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Every part of the innovation chain has understanding of the difficulty of their own link. Without every link, it doesn't work.

Consider the SR-71: Is it the pilots, the crews, the administrators who secure funding, the voters, the integrating engineers, the test pilots, the supply chain, the metallurgists, the engine designers, the manufacturers of test equipment, the standards bureau, the aircraft architect, the people who specified the initial requirements, the tire manufacturers, the refueling crews, the avionics manufacturers, the chemical suppliers for the bespoke starting fuel, the aerospace engineers who did the fundamental research, Chuck Yeager, the Wright Brothers, Bernoulli, the thousands of spouses who sacrificed to support their partners, or the fundamental researchers who ascertained the physics necessary to make the aircraft fly and evade detection?

Every one of them, and more, can lay claim to the statement: If we hadn't done what we did, the SR-71 wouldn't have flown.

I'm a fundamental physicist who has spent the entirety of this century trying to get at the bottom of things because it is the foundation upon which our understanding rests. When we make a measurement, however, even those experiments rest upon work and resources provided by a vast array of engineers, suppliers, manufacturers, administrators, support staff, physical plant, custodial support, funding agencies, and taxpayers.

As much as I appreciate what you're saying, the answer to your question is

> the aircraft architect

because that's the guy who really built it. He could not have done it alone or without the help of everyone you mentioned, but let's not pretend like everyone was equally important here.

As a tangent, this is one of my favorite books detailing the creation of some of Skunkworks' projects, including the SR-71:

https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...

> let's not pretend like everyone was equally important here.

Except that's completely wrong. An architect did not build the SR-71. Physical engineering involves a feedback cycle and iterative design refinements, just like software engineering.

I don't think it's common from some architect to just draw a blueprint, hand it off to some people to build it, and that's it, we're done here, my design came to life thanks to my Godly design skills (and the simple work of 40 lowly engineers). The SR-71 is a project that took years and years of work, lots of failed attempts, experiments and lessons learned. There's no way that the majority of the credit for the SR-71 goes to some bossman architect dude who just told people what to do. It was very much teamwork. Everyone, including the test pilots, participated in its design and refinement.

It was definitely team work. But the question comes down to being replaceable - could anyone replace Kelly Johnson and still create the SR-71? I don't know. I'm not even sure Ben Rich would have succeeded. But I'm confident not every single other person mentioned was irreplaceable. In fact I'd venture 99% of those people could be replaced.

Likewise, it takes thousands of engineers to operate Google right now. But do you really think most of those engineers are irreplaceable? Meanwhile good luck finding replacements for Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemewat.

This notion that everybody is equally talented/important is absurd. And the idea that you can always make up for a lack of talent with hard work is pretty obviously debunked if you take even a passing glance at competitive sports.

I'm not saying a single person can do everything without help. I'm saying a single person can have talent that you could never hope to have, no matter how hard you try, and that's just the way it is. And because of that talent, those people are more important when it comes to getting shit done.

I find it bizarre, but if you point to an athlete who is world class, many will acknowledge that yes, that person has unique skills and abilities.

Point to the mind, and suddenly everyone is equal.

> Point to the mind, and suddenly everyone is equal

Not equal. Sufficient.

Athletics are entertainment. Entertainers are usually not fungible. Contrast that with jobs demanding physical work.

Denying that some people are more replaceable than others for a given task done to a certain tolerance is a significant self kneecap. It blinds you to power structures and leverage dynamics. It also makes several simplifying paradigms inaccessible.

> It blinds you to power structures and leverage dynamics. It also makes several simplifying paradigms inaccessible.

Are you able to reference any material which explorer these concepts more in depth? These are incredibly resonating ideas.

Ronald Burt’s Structural Holes [1]. It’s a bit formal for my MBA friends. But gives you a basic model to string intuition on.

Slightly more fun, but still based on serious research: The Dictator’s Handbook [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_holes

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook

It may be the case that 99% of the people some way involved in the completion of the SR-71 were replaceable but that still leaves a significant number of people besides Kelly Johnson.

But on the other hand a superstar can also suck all the air out of the room, such that other potential talented people won't have the opportunities to refine their talents.

Everything is measured by if he can deliver. A superstar with leadership skills is arguably a better superstar.

You can also have asshole superstar who just needs other people for dumb labor. And who can micromanage them to project success.

That is pretty obviously only a local optimum.

Did the SR-71 evade detection? I was under the (perhaps wrongful) impression that it just outran the consequences of detection.

That's pretty much it. The standard countermeasure for launch detection was simply to accelerate and outrun the missile. It had some early stealth attributes but could still be detected by the systems of the time.

What "early stealth" did it have? The most I've heard from pilots is that they didn't use an airborne radar and didn't use the VHF radio on the plane under any circumstance. Even on the runway, it was forbidden. Those things have nothing to do with stealth and everything to do with basic signals intelligence stuff.

According to wikipedia [0]

> The second operational aircraft[40] designed around a stealth aircraft shape and materials, after the Lockheed A-12,[40] the SR-71 had several features designed to reduce its radar signature. The SR-71 had a radar cross-section (RCS) around 110 sq ft (10 m2).[41] Drawing on early studies in radar stealth technology, which indicated that a shape with flattened, tapering sides would reflect most energy away from a radar beam's place of origin, engineers added chines and canted the vertical control surfaces inward. Special radar-absorbing materials were incorporated into sawtooth-shaped sections of the aircraft's skin. Cesium-based fuel additives were used to somewhat reduce exhaust plumes visibility to radar, although exhaust streams remained quite apparent. Kelly Johnson later conceded that Soviet radar technology advanced faster than the stealth technology employed against it.[42]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#Shape...

