
Will the Manhattan Project Always Exist? - luchak
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/will-the-manhattan-project-always-exist.html
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mechanical_fish
This is lots of fun to read, because it's good to keep a perspective on
history.

That said, it's not at all clear that the next several thousand years will be
analogous to the last several thousand. We have a rather different starting
point. The key difference is mass production. A society without printing can
come close to losing the works of Plato: every copy of Plato cost weeks,
months, or years of a laborer's salary to make. [1] So, even at the height of
Greek and Roman civilization, there were a limited number of copies of Plato's
work. There were also a limited number of educated people who could read those
works -- not because people were stupid, but because reading material was
sufficiently expensive that it wasn't worthwhile for the majority of people to
master its use.

Meanwhile, Plato himself was seen by perhaps only a few thousand people in his
lifetime, at most. There were no planes or trains. There were no photographs
or recordings. Hence, there weren't a lot of eyewitnesses to spread tales of
Plato's genius. Inefficient as they were, the written books did most of that
work.

Compare that to the atom bomb. I never got to see one in person, but I've seen
them a hundred times in photographs and films. Literally half the people alive
today have seen the atom bomb in one way or another. And the stories of those
who encountered them directly can be heard by everyone, who then compose
stories which _mention_ the bomb, which _themselves_ get mass-produced. There
are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there
ever were copies of Plato's works.

\---

[1] I was recently listening to Brad Delong's economic history course from
Berkeley, and at one point he tried to explain the value of a book in medieval
times. A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars
-- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the
writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or
three personal books.

~~~
hughprime
_A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars --
that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing
by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three
personal books._

Without detracting from your actual point, is that really tens of thousands of
dollars' worth? Paper isn't all that hard to make, binding is just a matter of
sewing, and copying a book out in longhand is, what, a few man-weeks' worth?

~~~
philwelch
You forget that copying a book out in longhand required the services of
someone who was literate, which at one point was a rare skill. A few man-weeks
of highly educated skilled labor was and is worth tens of thousands of
dollars.

~~~
mechanical_fish
One interesting implication of this logic is that an ancient society could
lower the price of books by achieving a critical mass of literate people.
Because a literate person can spawn other literate people, and these literate
people can in turn be set to work copying books which the entire community can
then read, loaning them back and forth hundreds or thousands of times...

This explains how the ancient scholars managed to get anything done in the
first place. It's all about the density. This is why the Library of Alexandria
had so much stronger a reputation than the Library of Congress does today: The
Library of Congress is great, but since each of the works in it is a _printed_
work with potentially many other extant copies, it's not the same level of
unique resource.

Obviously it didn't do you as much good to train a literate person if they
then journeyed away to a distance where you could neither lend them your books
nor borrow theirs. Not only would that person not contribute to your local
library, but they would also be forced to spend a great deal of their precious
education time copying out the two or three vital books that would sustain
them in their isolation: The Bible, plus maybe one of the classical legal or
medical treatises. You tended to end up with the same handful of books
distributed over the landscape. Which suggests that the key problem which put
the "dark" in the "dark ages" was not some kind of barbarian hatred of
learning: It was the collapse of Roman civic society and the spreading of
scholars thinly over the landscape. When the central authority with the power
to collect taxes from an entire empire, drag those taxes to Rome, and use them
to support a sizeable class of co-located educated people collapsed, so did
the intellectual standard. Also explains why the centers of higher learning
became associated with the Church: The Duke of Normandy could only tax
Normandy, but the Church could collect tithes across political boundaries and
pool them.

Application of this kind of logic to, say, Wikipedia or the open source
movement is left as an exercise for the reader.

------
lionhearted
The article is mixed - some really interesting points, some off-the-mark
points. But this is one I've thought a lot about:

> Even Plato barely survived history’s guillotine—throughout medieval times,
> Plato was unknown in the West, living on only in Muslim countries and in
> footnotes to other Greek authors. Had the Muslims been worse stewards, or
> been conquered by marauding Christians who needed kindling or toilet paper,
> Socrates would have died in vain.

I wonder how many other exceptional Antiquity works we don't have? How many
other masterpieces were made and destroyed due to the Dark Ages/Burning of
Baghdad mix?

I've got this as one of the top 10 worst moments in human history, right up
there with the Holocaust:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_\(1258\)#Destruction_of_Baghdad)

In addition to the lost of life, cruelties, and destruction, we lost a lot of
works that would've tremendously benefited humanity:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom>

So I wonder what else we don't have copies of? I'm marveled when I go through
modern versions of some of the ancient works at how good they were. Antiquity
Greece and Rome, and the Islamic Golden Age produced some really incredible
science, philosophy, engineering, and literature. Sometimes I muse, wondering
what other knowledge did they produce that we have no more records of?

