The Trinity test remains the most intellectually arrogant moment in history. The bomb could have ignited the atmosphere, turned us into another sun for reasons we didn't understand. They worried about this, and were fairly confident in their calculations. But every century of physics brings the realization we had little clue a century earlier. If the Trinity test had behaved in an unexpected way, we wouldn't be reading this. That's what I assumed the headline meant. I was disappointed.
This appears to be a misunderstanding or myth. It was well understood prior to Trinity that such an occurrence was not possible. The issue was carefully studied by multiple top physicists affiliated with the Manhattan Project.
You’re getting hammered for this, but you’re probably correct. One could imagine a parallel universe where our test didn’t go so favorably.
One could also imagine a future physics breakthrough that we’re fairly confident about, which turns out to be horribly wrong.
However, with each decade that the standard model turns out to be correct, one could also imagine that this chance will never happen again; that we’ll be forever confident in our predictions. (This seems the most arrogant statement of all, though.)
The most important kind of intelligence is knowing what one does not know. There's a mindset counter to this, that substitutes a model for reality and then fervently believes the model. Math and physics exerts a very strong selection force attracting people fond of this substitution. The responses here do not surprise me.
Our extrapolations always take the form of moving along a tangent vector out from prior experience. Prior to relativity, Newtonian physics was the belief that we actually lived in that tangent space. Surprises come when the deviations are large enough for reality to curve away from our models. I thought I understood how materials behaved, till I was stuck briefly on a mountain at -30F. People dance on decks that collapse. They smoke joints on exposed foam mattresses. Surprises happen.
I appreciate that in this universe, our experience confirmed that physicists' absolute faith in the Trinity experiment was well-founded. A billion runs of parallel universes would have likely work out. Take this out to a quadrillion runs? It turns out that alien life has always been here at the subatomic level. Like dogs not liking fireworks, that nuclear ping really pissed them off, so they engineer a virus that wipes us out. Or it turns out that indeed there's a quantum basis to consciousness. After that nuclear ping, the atmosphere is fine, but everyone on that side of the Earth keels over, no longer able to think.
The Trinity test was a step further out along the tangent vector than we'd ever taken before. We were deliberately creating a version of a Carrington Event on Earth, with absolute certainty that we understood and anticipated all consequences. The odds of calamity were small, but our existence was at stake.
Igniting the atmosphere was merely the most obvious candidate for an unintended consequence. Countering this possibility does not address the underlying problem of what we do not know. My other scenarios are obviously far less likely. Yet, Neanderthals would never have detected radio waves. What are we not detecting? Who understands consciousness? There are limits to our understanding of physical reality.
Those with unquestioning faith in our current understanding of science are no different from those with unquestioning faith in a religion. With the Trinity test, we were playing with matches.
These type of concerns are pretty meaningless IMO. If we're going to speculate about stuff like what might annoy subatomic alien life or somehow creating some kind of quantum echoes or whatever that somehow destroy all consciousness, that brings us to the point of anything at all might happen for any reason at all. For all we know, me lifting my right pinky finger a quarter inch right now will result in the entire planet just winking out of existence.
Such things get into non-falsifiability. Sure, we can never prove true or false the idea that something we aren't even aware of might exist and do catastrophic things for reasons that make no sense to us. But if we take such ideas seriously, how could we ever do anything at all? Considering such ideas can only be either pointless speculation, or a power exercise - it's very good to be the person who decides what activities have an unacceptable risk of causing catastrophically bad things to happen for inscrutable reasons, and what don't.
We're inside a balloon together, poking at it with a needle. You're off on some philosophical discourse about falsifiability. And all I'm trying to say is we've never poked that hard before, are you sure you know what you're doing?
A long time ago I saw some documentary about the ruins of the Khmer (No! NOT Ancient Aliens! Seriuosly!) where they overlaid the groundplot by LIDAR into the aerials which have shown only jungle. The thing is, that groundplot looked exactly like the planar layout of some on-die microwave emitter I've seen in some site like IEEE or phys.org a few weeks before.
I just thought as above, so below.
The older I get, the less unlikely I think of some so called
"pseudo-history".
> However, with each decade that the standard model turns out to be correct, one could also imagine that this chance will never happen again; that we’ll be forever confident in our predictions. (This seems the most arrogant statement of all, though.)
Even with a perfect model complex systems will continue to surprise us so long as our intelligence and knowledge is finite.
See software development for an endless source of examples.
I'm not following. You're suggesting they had an exaggerated sense of their own abilities? It doesn't seem they did, given they accomplished what they set out to do. And their calculations turned out to be correct w/r/t the risk of igniting the atmosphere.
It seems odd to suggest they were arrogant because they didn't have physics knowledge that wasn't available to them - or anyone - at the time.
"In the twenty-two hundred recorded points of my conferences with Hitler, nuclear fission comes up only once, and then is mentioned with extreme brevity. Hitler did sometimes comment on its prospects, but what I told him of my conferences with the physicists confirmed his view that there was not much profit in the matter. Actually, Professor Heisenberg had not given any final answer
to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept
under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction. Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star.
Occasionally, however, he joked that the scientists in their unworldly urge to lay bare all the secrets under heaven might some day set the globe on fire. But undoubtedly a good deal of time would pass before that came about, Hitler said; he would certainly not live to see it. "
From the Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Such an amazing book, and required reading for any scientist IMO.
