Jones Beene wrote: I am not a sociologist but it might make a good study for one. This > is probably not coincidental. It probably has to do with going through an > "age" where the "seemingly impossible" in technology became reality in a > very short time, where rules were made to be broken and where the most > important things were done in someone's garage -- and then transposing that > underlying mentality and expectation towards what was obviously going to be > the "next big thing" for our society - i.e. energy (or lack thereof). >
You can multiply that effect by a factor of 10 for two other groups of people: people who lived from 1790 to 1840 during the "Age of Wonder" of science (the title of a new book by Richard Holmes), and the Los Alamos generation of people such as Schwinger and Dyson, who lived through the upsurges of the 1930s and the dawn of modern nuclear physics. That dawn turned out to be a lot like the French Revolution as described by Wordsworth. Great fun at first until they started chopping off people's heads, and blowing up cities, respectively: FRENCH REVOLUTION AS IT APPEARED TO ENTHUSIASTS AT ITS COMMENCEMENT. . . . OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance! . . . I have often quoted Freeman Dyson on this subject: " . . . [The] experiences of World War II made an indelible impression on people of my generation. At the bottom of our hearts we still believe you can have anything you want in five years if you need it badly enough and if you are prepared to slog your way through the barriers of confusion and incompetence to get it . . . The accepted wisdom says that, no matter what we decide to do about economic problems, we cannot expect to see any substantial results [for 15 years]. The accepted wisdom is no doubt correct, if we continue to play the game by the rules of today. But anyone who lived through World War II knows that the rules can be changed very fast when the necessity arises." My mother saw the first airplanes. She started driving one of the first mass produced automobiles when she 13, and she worked with the first computers at the Census Bureau. She lived through the Great Depression and WWII. People like her were saw far more progress, and more radical changes to technology and society than we see today. As Chris Tinsley used to say, nothing fundamentally new was discovered after 1950; we are just coasting along, making incremental improvements to things that earlier generations discovered. Martin Fleischmann is a young member of the WWII generation, but he was in the thick of it, and he suffered terribly. So he knows that the world can be turned upside-down. - Jed
