This part stands on its own and applies to everything, as well-learned lessons that felt instinctively & universally American to anyone born in the decade after the war:
>Because the field was so new, using only recently-discovered natural phenomena that were poorly understood, a great deal of effort was needed to resolve this uncertainty along numerous technological axes. Thus the Manhattan Project involved a large amount of trial and error experimentation, and of pursuing multiple paths of technological development —
>It’s this last difficulty that is most relevant for other technological development projects. Developing other technologies doesn’t necessarily require building enormous, industrial scale industrial facilities to even begin, and doesn’t necessarily require rapidly proceeding before the proper information and supporting technologies are available. But it will almost certainly require investigating various promising paths of development, partially-informed groping around until the right combination of methods and components is discovered. Indeed, this sort of exploration is the very essence of technological development.
>resolving this uncertainty, and figuring out what a technology should actually be, is hard. The Manhattan Project had some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the world working on it, but even with this collective brainpower it was far from clear what the best route to the bomb was.
>Not all technologies will require expensive physical facilities to produce, or require extremely rapid, expensive development. But resolving the uncertainty inherent in a new technology — figuring out what, exactly, the arrangement of phenomena needs to be to achieve some goal, and how that arrangement can be achieved — is part of the fundamental nature of creating a new technology.
Never thought this kind of approach would be allowed to fade so far from what it once was. Almost nobody is even trying to carry the torch any more.
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