Promises delivered

The conclusion of The Golem, the first volume in this series, argued that the book had wide significance where science touched on matters of public concern. Here we deliver on that promise.

The chapter on the Challenger explosion shows the way that human error is taken to account for technological failure and shows how unfair it is to assign blame to individuals when the uncertainties are endemic to the system as a whole.

The Challenger enquiry is one case among many that reveals that when the public views the fruits of science from a distance the picture is not just simplified but significantly distorted. Nobel laureate Richard Feynman demonstrated on TV that when a piece of rubber O-ring was placed in a glass of iced water it lost resilience. This was at best trivial – the effect of low temperature on rubberwas alreadywell understood by the engineers. At worst it was a dangerously misleading charade – an acting-out of the most naive model of scientific analysis. The crucial question was not whether low temperature affected the O-rings but whether NASA had reason to believe this would cause them to fail. Feynman gives the impression that doubts can always be simply resolved by a scientist who is smart enough.

The Gulf War

In August 1990 Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. The United States presented Iraq with an ultimatum – ‘withdraw or face a military confrontation’. The Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, responded by threatening to stage ‘The Mother of All Battles’. Over the next four months the United States set about building up military strength in neighbouring Saudi Arabia with the intention of driving Saddam's army from Kuwait. Given Iraq's confrontational stance, this meant building a force capable of destroying all of Iraq's military resources.

Considering the scale of the imminent confrontation, and its distance from the American continent, the United States needed the backing of the United Nations and the military and political cooperation of many nations, notably Iraq's neighbours. A critical feature of this alliance was that a set of Arab states would side with the Western powers’ attack on a fellow Arab state. As the old saying goes, ‘my enemy's enemy is my friend’, and at that time all the Arab states except Egypt had an enemy in common – Israel. On the other hand, America was Israel's staunchest ally, while Iraq was viewed as an important player in the confrontation with Israel. Thus the political alignment that the US needed to hold in place was continually in danger of collapse. It was crucial for American policy in respect of the forthcoming Gulf War that Israel did not take part in the conflict. Should Israel attack Iraq, creating circumstances in which the Arab states would be directly supporting Israel in its attack on an Arab ally in the Middle East conflict, it might become impossible for the other Arab states to continue to support America. Iraq's strategy was clear: they would try to bring Israel into the confrontation that had started with their invasion of Kuwait.

We always remember where we were when we first heard about a momentous event. Those over forty-five years old know what they were doing when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Similarly, anyone who was watching television remembers where they were at 11:38 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on 28 January, 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. The billowing cloud of white smoke laced with twirling loops made by the careering Solid Rocket Boosters proclaimed the death of seven astronauts and the end of the space programmme's ‘can do’ infallibility.

Unlike the inconclusive Warren Commission that inquired into Kennedy's death, the Presidential Commission chaired by William Rogers soon distributed blame. There was no ambivalence in their report. The cause of the accident was a circular seal made of rubber known as an O-ring. The Challenger's Solid Rocket Boosters were made in segments, and the O-rings sealed the gap between them. A seal failed and the escaping exhaust gas became a blow torch which burned through a strut and started a sequence of events which led to the disaster.

Shortly after the Second World War, an engineer from New Zealand, ‘Bill’ Phillips, working at the London School of Economics, built a model of the economy. The marvellous thing about this model was that it ran on water. Phillips's model was a set of tanks, valves, pumps, pipes, baffles and cisterns. If, say, the flow into some cistern increased while the cross section of the output remained the same, the water in the cistern would rise. The new level might increase the flow of water into another cistern, raising its level, or it might be enough to trigger a valve and restrict the flow somewhere else. The whole thing, which stood about seven feet high, weighed a good part of a ton, and was prone to leakage and corrosion, was meant to represent the flows of income around a national economy. Changes of levels were linked by indicators to scales which represented measures of economic performance such as price indices, stocks of money, or Gross National Product. It was even possible to link one of these gurgling monsters to another, thus representing the interaction of two national economies, or the interaction of one economy with the rest of the world. Phillips's hydraulic model of the economy has been restored recently and can be seen at the Science Museum in London.

Nowadays no one would dream of building a model of the economy that ran on water. Nowadays one would use a computer and the relationships would be represented by interacting mathematical equations. Using a computer and equations one can build the equivalent of many more pipes, tanks, and valves than one could ever construct with plumbing. This is what macroeconomic modellers do; they use equations to build a model of the economy. They model not only theoretically derived relationships but quantities based on observations of how this or that change has appeared to affect the economy in the past. Modern models may have hundreds of equations and variables arranged in a big tree-like structure representing everything from world interest rates to levels of business and consumer confidence; the output of some equations will count as variables in other equations, while these effect still other equations and so forth. A modern model rendered hydraulically in the style of Phillips would be big enough to flood the LSE and the surrounding streets.

