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Technology, useful for the US military and also useful later for US civilians? Are there any examples? (1) US Research Universities. For nearly all the US re

Technology, useful for the US military and also useful later for US civilians? Are there any examples? (1) US Research Universities. For nearly all the US research universities, a huge fraction of their annual budgets comes from Federally funded research grants via the National Science Foundation (NSF), but, trust me on this, passes Congress and gets signed by the POTUS heavily for US national security, i.e., the US military. As a result, the teaching is heavily supported by that funding. Else college would cost much more. Yes, not all the Federal funding is so closely tied to the US military: Since the Members of Congress also like progress in medicine, there is also a lot of funding via the National Institutes of Health for bio-medical research and, thus, support for the research-teaching hospitals. (2) GPS. The Global Positioning System (GPS), now heavily used for non-military purposes, was done by the US Air Force (USAF) and built on the work of the earlier system for the US Navy. GPS has been terrific for the US military. (3) Aircraft Engines. Aircraft engine development got a big push during WWI and then again during WWII. By the end of WWII, the best piston aircraft engines were mechanical marvels. But near the end of WWII, both the Germans and the British saw that just for military purposes jet engines would be much better. And the US saw the same: GE had been making turbines for supercharging the piston engines so with their turbine experience moved to make some of the best jet engines. With an aircraft engine, we use energy from the fuel to generate gas pressure to push mass out the back of the engine. Then the momentem of that mass (momentum is mass m times velocity v) provides force to propel the plane. But the mass moves out with kinetic energy (1/2)mv^2. So, we want to pick a pair, mass m and velocity v, to maximize the momentum for the given energy. Since in energy we pay for velocity v with v^2 but mass m with just m, we should pick the pair to have mass m large and velocity v small. So, going out the back of the engine (from a propeller or a jet) we want lots of mass moving slowly, not a small mass moving quickly. So, the US military saw this point for, e.g., their big cargo plane the C5A and developed "high bypass jet engines" where the turbine at the back of the engine drives a shaft to drive the compressor but also is used to drive a huge fan at the front of the engine that acts as a propeller in a duct to move huge amounts of cool air around, past (bypass), the engine and out the back. Now essentially all large commercial aircraft have high bypass jet engines -- the cost of jet fuel makes this crucial. Actually a little before the high bypass development, could also get some of the same benefits with just an aft fan: So, mount a fan, turbine, on the back of the engine. Have the fan blades relatively long so that they extend pass the flow of the hot gas from burning the fuel. Then the hot gas turns the fan and the extended parts of the fan blades push cold air out the back. A GE engine did that early on; the French Dassault FanJet Falcon DA-20 used two of those aft fan engines; and FedEx started with 33 of those planes modified for cargo. So, net, the jet engines used in commercial airplanes were heavily developed by the US military. (4) Digital Computers. So, sure, digital computers got developed in WWII for calculating artillery tables, etc. And after the war the US military was a big customer of digital computers and pushed the computer companies -- IBM, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Univac, Control Data, Systems Engineering Laboratories, etc. -- hard for more powerful computers. (5) Atomic Power. We have atomic power for the electric grid and applied nuclear physics more generally due mostly to developments paid for by the US military. Then it is common for the electronics on spacecraft -- often for science and not specifically for the military -- to be powered by nuclear power. (6) Radar. Commercial aviation is massively dependent on radar, and the first developments were for military purposes. (7) The Hubble Telescope. We can regard the Hubble telescope as used heavily for non-military science, but in simple terms the Hubble was a US military Keyhole surveillance telescope (supposedly can read car license plate numbers from orbit) but aimed away from the earth. (8) Rockets. Rockets are crucial for getting spacecraft into orbit (around the earth, the sun, Mars, etc.) or at escape velocity from the earth, and of course most of rocket development was for military purposes. (9) Optimization. Optimization, e.g., linear and non-linear programming, grew out of WWII military logistics efforts by G. Dantzig and others. Then asking for whole number solutions led us to the research on computational complexity and one of the most important research problems today, the question of P versus NP. (10) The Internet. Early on the Internet was ARPA-Net, funded by ARPA, the US military's Advanced Research Projects Agency. (11) The Interstate Highways. Early on President Eisenhower wanted the Interstate highways as a big contribution to US military logistics, that is, moving supplies and equipment.

enriquec 6y ago
as usual, attributing taxed funds to the government, attributing discoveries/development to that funding and assuming it would otherwise not exist, and ignoring completely the concepts of opportunity cost, waste, or fraud. Typical blind government praise riddled with misinformation, meaningless platitutdes, and logical falacies.
- graycat 6y ago
  > as usual, attributing taxed funds to the government, attributing discoveries/development to that funding and assuming it would otherwise not exist, We credit Newton, but we don't claim that without Newton we wouldn't have force equals mass time acceleration, the law of gravity, what he did with optics, etc. We credit Einstein for the photo electric effect, Brownian motion as evidence for rapidly moving molecules, special relativity, and general relativity, but we don't claim that without Einstein we would not have those results. Actually, the transformation between coordinate systems in special relativity was from before Einstein, and Poincare had a shot at doing general relativity. It goes on this way: Generally we credit the first or most successful, etc. without saying that otherwise we wouldn't have the results. Or, we are grateful for the results when we get them, know that we've got them, and are not at all sure that we would get the results soon from other sources later. Point: It is appropriate to credit the US military for the 11 examples I gave. But for more, some of those military projects were big bucks efforts, and non-military funding sources would have been tough to find. So for those projects, we would have to have waited longer and might still be waiting. For more, the Internet with TCP/IP was not nearly the first digital communications network or even the first nationwide network. E.g., for a nationwide network, IBM had SNA (Systems Network Architecture) and used it to connect all the airports to a central reservation computer. But compared with TCP/IP, SNA was clumsy -- no way could it do much of what TCP/IP is doing now. > misinformation, meaningless platitutdes, and logical falacies. Examples?

enriquec 6y ago

as usual, attributing taxed funds to the government, attributing discoveries/development to that funding and assuming it would otherwise not exist, and ignoring completely the concepts of opportunity cost, waste, or fraud. Typical blind government praise riddled with misinformation, meaningless platitutdes, and logical falacies.

graycat 6y ago
> as usual, attributing taxed funds to the government, attributing discoveries/development to that funding and assuming it would otherwise not exist, We credit Newton, but we don't claim that without Newton we wouldn't have force equals mass time acceleration, the law of gravity, what he did with optics, etc. We credit Einstein for the photo electric effect, Brownian motion as evidence for rapidly moving molecules, special relativity, and general relativity, but we don't claim that without Einstein we would not have those results. Actually, the transformation between coordinate systems in special relativity was from before Einstein, and Poincare had a shot at doing general relativity. It goes on this way: Generally we credit the first or most successful, etc. without saying that otherwise we wouldn't have the results. Or, we are grateful for the results when we get them, know that we've got them, and are not at all sure that we would get the results soon from other sources later. Point: It is appropriate to credit the US military for the 11 examples I gave. But for more, some of those military projects were big bucks efforts, and non-military funding sources would have been tough to find. So for those projects, we would have to have waited longer and might still be waiting. For more, the Internet with TCP/IP was not nearly the first digital communications network or even the first nationwide network. E.g., for a nationwide network, IBM had SNA (Systems Network Architecture) and used it to connect all the airports to a central reservation computer. But compared with TCP/IP, SNA was clumsy -- no way could it do much of what TCP/IP is doing now. > misinformation, meaningless platitutdes, and logical falacies. Examples?