Nova recently screened a documentary called "Bombing Hitler's Dams" about the engineering of the 'bouncing bomb' used to blow up three dams supplying the Ruhr, Germany's indsutrial heartland, with hydroelectric power during the Second World War. The raid was daring and dangerous requiring enormous courage and flying skill. The planes, Avro Lancasters, had to be flown exactly 60ft above the water behind the dam at 240mph. According to one of the crew, the margin for error was 20ft - so the bomb's release had to be timed to within 1/20th of a second.
Barnes Wallace, the designer of the bomb, devised a way to deliver the bomb to a position 50 feet blow the suface, right up against the back wall of the dam, after 'skipping' over the anti torpedo nets. His solution was simply astonishing in its creativity and the engineering challenges he managed to overcome. That was the 'good news'.
The documentary interleaved an account operation Chastise, the code name for the May 1943 raid, with a present day investigation into the engineering behind the raid. And this is where things went off the rails. Hugh Hunt, a professor of engineering at Cambridge University, founded in the 13th century and arguably Britain's finest institution of higher education, decided to replicate Barnes Wallace's work and build and test a working replica of the bouncing bomb.
What comes across from the documentary (apart from the astonishing waste of time and resources) is the seeming ineptitude of the research team. For example, just before the final test, they painted half the bomb with yellow paint and hadn't considered that by painting only one half, the asymmetric weight of the paint would move the cylinder's centre of gravity away from its axis. Anyone who has lost the balancing weights from their car will know what that means. And this is an engineering team?
The cost of the project must have been horrendous; and what did we (collectively) learn? That making the bouncing bomb had some significant engineering challenges. That's it. Nothing new was created. No new knowledge gained (although some might argue that knowledge we once had, that was lost when Barnes Wallace's notes were lost to a flood, has now been restored - but that's something of a stretch).
Now I should be clear that I do what seems to many to be fairly pointless research - measuring power or simulating knowledge flows in social networks - but I'm fairly sure that as esoteric as it is, it's not recreating something done 60 years ago. And I don't waste a ton of money doing it. If Hunt had built a theoretical model that explained the bomb's behaviour using what we know of the physics involved, that would have been one thing. But building a dam and blowing it up (which, by the way was not done at the time the bomb was dropped but some time later, with the bomb being lowered into position with a crane) according to Hunt "...really makes me appreciate what Barnes Wallace did". I didn't realise that 'appreciating what others had done' - in this case the genius of the person who devised the scheme originally - qualified as an academic contribution.
If this was funded by the university, the regents should be up in arms; if a penny of British tax payers' money was involved, a public enquiry into misappropriation of funds seems called for. This circus is appropriate fare for the MythBusters, not academia.
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