> Cesium-based fuel additives

Oh god, I never thought about all the awful additives militaries must add to their fuels and lubricants and other industrial chemicals.

Go read up on zip fuels if you want to learn about truly strange stuff. Those were just tested however, never actually used for production aircraft.

It's stealth was fairly advanced for the time. It was a bit of both.

I was under the impression it flew too high to be reached by surface to air missiles.

I think your take on it seems fine. The researchers did the poc, later it goes mainstream. The researcher should not care or be interested in the mainstream practical application anymore, they should be on to the next thing.

It's not just that though. It's also risk aversion. If you're optimizing for numbers of papers published, and you're optimizing for your confidence that your next paper is going to be accepted, it leads to redundant and uninteresting research.

The research world, just like every other social circle, is full of people who are just parroting each other, repeating to each other what everyone already believes, and patting themselves on the back. Maybe, once in a while, one person takes a risk, gets a cool result, and then 100 others rehash the same idea with small variations. At some point, the field collectively decides what the next cool research meme is going to be, and everybody follows along.

So yeah, structural battery packs stopped being cool at some point, I guess. Except that battery tech 10 years ago wasn't the same as what we have today, so maybe the results don't directly transfer. The topic hasn't been studied in a contemporary context, maybe the old results are out of date, maybe they would really be worth investigating again... But who cares, that topic has been done, it isn't cool anymore, it was 10 years ago. All the cool kids are doing solid state batteries nowadays.

> The research world, just like every other social circle, is full of people who are just parroting each other, repeating to each other what everyone already believes, and patting themselves on the back.

I'd be curious to know what your experience is that leads you to this opinion.

A more charitable explanation would be that game changing discoveries are by their nature rare, and even when they do arrive, they only outline a new space for exploration, which means that by definition, most research is going to be filling the gaps in that new space, both for positive results, and the depressingly large chunk of work that is discovering what doesn't work. The results of this negative outcome often look the same.

I'm not sure which field you're in, but at least in electrical engineering, the situation is very different from your description. EE academics are deeply enmeshed in real-world problems, and justifying real-world impact in publications is considered more or less essential. This is also enforced by the bottomline: a lot of research is sponsored by industrial consortia or even individual companies (Intel, Microsoft, etc). Furthermore, many though not all academics at some point spin off some part of their research into commercial ventures, and for some that even becomes their primary concern.

I'm on the CS side. Was surrounded by people who love math but seem to believe that programming code is somehow dirty and less worthy than equations. The difference is probably that EE academics have an engineering background (are engineers themselves)?

A more apt comparison might be CS and physics?

I'm currently seeing mechanical and materials engineers who have just discovered computers and are planning to do fundamental research on data modelling. They ignore existing international standards that deal with the area since they are not new enough.

I think that EE has always been more connected to industry.

I think the publish/perish culture has pushed academics closer to industrial research horizons than they were in the past. This leaves a few fields in an awkward state where academics are just credentialed junior engineers/practitioners struggling to differentiate their skills and activities from every one else.

The rule in academia is "publish or perish". So the publication focused scientists are only doing what they have to.

Yeah, but I think the problem is that you get a lot of "scientists" who are only optimizing to game the system and maximize the publication count. It leads to most of the published work following very safe and boring research directions that everybody else is already working on. There is less scientific progress as a result. Contributing something that is useful and novel is often not rewarded. Risking yourself exploring a new branch of your field is very dangerous for your career. In my own biased opinion, about 90-95% of published papers are contributing nothing new to the field.

Just to be clear, I agree with all that.

Science, in its current institutionalized form, is starting to look pretty broken to me. It's time for something new.

That's kind of the whole point of specialization - a good framework to look at this is the Technology Readiness Level principles; and different institutions are specialized to work with different maturity levels of a tech and that's ok.

The requirements to work on core principles that might have an application (and fund&organize that work) are fundamentally different from finding product/market fit for something that's known to be possible and are fundamentally different from optimizing a process for making that thing 1% cheaper than last year, so those are generally done by different institutions and different people.

So yes, from the point of someone doing fundamental research, once a proof of concept exists, their part of the work is done - there's a lot of further steps to get that to a commercially viable product, but those steps should be done by someone else who's better at it and whose organization is structured completely differently to facilitate this completely different process. And meanwhile they'll working on some other tech that's ready for that engineering stage yet. Theoretical physics isn't applied physics isn't prototype engineering isn't process optimization engineering.

You need people and organizations working on every TRL step, and they aren't interchangeable, you need the preceding step well-funded to make your work possible and you need to move the results to the following steps since those will harvest the actual end-user value in the end.

They probably are smarter than Engineers, on average, but that does not make them more valuable to society at large, though it might in their academic habitat.

“Smarter” is a really vague term. At least in CS/Software it’s incredibly common for people to sound much more knowledgeable than they are, or for promising junior engineers to get stuck in a hole. Given the selection bias inherent to graduate school pathways* in the US, I wouldn’t presuppose any innate skill gap between Fresh Phds and baccalaureates.

* A top BSc candidate with a comp eco background would need to forgo ~800k in compensation for a 4 year PhD. While in grad school, they must be able to survive on ~20k per year in direct income. Fresh from a BS they may have 100k in student debt, or have been fortunate to have wealthy family or studied internationally where the cost of education is lower. People willing and able to go for grad school do not represent an unbiased sample of the top students.