How good a physicist was Oppenheimer?

T. A. Gardner said:
The real killer of innovation isn't maximizing profits, but rather regulation. Apollo couldn't be done today because it wasn't 100%, or nearly so, safe. NASA will waste decades perfecting old technology to a point where it is 100% safe due to regulations--and the lawyers that go with that--rather than take risks and push the envelope of technology. The US military has lawyers reviewing battleplans now for their legality and meeting of regulations.

The car and aircraft industries are so heavily regulated that true innovation is no longer possible.
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So, you want no regulation yet complain when your family is drinking contaminated water? WTF?
 
Cypress said:
I personally don't have any good knowledge or intelligent insights on how the state of American science stacks up against China and Europe. It seems like we are still highly competitive.

To a large extent, government funding of core scientific research is predicated on how useful to society it is going to be. During the Cold War, particle physics was the Queen of the sciences as far as funding was concerned. These days it's genetics. Paleoanthropology has to always scrounge the bottom of the barrel.
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Competitive, yes, but like a marathon runner who is used to being out front and starts to slow down, the rest of the world, be they competitors or hostile, are gaining on us. Aesop's Tortoise and the Hare is a good example of the situation.

Core scientific research is looking at the future. An example is the Wright Brothers. They made powered flight practical but who took advantage of that technology? Not the US. Europe did which is why, when the US got into WWI, our pilots were flying French airplanes.

Same thing in WWII. When the Germans were flying Me-109s in the Spanish Civil War, we were still flying biplanes. There's a similar comparison of warships and armored vehicles.

Everyone on this forum is using tech which was part of the Space Race. Not advocating war as a tech boost, but it doesn't take a German rocket scientist to see the leaps in tech that came from WWI, WWII and all wars, both hot and Cold.

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/20/7423...o-reach-the-moon-was-put-to-use-back-on-earth
Space Spinoffs: The Technology To Reach The Moon Was Put To Use Back On Earth
The U.S. government spent roughly $26 billion (about $260 billion in today's dollars, according to one estimate) between 1960 and 1972 to hire contractors and subcontractors who employed hundreds of thousands of people to create and improve on technology that led us to the moon and back.

While some of that tech has stayed within the space industry, a lot of it has trickled down to the public. There's a huge list of the stuff. NASA has an entire department dedicated to cataloging it all.

Sometimes separating myth from reality isn't easy. These six, however, are bona fide space program spinoffs...

..."You probably still would have had integrated circuits," says John Tylko, a scholar who teaches a course called Engineering Apollo at MIT. "You probably still would have had Moore's Law. But you might not have had Moore's Law in 1965. You might have had it a decade later."

Tylko says that astronaut Eugene Cernan, who left humankind's last footprints to date on the moon, may have summed up Apollo's achievements best in 2007 when he said: "It's almost as if [President John F. Kennedy] reached out into the 21st century where we are today, grabbed hold of a decade of time, slipped it neatly into the '60s and '70s and called it Apollo."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
NASA spinoff technologies are commercial products and services which have been developed with the help of NASA, through research and development contracts, such as Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or STTR awards, licensing of NASA patents, use of NASA facilities, technical assistance from NASA personnel, or data from NASA research. Information on new NASA technology that may be useful to industry is available in periodical and website form in "NASA Tech Briefs", while successful examples of commercialization are reported annually in the NASA publication "Spinoffs". The Spinoff publication has documented more than 2,000 technologies over time.
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Doc Dutch said:
Competitive, yes, but like a marathon runner who is used to being out front and starts to slow down, the rest of the world, be they competitors or hostile, are gaining on us. Aesop's Tortoise and the Hare is a good example of the situation.

Core scientific research is looking at the future. An example is the Wright Brothers. They made powered flight practical but who took advantage of that technology? Not the US. Europe did which is why, when the US got into WWI, our pilots were flying French airplanes.

Same thing in WWII. When the Germans were flying Me-109s in the Spanish Civil War, we were still flying biplanes. There's a similar comparison of warships and armored vehicles.

Everyone on this forum is using tech which was part of the Space Race. Not advocating war as a tech boost, but it doesn't take a German rocket scientist to see the leaps in tech that came from WWI, WWII and all wars, both hot and Cold.

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/20/7423...o-reach-the-moon-was-put-to-use-back-on-earth
Space Spinoffs: The Technology To Reach The Moon Was Put To Use Back On Earth


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
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Good points, and that's why I don't think we can leave core scientific research in the magic hands of the free market. Government investment in core scientific research has paid off many times over, and it's imperative that USA remain one of leaders in public funding of science
 
Telocollinite said:
LOL.
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Laughing is good and often healthy. Let's see if you are laughing when you step off that cliff, Perry. :)

jump-powerrangers.gif
 
Cypress said:
Good points, and that's why I don't think we can leave core scientific research in the magic hands of the free market. Government investment in core scientific research has paid off many times over, and it's imperative that USA remain one of leaders in public funding of science
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Agreed. R&D is risky, but often pays off. A lot of it is military research, advances of which are often fleeting therefore requiring constant updating. Example: DARPA. https://www.darpa.mil/

Unfortunately, it takes years for such research to be declassified and reach the civilian market. GPS is such a defense project started in 1973. Consider how useful such tech is today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
Cost $12 billion (initial constellation)
$750 million per year (operating cost)
 
Doc Dutch said:
So, you want no regulation yet complain when your family is drinking contaminated water? WTF?
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No, I want reasonable regulation. Zero tolerance is almost never the answer to how much regulation is needed. Regulation should not be used to set political agendas (see the EPA's latest on auto emissions that basically regulates ICE vehicles out of existence for example).

You mention drinking water. The EPA standard for arsenic in drinking water up through the 90's was 50 ppb. Then new and better test equipment became available that could measure even more miniscule amounts accurately. The EPA lowered that standard to 10 ppb. There is no discernable health difference between the two standards you need on the order of 100 to 1000 times those levels to really be a health hazard as they are in say, Bangladesh. The EPA did this because of the zero-tolerance mentality of the bureaucracy and the availability of the new text equipment.

The equipment costs tens of thousands of dollars to purchase for a water company. Training to use it more. Across the US, water systems that relied on groundwater were suddenly out of compliance, often by just a few ppb. Here in the Phoenix area, the difference was roughly 2 to 5 ppb above the new standard. That required the installation and maintenance of new filtration systems costing often hundred of thousands of dollars a year to operate and maintain.

The result of all that was people in many areas saw their water bill triple or quadruple overnight-- FOR NO DISCERNABLE INCREASE IN SAFETY OR HEALTH BENEFIT TO THEIR DRINKING WATER.

Another, is allowable ozone pollution. The EPA couldn't shove that rule through. There, they wanted a 5 to 10 ppb reduction from nothing to less than nothing at an estimated cost of potentially $100 billion a year nationally. No increase in health benefits, but a huge hit on the economy to try and meet that standard.

I can keep going. Why is the US merchant marine fleet so small? Again, regulation. Shipping companies simply flag in countries with lax regulations, saving huge amounts of money on crew and ship upkeep avoiding US regulations. We benefit from those lower costs, but get hurt by our own stringent regulations in that the shippers went elsewhere.

Too much regulation is a big problem.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
No, I want reasonable regulation. Zero tolerance is almost never the answer to how much regulation is needed. Regulation should not be used to set political agendas (see the EPA's latest on auto emissions that basically regulates ICE vehicles out of existence for example).

You mention drinking water. The EPA standard for arsenic in drinking water up through the 90's was 50 ppb. Then new and better test equipment became available that could measure even more miniscule amounts accurately. The EPA lowered that standard to 10 ppb. There is no discernable health difference between the two standards you need on the order of 100 to 1000 times those levels to really be a health hazard as they are in say, Bangladesh. The EPA did this because of the zero-tolerance mentality of the bureaucracy and the availability of the new text equipment.

