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Einstein and Millikan should have done a Kurzweil

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Over on facebook, Shane Legg writes, (regarding my previous post):

Some nice quotes I hadn't seen before. So what's best hypothesis we can draw from this? It seems like most people take the last few data points and then just extrapolate linearly to predict the future.

The key quotes here are:

There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.

(Robert Millikan, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, 1923.)

No “scientific bad boy” ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy.

(Robert Millikan again)

There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

(Albert Einstein, 1932.)


The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

(Ernest Rutherford, 1917.)

Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explosives, but it is unlikely to produce anything very much more dangerous.

(Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, then soon-to-be British Prime Minister, 1939.)

That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done [research on]... The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.

(Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Admiral working in the U.S. Atomic Bomb Project)

What made these smart people make false statments? (Einstein's statement is not technically false - but it certainly shows that one of the smartest minds ever to exist can make huge blunders. The tone of the quote - and the likely interpretation of it by lay people listening - is "this technology won't work, ever") Perhaps their mistakes are forgivable - there is a difference between being rational and being omniscient, after all.

But consider, for example, Einstein's quote from 1932. Rutherford had split the atom back in 1917, but it was done using a particle beam, and this method clearly didn't allow arbitrarily large numbers of atoms to be split. But does "The existing method doesn't scale" legitimize the jump to "There is not the slightest indication that it will ever be obtainable"?. Surely Einstein, if questioned, would have said something like:

"maybe there is some more efficient way of doing it that I haven't yet thought of, and the fact that it can be done at all does count as an indication that it might be possible to do it better, especially if we are in the business of making predictions about the entire technological future of mankind".

But he did not say this. One good explanation for why people like Einstein, Rutherford and Millikan wrote the bomb off for no good reason is that they were following what we might call the absurdity heuristic: if a hypothesis you come up with seems sufficiently absurd on a "gut instinct" level, reject it no matter what the evidence says.
But, if Einstein et al had considered the history of high-energy weapons up to the day they made those predictions (circa 1932), they would have seen something like this:
Weapon Energy (Joules) over time

Predicting that the energy of the most powerful kind of weapon in the world will not increase is a predictive strategy that would have made bad predictions again and again; there appear to have been 5 "paradigms" of weapon development: the ballista (not shown) around the time of the romans and greeks, the (re)invention of the trebuchet around 1200-1400, the invention of gunpowder based siege weapons circa 1600, the development of explosive shells in 1722 (culminating in the 70,000,000 Joule Paris Gun used by the germans to shell Paris in 1914-18), and finally the development of heavy bomber aircraft - which allowed the British Handley-Page bomber to drop a massive 1,650 pound (600kg) bomb on the Germans in 1918, which had an energy of roughly 3 billion Joules.

If Einstein, Millikan, etc had looked at the historical data in a Kurzweilian way, they might have thought to themselves:

"Weapon energy seems to increase in paradigms, with each paradigm shift increasing the energy by a greater multiple: 30,000, 130,000, 10,000,000, 30,000,000,000 . The next term in the sequence ought to be about 4 orders of magnitude larger than the heavy chemical bomb - or about 3*10^14 Joules per bomb. Nuclear bombs have roughly this energy - perhaps we shouldn't write them off as impossible just because our imagination is failing to see a way to make them work right now?"

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