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Winston Churchill's Scientists
HughPickens.com writes Nicola Davis writes at The Guardian that a new exhibition at London's Science Museum tiitled Churchill's Scientists aims to explore how a climate that mingled necessity with ambition spurred British scientists to forge ahead in fields as diverse as drug-discovery and operational research, paving the way for a further flurry of postwar progress in disciplines from neurology to radio astronomy. Churchill "was very unusual in that he was a politician from a grand Victorian family who was also interested in new technology and science," says Andrew Nahum. "That was quite remarkable at the time." An avid reader of Charles Darwin and HG Wells, Churchill also wrote science-inspired articles himself and fostered an environment where the brightest scientists could build ground-breaking machines, such as the Bernard Lovell telescope, and make world-changing discoveries, in molecular genetics, radio astronomy, nuclear power, nerve and brain function and robotics. "During the war the question was never, 'How much will it cost?' It was, 'Can we do it and how soon can we have it?' This left a heritage of extreme ambition and a lot of talented people who were keen to see what it could provide." (More, below.)
According to Cambridge Historian Richard Toye, Churchill was a "closet science-fiction fan" who borrowed the lines for one of his most famous speeches from H. G. Wells — to depict the rise of Hitler's Germany. "It's a bit like Tony Blair borrowing phrases from Star Trek or Doctor Who," says Toye. A close friend of Wells, Churchill said that The Time Machine was "one of the books I would like to take with me to Purgatory". Wells and Churchill met in 1902 and several times thereafter, and kept in touch in person and by letter until Wells' death in 1946. "We need to remember that there was a time when Churchill was a radical liberal who believed these things," Toye adds. "Wells is often seen as a socialist, but he also saw himself as a liberal, and he saw Churchill as someone whose views were moving in the right direction."
unless you're talking about advances in military superiority.
There's an interesting argument to be made for man's warrior nature being the impetus for much of his science and engineering development.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I read that Churchills left arm was actually steam powered and included a wide array of weaponry. His support of scientists was not so much a matter of vision as a necessity for keeping his artifical heart in good operation. #rupertstruth
Oh yes!
I thought only space had spinoffs?
Although I'm old enough to have seen Churchill's funeral, I wasn't really aware of this. There's a good clue in his quote 'give them what they want' for Bletchley Park. Anyway, a good read about science and intelligence [apart from Collosus etc.] in WW2 is: http://www.hive.co.uk/book/mos...
We're coming up to an election in UK and we don't seem to have anyone much that appreciates science amongst our politicians. It's a real problem since the actual world is now full of pure science and technology. Still, we have lawyers and people that understand ancient Greek, they are always -really- useful.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
He had to work with what the education systems of the time gave him.
The meaning of "liberal", or "radical liberal" is the opposite of what you think.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
There was an article in the economist about how statisticians also served in WW II. They were indispensable to making sure that Britain did not starve. Before WW II the country imported most of its food. They enabled it stay in the war undefeated until the entry of the USA.
Among the instances of their success was their analysis of the distribution of German bombs falling on London each day. They concluded that the Germans were trying to destroy the docks but missing. They conducted quality-control in the manufacture of aircraft components, and the calculation of the distribution of stresses on aircraft in flight. The aimed to load planes up to the point that the wings were about to drop off. The research meant the RAF dropped more bombs, and brought more pilots safely home, than it would have otherwise.
They used sequential methods for the first time in trials of medical treatments. Analyzing the results of a trial bit by bit, rather than all at once when it was finished, meant it could be stopped straight away if it became clear that the new treatment was so good that everyone should be getting it, or indeed useless or even dangerous. This simple-sounding idea, now standard in medical trials, requires great statistical sophistication—and saved many lives.
But after the war, so much of this was not integrated into the British educational system. I remember taking a GCSE in math and having to do a project. We had to figure our how to calculate the area under a curve. I asked almost every adult I ran into if they could help me and give me some ideas. No-one had a clue and this included college educated people. It was so sad that no-one recognized this as as the primary question behind integration and half of calculus. British people had forgotten all that Newton and Leibniz (albeit that he was not a Brit) had accomplished.
