andygrovetheman

On a mostly-unrelated note:

Apparently big difference between the US and Germany in the nuclear race was not science but instead engineering.

Fermi and Oppenheimer were useful to the US effort but Heisenberg probably had the intellectual firepower to do that for Germany.

The REAL advances the US made were in chemical and metallurgical engineering at an industrial scale. Dealing with gaseous and liquid uranium and plutonium compounds took a lot of innovation. And the plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge were ENORMOUS. So if Germany was going to build a bomb they would have needed a massive industrial complex. Not just physicists.

Apparently Leslie Groves commissioned a public report in 1945. He deliberately put a lot of physics in it, but left out the chemical engineering. Because he regarded the latter as the key difficult steps in bomb building. And the physics was mostly known.

It’s good if you find the right family. But this is exactly what Tolkien was saying in Lord of the Rkngs with the ring metaphor (Tolkien’s work was a big allegory on European World Wars and politics).

Tolkien said Gandalf couldn’t take the ring because he would be corrupted by power and become an evil autocrat.

There are few rulers who can assume dictatoral power and not use it for ill. And once a family has autocratic power, it is difficult and bloody for the people to take power back.

IP and knowledge was much less valuable in the 19th C industrial economy than it is today. Back then execution and raw materials and access to semiskilled labor was most important.

The Chinese (NK, Iranian, Russian) corporate hacks we have seen recently could have a MUCH larger economic effect.

The US has slid away from a free and fair market too. By moving to completely unregulated markets, they have given control to the biggest companies. In a totally unregulated market, inequality grows.

That’s bad for a society. Most free market economists (before “free market” was taken over by billionaires and plutocrats trying to increase their wealth) understood that regulations (anti-trust, anti-price fixing, anti-dumping etc) were needed to give small players and workers a fair shake.

When the US emerges from this national emergency, will it restore balance to markets as it did in the 1930s and 40s in reaction to the 1920s plutocrats? To me that is totally unclear. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope Europe joins it.

Many scientists and academics immigrated to the US because of its values: it was a free country and a multicultural country where immigrants are welcomed. The knowledge drain moved smart people to a free country to build a knowledge economy. (Economists too: the Bretton Woods system was built in part by smart people who fled the autocratic or fascist countries). That system of free exchange between stable democracies with social safety nets kept peace in the world for 50 years.

Not sure this brain drain has equal intentions for rule of law and democratic societies.