On 24 April 1984, Margaret Heckler, US Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced with great gusto at a Washington press conference that the cause of AIDS had been found. A special sort of virus – a retrovirus – later labelled as HIV, was the culprit. Vaccinations would be available within two years. Modern medical science had triumphed.

Next summer, movie star Rock Hudson died of AIDS. The gay community had lived and died with the disease for the previous four years. Now that the cause of AIDS had been found and scientists were starting to talk about cures, the afflicted became increasingly anxious as to when such cures would become available. Added urgency arose from the very course of the disease. The HIV blood test meant lots of seemingly healthy people were facing an uncertain future. Was it more beneficial to start long-term therapy immediately or wait until symptoms appeared? Given the rapid advance in medical knowledge about AIDS and the remaining uncertainties (even the cause of AIDS was a matter of scientific debate), was it better to act now with crude therapies or wait for the more refined treatments promised later?

‘Science seems to be either all good or all bad. For some, science is a crusading knight beset by simple-minded mystics while more sinister figures wait to found a new fascism on the victory of ignorance. For others it is science which is the enemy; our gentle planet, our slowly and painfully nurtured sense of right and wrong, our feel for the poetic and the beautiful, are assailed by a technological bureaucracy – the antithesis of culture – controlled by capitalists with no concern but profit. For some, science gives us agricultural self-sufficiency, cures for the crippled, a global network of friends and acquaintances; for others it gives us weapons of war, a school teacher's fiery death as the space shuttle falls from grace, and the silent, deceiving, bone-poisoning, Chernobyl.

Both of these ideas of science are wrong and dangerous. The personality of science is neither that of a chivalrous knight nor pitiless juggernaut. What, then, is science? Science is a golem.

A golem is a creature of Jewish mythology. It is a humanoid made by man from clay and water, with incantations and spells. It is powerful. It grows a little more powerful every day. It will follow orders, do your work, and protect you from the ever threatening enemy. But it is clumsy and dangerous. Without control a golem may destroy its masters with its flailing vigour; it is a lumbering fool who knows neither his own strength nor the extent of his clumsiness and ignorance.

A golem, in the way we intend it, is not an evil creature but it is a little daft. Golem Science is not to be blamed for its mistakes; they are our mistakes. A golem cannot be blamed if it is doing its best. But we must not expect too much. A golem, powerful though it is, is the creature of our art and our craft.’

With the exception of most of Chapter 1 and the whole of Chapter 3, the substantive parts of this book are largely expositions of others’work; in this we follow the pattern of the first volume in the Golem series.Thefull bibliographic references to the works discussed both in this Preface and the other chapters, as well as additional reading, will be found in the Bibliography at the end of the volume.

As for the substantive chapters, Chapter 1 is Collins’s redescription of the argument over the success of the Patriot missile. It is heavily based on the record of a Congressional hearing that took place in April 1992, and on two papers written by principal disputants, Theodore Postol and Robert Stein; it also draws on wider reading. Though this chapter is not a direct exposition of anyone else’s argument, and though it uses a new analytic frame-work turning on different definitions of success, it must be made clear that the account was made possible only because of Postol’s prior work. Also, Postol was extremely generous in supplying Collins with much of the relevant material and drawing his attention to more. Collins has tried to make sure that the account is not unduly influenced by Postol’s views and that the material on which it draws represents the field in a fairway. Itwill be noted that the chapter does not repeat Postol’s expressed position – that no Scud warheads, or almost no Scud warheads, were destroyed by Patriot missiles – but stresses the difficulty of reaching any firm conclusion while keeping open the strong possibility that Postol is right.

These words were uttered in 1984 by the late Sir Walter Marshall, chairman of Britain's then Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). The CEBG used the rail system to transport spent nuclear waste from its generating plants to its reprocessing plants. In spite of the fact that the fuel was contained in strong containers, or flasks, the public was not happy. The CEGB therefore arranged for a diesel train, travelling at a hundred miles per hour, to crash head-on into one of their flasks to show its integrity. Sir Walter's words were spoken to the cameras immediately following the spectacular crash, witnessed by millions of viewers either on live television or on the nation's televized news bulletins. Sir Walter was claiming that the test had shown that nuclear fuel flasks were safe. (The source from which Sir Walter's quotation was taken and of the basic details of the train crash is a video film produced by the CEGB Department of Information and Public Affairs entitled ‘Operation Smash Hit’.)

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union on 26 April 1986 is one of the defining moments of the nuclear age. It is the worst nuclear accident ever: a melt-down of the core of a reactor, followed by an explosion and fire releasing tons of radio-active debris into the atmosphere. The accident not only killed nuclear workers and firemen who fought to save the doomed reactor, but also condemned many others who lived under the path of the fallout to illness and premature death or a life of waiting for a hidden enemy. The weather, no respecter of nation states, carried its deadly passenger far and wide.