No-one told us that 60 miles up the road DNA's structure had been discovered at Cambridge by Watson and Crick on 1953. No-one talked about Allan Turing and his Turing Machine. No-one would teach me anything about electronics in high school despite my begging and interest beyond a basic physics class. No-one talked about James Clerk Maxwell and his relations in thermodynamics. No-one had a clue about statistics. No one screamed off the rooftops the central dogma of biology - we merely had to memorize the names of bones and muscles in the human body. The phrase 'normal distribution' was not used. People in the USA at least have a vague sense of what 23 and me is. In the UK so many people I know have no idea. They see genetics as so foreign - oh the irony. The math and science teachers were mean and the books not very helpful. I learned all about British STEM history but only when in the USA.
There was a time when inventors, manufacturing, science, technology and innovation was celebrated in Britain. Now the only time you hear about science is when people are discussing global warming. They spend their energy in opposition to building anything new. There are parts of London where 1/3 of the buildings are listed and cannot be torn down and rebuilt. People oppose new high speed rail projects. They oppose new home building despite the data showing the UK being short of 1 million homes. They axiomatically oppose genetically modified crops disregarding that at least some of them are helping to alleviate malnutrition. Where has your sense of innovation gone, United Kingdom? You argue now about whether to be in the EU, whether Scotland should leave, and whether more spying will solve your Islamic extremist problem.
Why not aim to spend 1% of GDP on R&D and build institutions like the NIH and NSF? Why not have almost all school children complete the equivalent of pre-caclulus, Calc I and Calc II, and intro to statistics by age 16? Why not set aside land to allow high end manufacturing using 3D pri
In an interview recently Camerhun didn't even know what "magna carta" means.
You'd think that was common knowledge even among people who hadn't gone to a posh school and done PPE at Oxford, but there you go.
You'd think it'd come up in the second P somewhere, no?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
TIL "Operations Research" is known as "Operational Research" in the U.K.
He pretty much Gave the bomb to both the British and the Soviets.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Churchill "was very unusual in that he was a politician from a grand Victorian family who was also interested in new technology and science," says Andrew Nahum. "That was quite remarkable at the time."
Also unusual for a British politician was that Churchill's mother was from the USA.
I think that's preferable to the US where they got high on plutonium and penicillin then accidentally turned science into a jobs program.
"Sadly diverse fields, but not much diversity in hiring. "
And so, here comes the troll of the week.
Obvious sarcasm is not a troll. But I'm sick of hearing about the subject too - Should have been modded off-topic :)
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Why not have almost all school children complete the equivalent of pre-caclulus, Calc I and Calc II, and intro to statistics by age 16?
Because calculus is a massively overrated part of mathematics. It is emphasised in the British education system because, when it was introduced, having accurate artillery tables was seen as important. It is emphasised in the US education system because, when it was introduced, being able to put a satellite into orbit with incredibly primitive computers (that might fail) was considered important.
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I'll stand by what I said; we did Not share everything with the British, without Fuchs, tit would have taken them much longer.
Soviets too.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
I am intrigued by what you say. What would you say are the useful areas of mathematics that average and above average high school students should know beyond pre-calc. Are there other math subjects that you would rather college students (in STEM and econ) learn other than calculus? I know many benefit from a course in a probability and another in statistics. What else would you suggest?
Don't drop the calculus, but you can teach people to understand calculus in a couple of months. Having them spend a couple of years going from being a thousand times slower than a computer at solving differential equations to being 500 times slower isn't worth it. It's not like simple arithmetic, where getting a calculator out and typing the problem in can be a bottleneck.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Casteism
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The educational problems you speak of have a long history.
British military historian Correlli Barnett wrote several critiques of Britain's educational and industrial system during the WW1-WW2 period, which you might find interesting. Start with "The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation". The book is out of print now, but easy to find.
Few people understand the industrial, scientific, and logistical issues that, as much as anything, determined the outcome of the war, and Barnett's works are a good introduction to some of the issues with respect to how Britain was affected.
