Failure: the last taboo subject. I loved Selling Ben Cheever, a book about a series of low-level service jobs that Ben Cheever took after he left Reader’s Digest and couldn’t sell his third novel. In the introduction, Cheever noted that no one wanted to talk to him about what it was like to lose a job and have to start over. How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill is another excellent book along those lines. (Curious that both authors are the sons of well-iknown writers, John Cheever and Brendan Gill.)
Now comes a scientific third-person account of failure: Sun in a Bottle by Charles Seife, about attempts to produce nuclear fusion in the lab.
Seife’s message: fusion scientists should just cut bait. By analogy to your closet, if you haven’t worn it, throw it out. If you’ve been trying it for the last half-century and it hasn’t worked, then enough already.
According to its subtitle, the book covers “the science of wishful thinking.” Was it wishful thinking or avoidance of the f-word? I will have to read the book to find out, it sounds fascinating.
Well, fusion is different in that many people think it is just a matter of engineering — kind of like using light to make computers. Predicted in the 40s and 50s, finally getting engineered.
The other thing is that predictions of how much longer it would take, back in the early 1970s before they even had a first bottle attempt, were between 20 and 100 years. I read through all the congressional reports for the era (for another project) and the debate and estimates were quite interesting.
We don’t have Mars mission, and they’ve been working towards one for forty years. Should they just cut bait? Or is it predictable engineering and cost issues?
Does that make sense? I’m not sure they are right, but why they feel the way they do makes a lot of sense.
Oh, I should add that the “long time” position won out, for the purposes of planning national energy policy. I’ll have to pass on how well the executed on the planning (/sigh), but at least they realized in 1972 that fusion was not going to bail them out by the year 2000.