~~~
mechanical_fish
_I wonder how many other exceptional Antiquity works we don't have?_

Well, as my music history lecturer pointed out, we've lost just about one
hundred percent of ancient Greek and Roman music. There's not enough left to
fill half an hour.

Given that the Greeks and Romans left behind a lot of fascinating _writing_
about music, and that the music was apparently a central part of ancient Greek
drama, this is a really big loss.

~~~
electromagnetic
Well Greek and Roman cultures exemplified plays and indeed still have some of
the most revered plays to date, likely second only to Shakespeare. We also
know that there was music played to accompany them, and I have little doubt
that they would have understood the use of music to make the play.

Yet just like a silent film without a pianist, we'll never have a complete
understanding of what was intended by the Greek and Roman play writes.

Anyone watched Psycho without music? It's crap.

------
jerf
One doesn't have to be a strong Singulatarian to recognize that projecting
4000 years into the future is not the best idea. There is a non-trivial
probability that sophonts of the future will perfectly well believe that Man
had the atomic bomb in 1950, what with that being a standard part of the
ambient personality/memory matrix available for free for all pet paleohumans,
post-human-based personality megaliths, retro-humans, poingtarees, and all
others of sophont class H1C except the tridilons.

I know this isn't really meant as a projection into the future, and I suppose
I'm just riffing off that point to observe it really isn't the best jump off
point for an essay, since it distracts you with a lot of other things like the
temptation to observe how this is the worst time in the history of Man to try
to predict the future.

------
patio11
I think it is highly likely that the Catholic Church will have institutional
memory of nuclear weapons in 3000 AD if for no other reason than "Our
theologians spent a lot of time in the mid twentieth century writing on this
subject. We're obsessive compulsive about recording things, had large amounts
of resources to devote to it, and keep dead languages on life-support
singlehandedly _for millennia_ just because we have interesting things written
in them."

Incidentally, anyone interested in the intersection of science fiction,
Catholicism, and the Church functioning as external storage for the memory of
the human race should read a Canticle for Leibowitz.

~~~
akkartik
_"..anyone interested in the intersection of science fiction, Catholicism, and
the Church functioning as external storage for the memory of the human
race.."_

Another recommendation: the Coalescent-Exultant-Transcendant trilogy by
Stephen Baxter.

------
DanielStraight
An intriguing line of thought. I think, however, the number of references to
historical events is much greater now than in the past. There are 1.3M results
for "nuclear bomb" on Google; 120M for "nuclear". More are being added daily.
Ones that die off are being replaced.

~~~
jcl
But who is to say what those 1.3M results will mean for future readers? The
article's point is that "future history" may choose to interpret the Manhattan
Project as some kind of myth.

There's stuff in antiquity that is mentioned a lot, yet we're not sure if it
had any historical basis: Atlantis, the Great Flood, King Arthur, Prester
John, etc. We're not sure if Archimedes ever built his heat ray, or if the
formula for Greek fire ever contained anything special. We only just recently
discovered that the Persians inadvertently used _carbon nanorods_ to create
Damascus steel, and we're still not totally sure how they did it.

(Also, there is a lot of garbage on the Internet. For some unknowable reason,
"moon landing" gives 3.6M results on Google, while "moon landing hoax" gives
3.9M results...)

~~~
ahpeeyem
"(Also, there is a lot of garbage on the Internet. For some unknowable reason,
"moon landing" gives 3.6M results on Google, while "moon landing hoax" gives
3.9M results...)"

I think that's because Google includes pages that have any of the keywords you
supply, unless you tell it to do differently. Some examples:

<http://google.com/search?q=moon+landing+hoax> : about 3,190,000

<http://google.com/search?q=moon+landing> : about 3,030,000

<http://google.com/search?q=%2Bmoon+%2Blanding+%2Bhoax> : about 297,000

<http://google.com/search?q=%2Bmoon+%2Blanding> : about 3,010,000

So there aren't more pages about the moon landing hoax than there are about
the moon landing, there are just more pages that say the words moon OR landing
OR hoax.

Regardless of this example your point stands, there's a lot of garbage on the
internet :)

