A car was still, in some ways, the result of incremental
progression from the horse-drawn carriage. An airplane, and
later a rocket, are less along a line of gradual change, but
still conceptually close to our own practical experience with
flying birds, or with the physics of action and reaction.
Nevertheless, a nuclear reactor is well beyond such experiences.
The conceptual hierarchy it embodies takes it out of the realm of
any previous pragmatic experience. The effort here is to tame
the process, to keep it within a scale that allows for our use
of a new resource of energy. The relation between the sizes
actively involved-nuclear level of matter compared to the
enormous machinery and construction-is not only beyond the power
of distinction of individual minds, but also of any operators,
unless assisted by devices themselves of a high degree of
complexity. The Chernobyl meltdown suggests only the magnitudes
involved, and how peripheral to them are the literacy-based
experiences of energy management.
The enormous satellite and radio-telephonic network, which
physically embodies the once fashionable concept of ether, is
another example of the scale of work under the circumstances of
the new scale of human activity; and so are the telephone
networks-copper, coaxial, or fiberglass. The conceptual
hierarchies handled by such networks of increasingly generalized
communication of voice, data, and images make any comparison to
Edison's telephone, to letters, or to videotapes useless.
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