Schools who may not know how to design or build airplanes, but they know how to “make money” (i.e., with huge loans that they use for stock-buy-back programs, and they get the very best MBA’s by offering them huge stock option packages). Progress ???

When my Dad was a kid and when I was a kid:

When my Dad was born in 1923, there were bi-planes, some mono-planes; this was only 20 years after the Wright Brothers, and no commercial airlines for a few years. When my dad was a kid, he was chasing the horse-drawn ice-delivery carts for peoples’ ice boxes (the driver would throw them ice chips) and he always called the fridge the Ice-Box. When he was in his 40’s, we had the 747 and were flying to the moon.

When I was a kid, we had the 747. As a young adult I’d fly the 747’s around the world and we still have them today. Progress ????

Fermilab

When worked at Fermilab over 40 years ago, it was the largest (4 mile circumference) accelerator in the world with CAMAC (Computer Automated Monitoring and Control)¹. Today Fermilab is still the largest particle accelerator in this country, still 4 miles in circumference, hardly ever runs, and is irrelevant compared to the LHC at CERN in Europe². Progress ?????

And I’m thinking that I’m going to have to turn into an old curmudgeon, because I just simply can’t keep up with all this Progress !

1. See next footnote. We controlled the accelerator with trackballs, oh, and if you wanted to be really old-school, you could use the keyboard, and I’m thinking it was 15 years until I had my first PC with a mouse, and longer before my PC had a color display.

2. OK, so, yeah, they added to this 4-mile circumference accelerator a new synchrotron with liquid-helium-cooled (a few degrees above Absolute Zero) super-conducting magnets, and it was turned into a collider with protons going in one direction and anti-protons in the other direction (and don’t even bother asking me, '“Where the hell did they get all those Anti-Protons because that might trigger me) which increased the Center-of-Mass Collision Energy by a factor of 100 ([2x1000] over [400^1/2] assuming I did the simple arithmetic correctly] (perhaps lower cost than boring and installing a 40,000 mile circumference machine and think of the synchrotron radiation) and with a high energy electron cooling system to reduce the longitudinal emittance of the anti-protons, the world’s first permanent magnet storage ring, and etc., etc., etc. So, you see, it’s not that they didn’t do anything! So you can see, I am purposely making this story about Progress look as bad as it can be. Like, I’m an Old Curmudgeon, what do you expect ?