3 ms·
its a bit of an over used trope in fiction to me that if you kill the one person inventing a thing you stop it. think t2 and the chip. most major discoveries i
by grogenaut 5y ago
its a bit of an over used trope in fiction to me that if you kill the one person inventing a thing you stop it. think t2 and the chip. most major discoveries i have heard of in important areas had multiple people running neck amd neck.
when it comes to rebuilding a thing, i think whats important to wonder is would you even build it the same way? I remember seeing an article on ars about the engines for the Saturn 5. They took over a thousand hours of weld time at a level of skill and quantity that was built up during that time period. And they got them working via experimentation. Building the now was done differently. They 3d scanned the parts and used modern additive and cnc machining and used way less welds (one can argue additive metal is just cnc welding but I digress). And then simulated it in the computer. I remember a discussion about the baffles in the nozzle to stop pulsing in the combustion, that was figured out in destructive trials of this incredibly difficult machine. You'd do that in simulation now.
I likely got details wrong.
But it's to say that part of "they don't build em like they used to" also means "they learned". Look at bridges, they don't look like Brooklyn or Eads anymore. They used to build them with waaay too much steel.
That said roman concrete is a thing they've been chasing for a while
- hotpotamus 5y agoIf you ever watch the documentary "Connections" by James Burke, you get the impression basically all inventions are caused by the circumstances where two realms of science meet up in a new way to solve a problem, and that the people involved are a detail of passing importance.
- valarauko 5y ago> That said roman concrete is a thing they've been chasing for a while Roman concrete isn't some magical substance that we're hoping to replicate - we already know how it works - it just would really suck for the type of building projects we have now.
- grogenaut 5y agoAah, I thought we were trying to replicate it or one of it's properties still, maybe in the context of modern concrete. Would love to know more.
- valarauko 5y agoUnfortunately a lot of the discussion online regarding Roman concrete veers uncomfortably into a rather, shall we say, "supremacist" angle. For a level discussion about Roman concrete, I found this to a nice place to start. http://engineeringrome.org/understanding-roman-concrete/#Ancient%20Roman%20Concrete http://engineeringrome.org/understanding-roman-concrete/#Anc...
- elihu 5y agoIn my (probably flawed) understanding, I think the drawbacks of Roman concrete in a modern setting is that it takes a really long time to cure (like a year or so) and it uses salt water, which would not interact well with regular steel rebar.