mandarine

I work in the aerospace industry. A domain where the best happened between 1950 and 1980. Mainly for bad reasons, among which an ambition to send a hydrogen bomb through or above the atmosphere over to the other side of the world was probably chief, the best scientists and engineers ever to work together did Sputnik, the SR-70, the Apollo programme, the Pioneer probes, the Jumbo Jet, the space shuttle, the Soyuz and Energiya launchers, the Buran space plane, the Concorde, the Airbus.

Nowadays, mainly for bad reasons involving big money and the wish to patent nature before understanding it, the best have gone elsewhere and are pioneering molecular biology and genetics. I would like to testify and share the esteem that I feel towards the people that came before, and to dislodge any belief that we are any smarter than they were.

There are many elements that explain why we are so often lured into believing that what we do is superior to what people did before:

• we know what it took lifetimes for them to find out, and we consider it obvious,
• we are more and we can communicate more,
• we have computers doing the tedious stuff for us,
• our dead predecessors look terribly out-of-fashion with their ridiculous outfits on black-and-white photographs, and those who are still alive are bordering on senility.

Science and technology, especially in fast-growing pioneering directions where progress seems unabatedly exponential, is a place where it is easy to build up on past work, make things ever better, and take all the credit. Language and literature is not. I cannot say: let me take Cervantes’ work for granted, correct some mistakes, apply the scenario of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, mix it with a little Hemingway and one chapter from Flaubert, add a wee idea of mine, and I write the best novel ever. Reading classics and working on classic technology is an immensely humbling experience, and in the meantime an immensely rewarding one, as I am constantly confronted with the best there ever was: elegant concepts, efficient designs, beautiful language, powerful insight. Sometimes, there is nothing left for me to improve. But there is pleasure in just repeating what the elders did, there is dizziness in simply ackowledging that I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

As a lighter tribute to said giants, let me quote Jerome K Jerome who could not have described better how our automobile skews our personality, half a century before driving would become a way of life:

I don’t know why it should be, but everybody is always so exceptionally irritable on the river. Little mishaps, that you would hardly notice on dry land, drive you nearly frantic with rage, when they occur on the water. When Harris or George makes an ass of himself on dry land, I smile indulgently; when they behave in a chuckle-head way on the river, I use the most blood-curdling language to them. When another boat gets in my way, I feel I want to take an oar and kill all the people in it.

The mildest tempered people, when on land, become violent and blood-thirsty when in a boat. I did a little boating once with a young lady. She was naturally of the sweetest and gentlest disposition imaginable, but on the river it was quite awful to hear her.

“Oh, drat the man!” she would exclaim, when some unfortunate sculler would get in her way; “why don’t he look where he’s going?”

And, “Oh, bother the silly old thing!” she would say indignantly, when the sail would not go up properly. And she would catch hold of it, and shake it quite brutally.

Yet, as I have said, when on shore she was kind-hearted and amiable enough.

The air of the river has a demoralising effect upon one’s temper, and this it is, I suppose, which causes even barge men to be sometimes rude to one another, and to use language which, no doubt, in their calmer moments they regret.

Read on

The deceptive notion of technical progress
The rhino analogy

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