If you mean the Manhattan Project: no. IIUC there were basically zero Western groups and zero dollars working toward the bomb before that, so the Manhattan Project clearly sped things up. That’s not really a case of “centralization” so much as doing-the-thing-at-all vs not-doing-the-thing-at-all.
If you mean fusion: yes. There were many fusion projects in the sixties, people were learning quickly. Then the field centralized, and progress slowed to a crawl.
The current boom in fusion energy startups seems to have been set off by deep advances in material sciences (eg. magnets), electronics, manufacturing. These bottlenecks likely were the main reason fusion energy was not possible in the 60s. On priors it is more likely that centralisation was a result rather than a cause of fusion being hard.
On my understanding, the push for centralization came from a specific faction whose pitch was basically:
here’s the scaling laws for tokamaks
here’s how much money we’d need
… so let’s make one real big tokamak rather than spending money on lots of little research devices.
… and that faction mostly won the competition for government funding for about half a century.
The current boom accepted that faction’s story at face value, but then noticed that new materials allowed the same “scale up the tokamaks” strategy to be executed on a budget achievable with private funding, and therefore they could fund projects without having to fight the faction which won the battle for government funding.
The counterfactual which I think is probably correct is that there exist entirely different designs far superior to tokamaks, which don’t require that much scale in the first place, but which were never discovered because the “scale up the tokamaks” faction basically won the competition for funding and stopped most research on alternative designs from happening.
It is a weird claim that the current boom, concentrated in time, is the result of many advances, which were spread out over time. All these advances are being used at the same time because funders are paying for them now and not earlier. How do you know that you need all of those advances and not just some of them? People could have tried using ceramic superconductors in Tokomaks in the 90s, but they didn’t, because of centralization. Maybe that wouldn’t be enough because you need all the other advances, but it would have yielded more useful data than the actually performed experiments with large Tokomaks.
The advances build on top of each other. I am not expert in material sciences or magnetmanufacturing but I’d bet a lot of improvements & innovation has been downstream of improved computers & electronics. Neither were available in the 60s.
How is this a response? Yes, advances accumulate over time, which is exactly my point and seems to me to be a rebuttal to the idea that the centralized project has been sane, let alone effective. Which advances do we need? How many do we need? Why is this the magic decade in which we have enough advances, rather than 30 years ago or 30 years hence?
In fact, the current boom does not reflect a belief that we have accumulated enough advances that if we combine them all they will work. Instead, there are many different fusion companies trying experiments to harness different advances. They all have different hypotheses and the fact that they are all contemporaries is a coincidence that you fail to explain. If there were a single bottleneck technology that they all use, that would explain it, but I don’t think that’s true. Computers are a particularly bad explanation because they have continuously improved: they have contributed to everything, but at different times.
Surely the reason that they are not trying to combine everything is that it takes time to assimilate advances. Some advances are new and will take time. But some are old and they could have started working on incorporating them decades ago. The failure of the centralized project to do that is extremely damning.
As a point of comparison—do you think the US nuclear programme was substantially slowed down because it was a centralized government programme?
If you mean the Manhattan Project: no. IIUC there were basically zero Western groups and zero dollars working toward the bomb before that, so the Manhattan Project clearly sped things up. That’s not really a case of “centralization” so much as doing-the-thing-at-all vs not-doing-the-thing-at-all.
If you mean fusion: yes. There were many fusion projects in the sixties, people were learning quickly. Then the field centralized, and progress slowed to a crawl.
The current boom in fusion energy startups seems to have been set off by deep advances in material sciences (eg. magnets), electronics, manufacturing. These bottlenecks likely were the main reason fusion energy was not possible in the 60s. On priors it is more likely that centralisation was a result rather than a cause of fusion being hard.
On my understanding, the push for centralization came from a specific faction whose pitch was basically:
here’s the scaling laws for tokamaks
here’s how much money we’d need
… so let’s make one real big tokamak rather than spending money on lots of little research devices.
… and that faction mostly won the competition for government funding for about half a century.
The current boom accepted that faction’s story at face value, but then noticed that new materials allowed the same “scale up the tokamaks” strategy to be executed on a budget achievable with private funding, and therefore they could fund projects without having to fight the faction which won the battle for government funding.
The counterfactual which I think is probably correct is that there exist entirely different designs far superior to tokamaks, which don’t require that much scale in the first place, but which were never discovered because the “scale up the tokamaks” faction basically won the competition for funding and stopped most research on alternative designs from happening.
In fact, many 21st century fusion companies do not use Tokomaks, but use other designs from the 60s. My estimate from wikipedia is about half.
It is a weird claim that the current boom, concentrated in time, is the result of many advances, which were spread out over time. All these advances are being used at the same time because funders are paying for them now and not earlier. How do you know that you need all of those advances and not just some of them? People could have tried using ceramic superconductors in Tokomaks in the 90s, but they didn’t, because of centralization. Maybe that wouldn’t be enough because you need all the other advances, but it would have yielded more useful data than the actually performed experiments with large Tokomaks.
The advances build on top of each other. I am not expert in material sciences or magnetmanufacturing but I’d bet a lot of improvements & innovation has been downstream of improved computers & electronics. Neither were available in the 60s.
How is this a response? Yes, advances accumulate over time, which is exactly my point and seems to me to be a rebuttal to the idea that the centralized project has been sane, let alone effective. Which advances do we need? How many do we need? Why is this the magic decade in which we have enough advances, rather than 30 years ago or 30 years hence?
In fact, the current boom does not reflect a belief that we have accumulated enough advances that if we combine them all they will work. Instead, there are many different fusion companies trying experiments to harness different advances. They all have different hypotheses and the fact that they are all contemporaries is a coincidence that you fail to explain. If there were a single bottleneck technology that they all use, that would explain it, but I don’t think that’s true. Computers are a particularly bad explanation because they have continuously improved: they have contributed to everything, but at different times.
Surely the reason that they are not trying to combine everything is that it takes time to assimilate advances. Some advances are new and will take time. But some are old and they could have started working on incorporating them decades ago. The failure of the centralized project to do that is extremely damning.