The tragedy of short-sighted LNP Governments

CSIR Mk1 Computer by CSIRO

Menzies era 'lost a lead in technology'

DON MADDOCKS
The Age
September 8, 1981

The Menzies' Government was responsible for Australia's dependency on imported computer technology, according to the Federal Opposition spokesman on science and technology, Mr Barry Jones.

He said that government made a "conscious political decision not to develop" an Australian computer industry.

Mr Jones made the comments to delegates attending the Institute of Engineers' conference on computers, held in Melbourne last week.

“The tragedy was that short-sightedness by the Menzies' Government (stopped Australia) . . . from taking a leading role in the development of the computer industry," he said.

"Even worse, it has forced Australia into total dependence on overseas computer suppliers, mostly from the United States and Japan."

To make his point, Mr Jones cited import figures: "Australia spends $13.60 on computer imports for every dollar spent locally.

"The next greatest imbalance between imports and local production is in Spain; the equivalent of $5.90 for every dollar."

He warned that even Britain, so often written off in high technology areas, still managed to strike an even balance

And the pity of it all, he said, was that in the 1940s Australia was a pioneer in computer hardware.

"'Australia produced one of the earliest first-generation computers, originally called CSIRO Mark 1 Automatic Computer, and later renamed CSIRAC.

"It was probably the fourth or fifth stored-programme computer in the world."

CSIRAC was designed in 1947 by Maston Beard and Trevor Pearcey, who worked in the CSIRO's radiophysics division in Sydney.

Mr Jones accused the computer industry of preoccupying itself with gadgetry, without thinking about the consequences.

"Your 'gee-whiz' enthusiasm for the hardware produced by your industry is infectious, but you ought to devote a few moments of thought . . . to these questions: Who are the beneficiaries? Who pays the social price?"

He blamed technologists for being more preoccupied with the medium, than the message.

"I would like to think that you purveyors of information technology were interested in information for its own sake; for ideas and concepts which are the substance of the Western intellectual tradition . . . rather than the technology.

"I see no evidence that you are.

And Mr Jones berated them, adding: "Where are the thinkers among you?"

He warned that the control of information technology could divide society into two groups: the "information rich", who would take an active role in dominating the business world, and the "information poor", those who played a passive programmed role. "Australia already has the heaviest concentration of media ownership of any Western nation," Mr Jones said.

"And after the ABC is dismembered, this concentration will grow even tighter."

And apart from the attendant stress induced by the "knowledge explosion" — the inability to keep up with it all — there was little indication that this knowledge was filtering through all sectors of society.

An education study tabled last year, revealed that 49 per cent of 15-year-olds in NSW had a reading comprehension level below the competence "required for a fully literate adult life."

"The possession of a large data base is no guarantee that the quality of public understanding, debate or decision making will be any better," Mr Jones said.

Finally, he warned the engineers that a pre-occupation with the present — in the sense that only the latest information was relevant, and that old data may be misleading — was emotionally destructive.

This attitude disrupted our personal sense of history, damaging both our individual and collective view of life.

Source: The Age, Tuesday 8 September 1981, page 37

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Higgs boson in the history of science

Scientific knowledge has developed over centuries. The journey of discovery includes long periods of experiments and the collecting of careful measurements (empirical data). Every once in a great while important milestones occur when a pattern in this data is recognised.

Identifying chemical compounds, chemical elements and developing processes to separate mixtures of each progressed gradually over centuries. A major milestone was reached in 1869 when Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev proposed a Period of Table of Chemical Elements that fitted the known elements according to patterns of physical properties that many scientists and researchers had discovered and studied.

The Periodic Table of Chemical Elements originally contained gaps that suggested a number of chemical elements may exist and that remained to be discovered.

Periodic Table of Chemical Elements

Another milestone occurred at the dawn of the twentieth century when Marie Curie revealed two revolutionary ideas for which she was awarded Nobel Prizes in Physics and in Chemistry.

"Marie drew the conclusion that the ability to radiate did not depend on the arrangement of the atoms in a molecule, it must be linked to the interior of the atom itself. This discovery was absolutely revolutionary."

"For the first time in history it could be shown that an element could be transmuted into another element, revolutionizing chemistry and signifying a new epoch."

Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. Marie Curie was awarded a second Nobel Prize, in Chemistry, in 1911.

This type of scientific milestone is different in character to the work of Mendeleev. It occurs when completely new and previously unknown features of the natural world are revealed. It built on Mendeleev's work - Marie Curie's insights were gained after she discovered two new chemical elements, polonium and radium and devised techniques to isolate radium in sufficient quantities to study its properties. Polonium is named after her homeland, Poland.

Radium's radioactivity was so great that it could not be ignored. It seemed to contradict the principle of the conservation of energy and therefore forced a reconsideration of the foundations of physics. On the experimental level the discovery of radium provided men like Ernest Rutherford with sources of radioactivity with which they could probe the structure of the atom.

Rutherford conducted experiments with alpha radiation and as a result in 1910  introduced a new model of an atom that contained a minute nucleus possessing almost all the atom's mass.

The first half of the twentieth century was a period of remarkable scientific advances including Niels Bohr's atomic model (1913), Erwin Schrödinger's development of quantum mechanics (1925) and Albert Einstein's theory of mass-energy equivalence (1905) among numerous others.

It was also remarkable for an "embarrassment of riches" of fundamental sub-atomic particles that were discovered. At first each discoverer of a new sub-atomic particle was almost guaranteed a Nobel Prize in Physics. Later, each new discovery was greeted with dismay at the growing complexity of what was originally thought to be a simple quest to identify and characterise a limited number of fundamental particles.

The identification of new sub-atomic particles continued and eventually in the mid 1960s a model to fit all this empirical evidence into a coherent framework was more-or-less settled. This model known as The Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions parallels the breakthrough that Mendeleev's Periodic Table of Chemical Elements achieved in 1869.

The Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions

Like Mendeleev's model of one century earlier, The Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions also identified a number of missing pieces that, if the model was correct, should be able to be found.

Of the missing pieces, the Higgs boson was predicted and its existence was crucial in checking the validity of the Standard Model.

See more information on the hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson at How Stuff Works:

What exactly is the Higgs boson?