Progress Is in the Eye of the Beholder
It was on the front page of the newspaper the other day: U.S. scientists at IBM have achieved a breakthrough that increases “the current-carrying capacity of a new family of superconductors by 100-fold.” This advance will revolutionize the already revolutionized computerized world of science.
Undreamed of medical progress is expected to be a result of the new findings. Computers will be able to transcend their already inconceivable boundaries of electronic wisdom and their speed will be vastly increased. The brittle new superconductors can be fashioned into wires that are flexible enough to be wound into coils. These superconductors can be used to make feasible magnetically levitated trains “that would glide smoothly over superconducting roadbeds.” The ramifications of the discovery are only beginning to be fathomed.
The United States is especially proud, we are told, because its scientists have been “first” in an international race to penetrate this barrier to widespread use of the potentially revolutionary materials.
This truly is the stuff of which progress is made, but isn’t progress, like so many things, relative? While scientists from every nation seemed absorbed with finding the solution to this problem, researchers from some nations had other, more mundane priorities for progress.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in “Alice in Wonderland,” “It means just what I choose it to mean. . . .” Indeed. Can’t “progress” mean what one wants it to mean?
Recently in India progress has taken a giant step forward, too. (You didn’t see it? It was in all the papers--in India.)
The revolutionary advance was the ALCART by the Indian Aluminium Company Ltd. (INDAL)--an all-aluminum cart to replace the age-old wooden vehicles that Indian bullocks pull to haul all sorts of goods to and from market, and also for every other kind of transport imaginable in the vast Indian countryside.
Carts pulled by ambling bullocks--big, strong, good-natured creatures that closely resemble bulls--are omnipresent throughout India and they are slower than snails. In the narrow streets of Agra, Aurangabad, and other Indian cities and towns, bullock cart gridlock is a maddening fact of life.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was the catalyst in bringing about the development of the ALCART, according to news reports. He urged INDAL researchers to develop a cart that would dispense with the traditional heavier wooden models and yet be affordable to the average peasant.
The effort has been lauded by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals because the new carts are approximately one-fourth the weight of the old ones.
Environmentalists applaud the ALCART because each one will allow one medium-sized tree to live that otherwise would have been felled to build a traditional wooden cart. It takes about 1,100 pounds of wood to make a traditional wood bullock cart, and there are roughly 15 million such carts in use in India today!
It should be noted that a fiberglass bullock cart recently was introduced in India, too, with many of the same advantages as the aluminum models. There are billboards advertising the fiberglass carts. Probably one day there will be a fiberglass/aluminum confrontation in bullock cart technology, but so far the two sides appear content to accept their laurels as they come.
I would bet a bundle that the Indians are a hell of a lot more excited about an all-aluminum bullock cart than they are about a better supercomputer chip. There have been all-wood bullock carts in existence almost since the invention of the wheel; it’s about time for a change.
Progress is what you want it to be.
