Add new comment

Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
      Dr. Adam Luft is a senior weapons designer at Los Alamos who is sympathetic to the young designers. The new design process forces them to fly blind. They cannot physically test the weapons they design and the virtual reality systems they do use have complex computer code that is difficult for them to access. Luft says that he can only be confident of his research results if he can dive into the computer code of the simulation he is using. He is concerned because he finds his work environment to be evolving in complexity which makes it hard to work on the underlying code. If there are problems in a simulation, he likes to be able to delve into the simulation and test different parts of the code. He is wary of trusting design changes in weapons if he did not personally write the code that is used in simulation. He is worried that if scientists no longer understand the working of their software tools, they lose the basis of their trust in the results of their tests.
     Across scientific disciplines, successful simulations give the researchers confidences that their tools are working correctly. Critics are worried that the designers are not concerned about whether they wrote the simulation code or have even seen it. One of the senior weapons designers at Los Alamos said, “[They are] good at using these codes, but they know the guts a lot less than they should. The older generation… all did write a code from scratch. The younger generation didn’t write their code. They grabbed it from somebody else and they made some modifications, but they didn’t understand every piece of the code. You can’t throw away things too early. There is something you can get from [the legacy codes] that will help you understand the new codes.”
      Seymour Sack was a well-known and respected weapons designer at Livermore who resigned in 2005. His colleagues discussed his impending departure at an MIT workshop. They knew that he had a lot of knowledge of nuclear weapons design which had not been written down and only existed in his head. They were worried that important information on nuclear weapons would be lost to the laboratory when he resigned. Hugh Gusterson was attending the MIT workshop. He was an anthropologist who had published a paper about growing complication in the science as well as loss of important knowledge across three generations of nuclear research. One of the other attendees told Gusterson, “He has such a great memory that he hasn’t written down lots of important stuff. How will people know it?” The response of the workshop to their concerns about the loss of important scientific knowledge held by Sack was to videotape him and other retiring scientists and make the videos available to those still working at the laboratory.
Please read Part 3 next