Great Failures
The Leaning Tower of Pisa was supposed to stand up straight. But if it had, would anyone bother to visit it today?
The lore of failure consumes our culture. In our lifetimes, the passing of eight-track audio tapes and the Beta Max VCR have been memorialized by nostalgic television programs and movies. Looking further into the past, dinosaurs, an extinct race of giant reptiles that once ruled the earth, are now the fodder of elementary school imaginations; the answer to why these ancient behemoths disappeared continues to perplex and fascinate world-renown scientists and four-year-olds alike.
The persistence of these bygone novelties is more than just a celebration of the past; it's a kind of prolongation of it. An aging thirty something's wistful recollection of his once-prized Supertramp eight-track and that terrible movie about the discovery of a Brontosaurus living somewhere in the African jungle both reveal a hope that these obsolete remains of our past can continue to provide us something alive and relevant.
This sort of impulse is so strong, we've begun making up stories of failure about ourselves. Perhaps looking for inspiration in the malfunction of human evolution, some believe a primitive human ancestor lurks deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest or the Himalayan Mountains, the lonely survivor of his ill-fated race. Plato told of the mythical lost city of Atlantis, a vast idyllic city-state that purportedly sank somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Whether these stories are actually true is of little consequence, although it's worth noting that each can be compared to real events in human history. Atlantis to the mysterious fate of the Minoans on Crete; sasquatch and the yeti to the period, ages ago, when the last Neanderthals coexisted with our ancestors, the CroMagnons.
There are legends of documented failures, such as the Titanic's collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Over 1,500 lives were lost; that, we know. Yet, that figure hardly constitutes the deadliest nautical disaster in history; it takes more than a high death toll to establish a legacy. More likely, the myth of the Titanic was secured by the boasts of its builders -- that they had created an unsinkable ship. And thus a trend emerges …
The eight-track, the dinosaur, Bigfoot, Atlantis, the Tower of Pisa, and Titanic; the failure of each was notable not because of the scale or enormity of its failure, but because of what each innovation supposedly represented: a culmination. Whether that culmination was in hi-fidelity home stereo equipment, the evolution of primates, or medieval architecture, these illustrious anomalies serve as a reminder that our achievements are fallible; that time does not advance in a steady wave of progress. Things go awry. Species grow in funny, unexpected directions.
They say that history repeats itself. Yet, these stories suggest that, at the same time, we're telling ourselves to expect the unexpected; that the lessons of the past won't necessarily bear out in the future. Perhaps this tension is one of the reasons we continue to repeat our mistakes. For instance, in the early twentieth century, as the future of transportation shifted from the sea to the sky -- and in the wake of the much-publicized Titanic sinking -- some looked to the breed of lavish ocean liners that Titanic had come to epitomize as an example.
In his book IMAGINED WORLDS, Freeman Dyson recounts the tale of the R101, an enormous dirigible designed in 1926 to be the airborne equivalent of a luxury liner. The ship had a lounge, a dining room, promenade decks, passenger cabins, and even a smoking room. "At all costs," Dyson writes, "the R101 had to be the largest airship in the world, and at all costs it had to be ready to fly by a fixed date in October 1930…" And it did fly. On its way to Karachi, India, the R101 made it as far as France, where it crashed into a field on October 5, 1930, killing 48 of its 54 passengers.
The strict deadlines and size expectations of the R101 were symptomatic of a phenomenon Dyson refers to as ideologically driven technology. The ideology, in this case, was the promotion of British imperialism. Taken by the visually striking image of a giant blimp and the deluxe accommodations a ship such as the R101 could offer, politicians seized on the notion of using airships to unify Britain's imperial holdings, from Canada to India and, eventually, to Australia. Assuming that lighter than air technology would support a vast network of transportation hubs, they instigated the Imperial Airship Programme in 1924.
At the same time, however, the development of the airplane proceeded through a much different sort of process. Dyson suggests that, in the 1920s and '30s, the various small companies inventing airplanes created 100,000 different designs. Certain designs failed and test pilots were killed, but there were no devastating catastrophes in the vein of the R101. A kind of Darwinian competition between these planes narrowed the pool to the 100 airplane varieties that ultimately formed the basis of modern aviation.
To Dyson, this cutthroat, evolutionary process of technological development is the reason for today's safe and efficient airplane travel. Airship designs, on the other hand, were not afforded the same opportunity to fail. Britain instigated its Imperial Airship Programme before the capabilities and limitations of airships were understood. It took a large-scale disaster to convince the politicians that perhaps airships weren't the ideal way to unite its empire. Germany continued the development of its dirigibles until the Hindenburg, which was even larger than the R101, crashed spectacularly over New Jersey and killed 36 people in 1937.
"The characteristic feature of an ideologically driven technology is that it is not allowed to fail," Dyson writes. Yet failure is an important part of scientific progress. Albert Einstein once said, "anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." And anyone who recalls the scientific method from high school chemistry or physics should recall that, for an experiment to be scientific, its hypothesis must be ruled out or altered if the results of that experiment prove its predictions wrong.
In fact, according to Thomas S. Kuhn's THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, one of the driving forces behind scientific change is an "apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident." He mentions, among other examples, how Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered x-rays while working with a cathode ray.
Kuhn's book suggests that science does not progress through a steady accumulation of knowledge. Rather, science is composed of extended phases of "normal science" which are periodically disrupted by violent intellectual revolutions -- paradigm shifts -- that alter the course of scientific evolution. He devotes an entire chapter to how an anomaly in normal scientific enterprise leads to the revolutions that inspire the most tumultuous scientific change and discovery.
More than a few have taken issue with Kuhn's interpretation. In IMAGINED WORLDS, Dyson says that STRUCTURE misled a generation into believing that all scientific revolutions are concept-driven. He writes that tool-driven revolutions, such as the advent of the computer in the 1960s, are much more common. Elsewhere, Kuhn has been criticized for his use of the word "paradigm." But, perhaps most of all, scientists have condemned the implication that science itself evolves along similar lines as Darwin's process of natural selection -- an assertion that has allowed theorists in other fields to question the validity of scientific output.
Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist and former colleague of Kuhn, writes that, "Kuhn did not deny that there is progress in science, but he denied that it is progress toward anything." Weinberg concludes that this is "wormwood to scientists, like myself, who think the task of science is to bring us closer and closer to objective truth."
Whether or not science will eventually deliver a unified understanding of the universe is a debate I'll leave to the Kuhns and Weinbergs. Yet the very existence of a dispute over the objective truth of science reveals an uncertainty with how much stock we've come to place on the subject. Look at the hoopla that resulted in 1999 from the very thought of a Millennium Bug in our computers. As we continue to mechanize and build upon our technological empire, the philosophers and sociologists fascinated by STRUCTURE probably experience many of the same feelings as a tourist looking at the Tower in Pisa: wonder at the intricate beauty of what they see; skepticism about going inside and climbing to the top.
-- John Uhl
