I think “unknown unknowns” is a good one for this sort of thing. My attempt follows:
We know a lot of things, and generally we know that we know them. These are “known knowns.” I know that 1+1 = 2, I know that the year is 2010, and so on.
We also don’t know a lot of things, but generally we know that we don’t know them—for example, I don’t know the hundredth digit of pi, I don’t know how to speak Chinese, and I don’t know what stocks are going to do well next year. All of those things are “known unknowns,” or unanswered questions. However, because we know what the questions are, it’s possible for us to solve them, or at least approach some kind of solution, if we anticipate needing one. If I knew I was going to be quizzed on the hundredth digit of pi, I could look it up or calculate it; if I knew I was going to have to speak Chinese, I could buy a course on it and at least learn the basics; if I knew I was going to need to make stock predictions, I could look at market trends and try to extrapolate what might happen in the future. The fact that I know that I don’t know these things allows me to take action to correct that lack of knowledge. So while known unknowns can be bad, we can at least plan around them and minimize their potential impact on our lives.
However, there are also things that we not only don’t know, we don’t know that we don’t know them. There are questions out there that we haven’t even considered or thought about. Not only do we not know what the answers to the questions are, we don’t even know the questions themselves. These things are “unknown unknowns,” and they are very, very dangerous, because there’s no way we can plan for them.
For example, Japan in late World War II had a plan for fighting the US if it invaded Japan with ground troops, and Japan also had a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with conventional air raids. But Japan did not have a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with nuclear weapons, because Japan did not know that nuclear weapons existed, much less that the US actually had them. Nuclear weapons, for Japan in World War II, were an unknown unknown.
Japan did not have a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with nuclear weapons, because Japan did not know that nuclear weapons existed, much less that the US actually had them.
Japan had a research program into nuclear weapons, but they ran into what they considered an insurmountable hurdle, which they believed would stop the US, too. Something to do with the lack of industrial capacity (electricity??) needed to produce enough fissionable material if memory serves.
If memory serves, both the Japanese and Germany nuclear weapons program made a subtle mistake with the cross-section of uranium atoms (or something like that), and wound up calculating that critical mass would be something like a ton of enriched uranium, and so not a useful weapon within WWII’s timeframe.
(I read about this while also reading Copenhagen, but I can’t remember what book. IIRC, Heisenberg claimed he had made this mistake deliberately and this was evidence that he wasn’t cooperating whole-heartedly with the Nazis, but the countercharge is that he seemed as astounded as the rest of the German physicists in custody when told of Hiroshima & Nagasaki.)
Is a duplicated error evidence for or against sabotage?
Heisenberg did not claim to have sabotaged it. Wikipedia claims that the story comes from selective quotation of the last letter here. But, when the bomb was announced, the imprisoned Heisenberg’s reaction of frantic work is suspicious to me: it suggests that he knew where the mistake was and wanted to go back and do the work he had blocked (but I don’t know the details; maybe he was working on something independent of the mistake).
Well, for 2 physicists of equal competency, differing results would suggest sabotage, since for both to give the wrong answer suggests that either they are not good enough to get the right answer at all, or they both got the answer and simultaneously decided to sabotage. Heisenberg was great, though, surely greater than anyone on the Japanese project; so I tend to regard the net as a wash, and focus more on Heisenberg’s reaction—which as I said suggests he genuinely made a mistake and was not engaged in passive resistance, and his surprise & flurry of activity was a give-away.
No numbers, unfortunately. But I did notice:
We did not know a process for obtaining of 235-Uranium with the resources available under wartime conditions in Germany, in quantities worth mentioning. Even the production of nuclear explosives from reactors obviously could only be achieved by running huge reactors for years on end.
Of course, for a few kilograms of enriched uranium or plutonium, you don’t really need huge reactors running for years and years—the hard part is enrichment. Yesterday I was reading a history of modern Korea, and North Korea obtained enough plutonium for a bomb or 3 by running a 20 or 50 megawatt reactor for 2 or 3 years, IIRC. But perhaps by Heisenberg’s 1940s standards such a reactor is beyond huge.
(Factual correction) The US didn’t have nuclear weapons when Japan started the war.
{Mulling the topic) Not only that, but I think “the other side won’t come up with a superweapon” is generally the way to bet, though perhaps less so than it used to be.
I thought radar was invented for WWII, but it’s not that simple.
It’s close enough—as that page notes, what we know as RADAR was developed during the war. That’s also when Norbert Wiener developed the first radar-integrated guns.
Maybe I’ve missed something, but I don’t think there’s been anything but incremental improvement in war tech since WWII—nothing really surprising.
It really depends what you call “incremental”, and what sorts of increments you’re looking at. We have robots with guns!
If the standard is nukes and radar, then only things which leave the other side saying “how is that even possible?” or “that came out of nowhere” counts as surprising.
Robot drones are not surprising. I’m pretty sure invisibility tech would not be surprising. Anti-gravity would be surprising.
Decreasing frequency of surprising technology advancements are caused by faster and more frequent information of the general public about scientific advancements.
If the rate of news consumes grows faster than the rate of innovations produced, the perceived magnitude of innovation per news will go down.
How many people, even as smart as us, correctly predicted the sorts of wonder weapons that the intense research pressures that a world war would create in say, 1935? If we’re talking about surprising sorts of weapons, I expect not to have been exposed to them, or if I have, to have rejected them out of hand.
