New Scientist 16th January 1975. Vol 65 No 932
Some issues of New Scientist contain examples of the prevailing zeitgeist that are more redolent than others. Issue 932 contains two interesting insights into science and technology in the U.K. Dr Martin Sherwood’s article Do Graduates need careers? attempts an authoritative overview of the complicated pattern of population growth, university undergraduate growth and economic problems. Set against a background of economic crisis of energy price rises, looming 25% inflation and the culture shock of mass unemployment, the article has tacit assumptions that are different from today.
“With economic darkness heralded daily in the British press, and reinforced by the sound of household-name companies crashing around us, prospects for this year’s science and engineering graduates might seem grim” It should be made clear that what Sherwood meant by “household-names companies” is engineering and manufacturing companies and not retail chains such as Woolworths or British Home Stores. 50 years of progressive de-industrialisation have created a completely different mindset in British culture.
Sherwoods’s discussion of the value of “a year between school and university” is as meaningful today as it was in 1975, but the assumption that a school leaver might experience work related to an intended science or engineering degree by simply stepping into the nearest technology-based company now seems quaint.
Tokamak at the crossroads by Michael Kenward reports on the planning stages of the Joint European Torus (JET) thermonuclear energy project. It is a perennial joke that the generation of electricity by controlled thermonuclear energy is always twenty years in the future and the JET tokamak, although never intended to produce electrical power, has made valuable contributions to the design of later machines over its 40 year operating life. Dr Paul Rebut lead a team of 40 people at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy laboratory at Culham in Cambridgeshire who took 18 months to design the machine. The plan to confine the high temperature plasma to a D-shaped region within a “tight” torus was considered to be advanced at the time. Today the JET project at Culham is being decommissioned, but over the last 50 years it has contributed design ideas to the new ITER project as well as helping to give personal hands-on experience with operating a tokamak.
The Monitor section pf issue 932 reported the imminent launch of the second ERTS satellite. When the programme of Earth Resources Technology Satellites (ERTS) started 50 years ago it was uncertain as to how much information to support agriculture, hydrology and land use planning could be gained from automatic satellites. “Judging from reports to date, Earth resources space technology is very much in its infancy, at the stage where people are still finding out what you can see from space by electronic imaging (space photographs have substantially better resolution but require manned spacecraft for their realisation).”
ERTS 2 used a pioneering multispectral scanner which used a moving mirror to sweep a path 920 kilometres wide as it orbited every 103 minutes. The satellite also had three vidicon cameras(red, green and blue), developed from the imaging systems used on earlier mariner probes to Mars.
The tentative first steps with the ERTS satellites have evolved into a whole fleet of Landsat surveillance platforms which now monitor the Earth day and night. In the last 50 years the emphasis has shifted from supporting agriculture, oil exploration and mining towards environmental protection and measuring the effects of climate change.
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