Jim Farmelant : If you are going to bring up the Manhattan Project, then I think it ought to be compared with the German A-bomb project, which failed to produce a bomb. Why did it fail? Well, primarily because it was never funded, anywhere, close to the level that the Manhattan Project was funded. The Germans simply didn't have the money and they were in far more desparate straights than the Americans were at the time. However, that's not the only reason for its failure. Another reason is that its head, Werner Heisenberg made some serious errors in his cailculations. A lot of people when commenting on the failure of the German A-bomb project seem to stop there. But the question in my mind is why didn't anyone working on the project step forward and correct Heisenberg's errors. And that, I think, speaks to what was then a major difference between the way American science operated (even under the relatively authoritarian and militaristic conditions of the Manhattan Project) and the way German science operated. In Germany universites of that time, senior professors were like little gods. They reigned supreme in their own departments and no mere underling would have dreamed of criticizing them or correcting them. Even if a scientist working in the German A-bomb project had become aware that Heisenberg was making mistakes in his calculations, he would, most likely, not dared to step forward to correct the great man, since that was simply not the done thing in German science at that time.
In the Manhattan Project, despite the efforts of General Groves to impose military discipline on the scientists, things were still relatively loose and freewheeling among them, and that, I would submit, contributed to the success of the project. If a senior scientist, even an Oppenheimer or a Fermi, had made an error in his calculations, there would have been other, perhaps more junior, scientists who would have been willing to step forward to make the necessary corrections. Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant ^^^^^^^^ CB: This seems to be authoritarianism at the university level. On the other hand, this university authoritarian atmosphere did successfully produce the Heisenberg uncertainty discoveries , evidently (smile). I'm glad Heisenberg got his uncertainty stuff correct and his atom bomb calculations incorrect. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
