Whether it’s designing a supersonic vehicle, helping the blind to see or
creating space history, what can we learn from the great minds behind
these feats?
We will taken you inside the minds of people who are making the impossible
possible. Whether it is designing the fastest ever land vehicle, helping
the blind to see or creating space history, success relies on raising
levels of knowledge to new heights. What can we learn about genius from
these minds? Based on the people and the projects outlined in the
series, we’ve come up with five lessons
Lesson one: New challenges require new ways of thinking
Part car, part jet fighter, part spaceship, Bloodhound SSC
aims to be the first land vehicle to break the 1,000mph barrier. One of
the key challenges has been to design the wheels. How do you create the
fastest wheels in history, make them stable and reliable at supersonic speeds, and with limited resources?
After much deliberation, and devising ideas that pushed the boundaries of material technology, Mark Chapman, chief engineer of the Bloodhound project
said the team decided to take a step back and change the way they were
trying to solve problems. “There’s very little we’ve actually developed
that’s new,” he says, “what’s unique is how we apply technologies.”
They
adopted an approach called the design of experiments – a mathematical
technique of problem solving through doing lots of little experiments
and then looking at the statistics all glued together. “All of a sudden,
where we’d been knocking our head against the wall for maybe two,
three, four months, we came up with a wheel design that would hold
together and was strong enough,” he says.
Lesson two: Let evidence shape your opinion
Like
his peers, geophysicist Steven Jacobsen from Northwestern University
believed that water on Earth originated from comets. But by studying
rocks, which allow scientists to peer back in time, he discovered water
hidden inside ringwoodite, which lies in the Earth’s mantle, and which
suggests that the oceans gradually made its way out of the planet’s interior many centuries ago.
“I had a pretty hard time convincing others,” he admits. Yet two key pieces of evidence uncovered this year
seem to support his point of view. Time will tell whether the new
theories are true, and there may be further twists to the tale. “But
thinking about the fact that you may be the first person to see
something for the first time doesn’t happen very often,” he says. “When
it does it’s thrilling.”
Lesson three: It really is 99% perspiration
Sheila Nirenberg at Cornell University is trying to develop a new prosthetic device for treating blindness. Key to this was cracking the code
that transmits information from the eye to the brain. “Once I realised
this, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep – all I wanted to do was work,”
says Nirenberg.
“Sometimes I’m exhausted and I get burnt out,” she
adds. “But then I get an email from somebody in crisis or somebody
who’s getting macular degeneration, and they can’t see their own
children’s faces, and it is like, ‘How can I possibly complain?’ It
gives me the energy to just go back and keep doing it.”
Lesson four: The answer isn’t always what you expect
Sylvia Earle has spent decades trying to see the ocean with new eyes. Her “dream machine”
is a submarine that could take scientists all the way to the bottom of
the deepest ocean floor. What sort of material could best withstand the
types of pressure you would encounter thousands of feet below the ocean
surface? “It could be steel, it could be titanium, it could be some sort
of ceramic, or some kind of aluminium system,” says Earle. “But glass
is the ultimate material.” By her estimates, a glass sphere about
four-to-six inches (10-15cm) thick should be able safely explore the
ocean depths she dreams of exploring.
Glass is the oldest material known to man and one of the least understood, says Tony Lawson, Earle’s engineering director at Deep Ocean and Exploration Research Marine.
“It has a higgledy-piggledy molecular structure a bit like a liquid,
rather than the ordered lattices often found in other solids. As a
result, when glass is evenly squeezed from all sides – as it would be
under the ocean – the molecules cram closer together and form a tighter
structure.
Lesson five: A little luck goes a long way
It
was hailed as one of the biggest success stories in the history of
space exploration – 20 years of planning ended earlier this year with
the Philae lander rendezvousing with Comet 67P over 300 million miles
(480 million kilometres) away from Earth.
The biggest challenge, says Stephan Ulamec, manager of the Philae lander programme,
was how to design a probe to land on a body whose makeup they had
little knowledge about. “We had no idea of the size, we had no idea of
the day-night cycle, which influences the thermal design, we had no idea
of the gravity, so how fast would the lander impact, we had no idea how
the surface looked,” he says.
They needed to create design
parameters that could cope with an extremely wide range of possible
comet structures – but banked on the comet being a relatively even
potato shape with enough flat surfaces for the probe to land on. Even
then, not everything went to plan, and two decades of meticulous
planning could have failed within minutes at touchdown. Philae's
anchoring harpoons didn't fire as planned, and it bounced off the comet
before settling onto its icy surface and successfully beaming data back
to its relieved creators.
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