Dam busters or bouncing bomb (by metalmelvin)
Have been watching the old film The Dambusters. It reminds me of my senior honours project, one of the physics books that was really useful to me at the time was written by B. N. Wallis….yes *that* Barnes Wallis. My project was more peacefully about modelling golf balls flying through the air and bouncing rather than bouncing bombs but a lot of the physics is almost pure Newtonian Mechanics and Barnes’ book was still one of the main sources of the explanations of how it works.
Unfortunately the consequences of this raid resulted in death both at the targets and some of the bombers. Science can be used for good or bad. Mixed feelings about the morality, I can appreciate how, during wartime, scientists like Barnes Wallis must have thought that their tools would lead to a quicker *end* to the war and ultimately fewer lives lost and the primary target was *things* rather than people but still death resulted. Wonder how that played on his conscience after the events? Oppenheimer (one of the main scientists in developing the first nuclear bombs) said later
”Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