It is difficult for me to conceive of military technology that is:
a) potentially surprising b) powerful enough to make a big difference c) near-future
“Rods from God” might count, if they exist, but they’re not surprising. The best example I can think of is strong memetic warfare, but I’m not confident that will be developed in the near future (or indeed ever).
I think “unknown unknowns” is a good one for this sort of thing. My attempt follows:
We know a lot of things, and generally we know that we know them. These are “known knowns.” I know that 1+1 = 2, I know that the year is 2010, and so on.
We also don’t know a lot of things, but generally we know that we don’t know them—for example, I don’t know the hundredth digit of pi, I don’t know how to speak Chinese, and I don’t know what stocks are going to do well next year. All of those things are “known unknowns,” or unanswered questions. However, because we know what the questions are, it’s possible for us to solve them, or at least approach some kind of solution, if we anticipate needing one. If I knew I was going to be quizzed on the hundredth digit of pi, I could look it up or calculate it; if I knew I was going to have to speak Chinese, I could buy a course on it and at least learn the basics; if I knew I was going to need to make stock predictions, I could look at market trends and try to extrapolate what might happen in the future. The fact that I know that I don’t know these things allows me to take action to correct that lack of knowledge. So while known unknowns can be bad, we can at least plan around them and minimize their potential impact on our lives.
However, there are also things that we not only don’t know, we don’t know that we don’t know them. There are questions out there that we haven’t even considered or thought about. Not only do we not know what the answers to the questions are, we don’t even know the questions themselves. These things are “unknown unknowns,” and they are very, very dangerous, because there’s no way we can plan for them.
For example, Japan in late World War II had a plan for fighting the US if it invaded Japan with ground troops, and Japan also had a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with conventional air raids. But Japan did not have a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with nuclear weapons, because Japan did not know that nuclear weapons existed, much less that the US actually had them. Nuclear weapons, for Japan in World War II, were an unknown unknown.
Japan had a research program into nuclear weapons, but they ran into what they considered an insurmountable hurdle, which they believed would stop the US, too. Something to do with the lack of industrial capacity (electricity??) needed to produce enough fissionable material if memory serves.
If memory serves, both the Japanese and Germany nuclear weapons program made a subtle mistake with the cross-section of uranium atoms (or something like that), and wound up calculating that critical mass would be something like a ton of enriched uranium, and so not a useful weapon within WWII’s timeframe.
(I read about this while also reading Copenhagen, but I can’t remember what book. IIRC, Heisenberg claimed he had made this mistake deliberately and this was evidence that he wasn’t cooperating whole-heartedly with the Nazis, but the countercharge is that he seemed as astounded as the rest of the German physicists in custody when told of Hiroshima & Nagasaki.)
Is a duplicated error evidence for or against sabotage?
Heisenberg did not claim to have sabotaged it. Wikipedia claims that the story comes from selective quotation of the last letter here. But, when the bomb was announced, the imprisoned Heisenberg’s reaction of frantic work is suspicious to me: it suggests that he knew where the mistake was and wanted to go back and do the work he had blocked (but I don’t know the details; maybe he was working on something independent of the mistake).
Well, for 2 physicists of equal competency, differing results would suggest sabotage, since for both to give the wrong answer suggests that either they are not good enough to get the right answer at all, or they both got the answer and simultaneously decided to sabotage. Heisenberg was great, though, surely greater than anyone on the Japanese project; so I tend to regard the net as a wash, and focus more on Heisenberg’s reaction—which as I said suggests he genuinely made a mistake and was not engaged in passive resistance, and his surprise & flurry of activity was a give-away.
No numbers, unfortunately. But I did notice:
Of course, for a few kilograms of enriched uranium or plutonium, you don’t really need huge reactors running for years and years—the hard part is enrichment. Yesterday I was reading a history of modern Korea, and North Korea obtained enough plutonium for a bomb or 3 by running a 20 or 50 megawatt reactor for 2 or 3 years, IIRC. But perhaps by Heisenberg’s 1940s standards such a reactor is beyond huge.
(Factual correction) The US didn’t have nuclear weapons when Japan started the war.
{Mulling the topic) Not only that, but I think “the other side won’t come up with a superweapon” is generally the way to bet, though perhaps less so than it used to be.
I thought radar was invented for WWII, but it’s not that simple.
Maybe I’ve missed something, but I don’t think there’s been anything but incremental improvement in war tech since WWII—nothing really surprising.
It’s close enough—as that page notes, what we know as RADAR was developed during the war. That’s also when Norbert Wiener developed the first radar-integrated guns.
It really depends what you call “incremental”, and what sorts of increments you’re looking at. We have robots with guns!
If the standard is nukes and radar, then only things which leave the other side saying “how is that even possible?” or “that came out of nowhere” counts as surprising.
Robot drones are not surprising. I’m pretty sure invisibility tech would not be surprising. Anti-gravity would be surprising.
Decreasing frequency of surprising technology advancements are caused by faster and more frequent information of the general public about scientific advancements.
If the rate of news consumes grows faster than the rate of innovations produced, the perceived magnitude of innovation per news will go down.
How many people, even as smart as us, correctly predicted the sorts of wonder weapons that the intense research pressures that a world war would create in say, 1935? If we’re talking about surprising sorts of weapons, I expect not to have been exposed to them, or if I have, to have rejected them out of hand.
It is difficult for me to conceive of military technology that is:
a) potentially surprising
b) powerful enough to make a big difference
c) near-future
“Rods from God” might count, if they exist, but they’re not surprising. The best example I can think of is strong memetic warfare, but I’m not confident that will be developed in the near future (or indeed ever).