From an engineering perspective, the military systems of the day and the industrial processes required to build them were staggeringly complex. Most military historians have little feel for industry, and manufacturing (especially logistics), and how hard it can be to take an idea from science and do anything useful with it. As a result a lot of the material they present the public, and the conclusions they draw, are misleading or even inaccurate.
Thanks, great essay. I was lucky enough to do public school [that's a private fee-paying 'prep' school for those in the US, it has a very unhelpful name] and I got to write FORTRAN program in 1965. We ran it on a mainframe in a steel mill in a nearby town. That mill has, of course. closed now.
Secondly I and a pretty-much-genius friend built OSTEC, Oundle School Transistorised Electronic Computer, something that was pretty much just a full adder and a bit of core-store [ferrite core, they still use it in space]. It had a backplane and [fairly standardised] printed circuits that I etched with ferric chloride. I also etched a number of shirts, to the disgust of my mother.
I'm really happy that 'proper' computing seems to be coming back with Arduino, Pi and Scratch. At time of writing I've just come back from a local school where we're just starting a Code Club: https://www.codeclub.org.uk/ So I feel that things are picking up a little, people are, at least, aware that we've been neglecting science and technology for quite a while.
The worry I have left is that education should be about human potential not just about 'jobs', commerce is lobbying hard, so expensive to train people, so they prefer school to output pre-trained/compliant workers with low expectations. Go figure.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Among the instances of their success was their analysis of the distribution of German bombs falling on London each day. They concluded that the Germans were trying to destroy the docks but missing.
Somehow they failed to figure out that the British bombers were ALSO missing.
All the theoretical statistics in the world couldn't change that: they needed somebody on the ground (or inside the enemy forces), or far better photo-recon than they would have for years to come.
See Neillands book "The Bomber War: The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany" for a modern take on the subject.
In reality, the British bomber war was in many respects a disaster (in terms of damaging targets of military value) until 1944. It took that long to work out the technology and procedures needed for accurate bombing.
For much of the war, the British bombed at night, as it was too dangerous in the day without long range fighter escort (something the Americans, who insisted on daylight bombing, took a long time to admit, taking horrendous losses along the way) which only made matters worse.
Essentially, for much of the war the British were bombing civilian targets, and not even civilian targets of a military nature such as docks.
The British were also the first to deliberately adopt a policy of hitting purely civilian targets, thanks to Mr Churchill, in "retaliation" for a German bomber missing its target (incidentally, the whole crew of the German aircraft was arrested the moment they returned to Germany, since this was strictly against Luftwaffe policy at the time). Hitler in turn was stupid enough to "retaliate" for the "retaliation", and the two powers quickly started a race to the bottom...
On the plus side, the bomber war tied up enormous resources that Nazi Germany was unable to use against the Soviet Union. The British were not hitting a lot of military targets, but nobody likes getting bombed, and preventing that required a truly staggering commitment of German resources (people, fuel, metal, aircraft, gunpowder, radar, and so forth). Along with the Allied supply to Russia, that commitment kept the Soviet Union afloat. For example, when the Soviets finally broke through the German lines, they were only facing about 5% of the German fighter squadrons (and relatively few of those aircraft were operational due to conditions on the Eastern Front).
Calculus is about how to work with things that are changing. People have problems with change, of all kinds.
I believe that it is at least partly because they were never taught Calculus in school. There was a time when it was taught in highschool.
I went to a 2-year technical school, where they had what was called Technical Math. Toward the end, the teacher was teaching "tricks and shortcuts" for working difficult problems. After a while, he told the class that some of the tricks were actually Calculus. The average grade of the studends immediatly dropped about 10%, more for the minority students. The drop seemed to be a self-asteem issue, not intellegence or experiance. Some students seemed to feel that they should not know such things. I was shaken by it and very sad, because the whole class had been doing well with the work, before that.
I think if they had been taught it any time before that, they would have not felt that way. Dumbing-down classes, is stealing from students. And the least capable are hurt the most.
And thanks for demonstrating you are just a troll.