New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 02:41pm Oct 19, 2003 EST (# 15236 of 15240)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Lchic has asked me to set out a blow by blow of my experiences - and it seems a good idea - but a bad one at the same time. Part of the problem has to do with figuring out what happened. I recall the very good-bad advice from Robert Frost:

Never ask of money spent.

Where the spender thinks it went.

Nobody was ever meant

To remember or invent

What they did with every cent.

You can't account for everything - even when you "must." I'm writing this, in part, intending to use it as part of a workable closure between me and the New York Times.

I was commandeered by Eisenhower 13575 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.a6aGbSx3PN9.3524776@.f28e622/15268 , and a central reason that I was is that Eisenhower and people around him knew that they had technical and logical problems with their ability to make good decisions.

Eisenhower and people around him were intensely interested in these issues - and they thought a smart, expendible kid might make some headway on their problems. I was expendible and of low rank - and knew that. The problems I was given were important - as far as I was concerned, mostly because I trusted the judgements of people asking me to work on them. Many of the problems were very specialized, nutsy boltsy, and technical ( for a list of problems "on my plate" as of 1970 - see 15010 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.a6aGbSx3PN9.3524776@.f28e622/16721 ) .

My background was unconventional - my supervision was unconventional - I was a "human guinea pig" who was (and was expected to ) manipulate other people ( as Eisenhower felt people with power naturally had to do. ) - but the work was subordinated to national interests as I understood them - and I felt proud, for all the awkwardness - of what I was doing. 2116 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.a6aGbSx3PN9.3524776@.f28e622/2621 fits here - it deals with the AEA project - and about my neural and medical problems. It includes a statement that is right - but incomplete in details that make sense to add now.

My nervous breakdown. : I had been trained to identify and solve differential equations, and sometimes simple systems of them, using the power series method (as described in Kreyzsig's Advanced Engineering Mathematics and many other texts.) I did these computations in my head - and spent much of my time doing so. This was arduous, and involved a lot of concentration. I overdid it, at a time when I believed the solution of the "hidden problem" above was cracking "before my eyes" - when I'd been told that, on delivery of that solution, AEA investors would be made whole, and AEA would be funded for success by the government.

I broke down twice explicitly working on the "hidden problem" - in 1984 and 1986 - my last conversation with Casey was in 1986 - and at that time Casey told me to try to come in with solutions, if I could get them, through academic channels, and, failing that, through the good offices of the New York Times - which would know enough, he felt, in a case like mine - to sort things out in the public interest.

Casey believed, or told me he believed, that I would be fairly accomodated - and promises he'd made about the AEA investors would be kept. I was to deal with them face to face.

I broke down once later, in 1988, when I was in a coma for close to a week, and emerged with problems at the level of reading letters and using English - and significant losses in my mathematical competence.

I put myself together as best I could thereafter - doing the math in http://www.mrshowalter.net/pap2/ - in 1988-89 - passed the Professional Engineering exam in Mechanical Engineering in 1989 - enrolled in the UW School of Education as soon as I could function at all by classroom standards - and resumed work with S.J. Kline by 1989 http://www.mrshowalter.net/klinerec/ . . . http://www.mrs/

rshow55 - 02:44pm Oct 19, 2003 EST (# 15237 of 15240)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

I resumed work with S.J. Kline by 1989 http://www.mrshowalter.net/klinerec/ . . . http://www.mrshowalter.net/klineul/ .

Kline and I, working together, broke the hidden problem - finding a "concrete bridge to the abstraction of mathematics" in 1989 - and worked very hard, together from that time until Steve died in 1997. - and I've worked hard since - often with help from ( but incapacitation by) people who have been closely associated with the New York Times.

(3 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense