The blood suckers on Wall Street are freaking out about a rash of problems with Boeing’s new Dreamliner aircraft. There was a fire in a Japan Airlines Dreamliner yesterday, attributed to wiring in a lithium battery pack.
Electronic problems have cropped up in half a dozen other aircraft in the last week. The media were able to cover up the latter; they did their best to minimize the fire.
This is, of course, terrifying news to Boeing stockholders (great news for Boeing’s competition). The only defense Wall Street could muster was, “Why don’t you try and build a jet from the ground up” amid tepid rhetoric that it’s just teething pains.
I guess none of these people read the New York Times best seller a decade ago, The End of Science. It’s a pretty damning condemnation of science – ten plus years ago!
Basically, every science is now based on statistics. Everything from subatomic physics to spacecraft dynamics to semiconductor junctions. Especially semiconductor junctions because the whole body of solid state physics is hand waving and statistics, with absolutely no foundation in reality.
Ten years ago major electronics companies began beefing up all sensitive electronic devices like those in jet aircraft, adding duplicate and triplicate functions to every vital system. It’s almost a given that the primary systems will experience a glitch during any given flight. Add one backup system and you cut the odds; add two and you cut them a little bit more.
You can’t ever get rid of the gremlins, however. As the software becomes more complicated and the hardware too; well, it’s not comforting that every last bit of that engineering is based on statistical models – averages, norm, probabilities – and the more improbabilities you stack up together in hyper-complicated systems; well, that just increases the probability of system failures.
It’s not just the end of science; it’s the end of technology.
Its apex, at least.