The equipment costs tens of thousands of dollars to purchase for a water company. Training to use it more. Across the US, water systems that relied on groundwater were suddenly out of compliance, often by just a few ppb. Here in the Phoenix area, the difference was roughly 2 to 5 ppb above the new standard. That required the installation and maintenance of new filtration systems costing often hundred of thousands of dollars a year to operate and maintain.

The result of all that was people in many areas saw their water bill triple or quadruple overnight-- FOR NO DISCERNABLE INCREASE IN SAFETY OR HEALTH BENEFIT TO THEIR DRINKING WATER.

Another, is allowable ozone pollution. The EPA couldn't shove that rule through. There, they wanted a 5 to 10 ppb reduction from nothing to less than nothing at an estimated cost of potentially $100 billion a year nationally. No increase in health benefits, but a huge hit on the economy to try and meet that standard.

I can keep going. Why is the US merchant marine fleet so small? Again, regulation. Shipping companies simply flag in countries with lax regulations, saving huge amounts of money on crew and ship upkeep avoiding US regulations. We benefit from those lower costs, but get hurt by our own stringent regulations in that the shippers went elsewhere.

Too much regulation is a big problem.
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Haven't you recommended desolving all government agencies like the EPA? I know other Trumpers have done so.

Is Agent Orange, asbestos and Round Up enough regulation for you? Flint, MI? Too much regulation? Not enough?

Your pie-in-the-sky dreams of perfect regulation are nice, but impractical. I think it's better for Americans to have a little too much than not enough.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Haven't you recommended desolving all government agencies like the EPA? I know other Trumpers have done so.
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No.

Is Agent Orange, asbestos and Round Up enough regulation for you? Flint, MI? Too much regulation? Not enough?

Meaningless generalities. Take asbestos for example. It's only a hazard when friable. That is, when it becomes an airborne dust. Sealed in something where it cannot do that it's not a hazard. Is some regulation of it needed? Yes, does that regulation need to be extreme like it is? No. But liars--err, lawyers--and bureaucrats nitpick to the point of making pedantic rules over these things regulating them out of existence rather than rules that are founded in reason.

Round Up? What, that asinine case where some idiot got cancer after grossly misusing the product, and there's now a cottage industry of ambulance chasers looking for clients to sue the company for big bucks? That Round Up.

Your pie-in-the-sky dreams of perfect regulation are nice, but impractical. I think it's better for Americans to have a little too much than not enough.
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Your support for zero tolerance, ever more stringent, no use of science and reason regulation is the problem, not the solution. I think it's better for Americans to be able to make up their own minds most of the time rather than have an unelected bureaucrat that's no smarter than some smuck on the street corner make it up for them.

You're one of those idiots who thinks "Safety First!" and that the regulations will protect you from yourself. Well, I think "Safety Third" and it's my personal responsibility to act safely whether I'm following the regulations or not.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
Your support for zero tolerance, ever more stringent, no use of science and reason regulation is the problem, not the solution. I think it's better for Americans to be able to make up their own minds most of the time rather than have an unelected bureaucrat that's no smarter than some smuck on the street corner make it up for them.

You're one of those idiots who thinks "Safety First!" and that the regulations will protect you from yourself. Well, I think "Safety Third" and it's my personal responsibility to act safely whether I'm following the regulations or not.
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Thanks for that, Terry. It's one thing to accuse someone that their anchors no longer touch bottom, but it's another when they prove it. LOL
 
"We can change reality by changing the narrative, and any abuse it takes to get there is AOK ........BECAUSE UTOPIA!"











barf
 
Is letting this EVIL take place on your watch what you were born for?

Is this what you want to be remembered for?

Serious Question.
 
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