Phil Fernbach
speaker
299 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Oct
Phil Fernbach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
He was. He was one of the developers of the bomb and was an extremely eminent and experienced physicist. He was... the most important member of this experimental team because he was the one who was actually engaged in the process of bringing those hemispheres of beryllium closer together. How was he doing it? What was he doing? Well, this is the crazy part of the story.
He was actually using a common flathead screwdriver to keep the two sections of beryllium apart. Unfortunately, at the critical moment, The screwdriver slipped. The two hemispheres of beryllium crashed together and they released this intense burst of radioactive radiation. Slotin, who was right next to the apparatus, took the worst of it.
And he actually died in the infirmary eight days later of radiation poisoning. The rest of the physicists in the room, all eminent scientists, all survived the initial burst. Some of them unfortunately died before their time, potentially due to the radiation dose that they received.
There certainly was. For instance, an obvious way to do it would have been to suspend one of the hemispheres of beryllium, and then the other hemisphere could be raised from the bottom. In that case, if anything slipped or there was any problem, gravity would have just pulled the two hemispheres apart, and that would have been much less of a dangerous way to conduct the experiment.
I think Slotin, like any other person, by virtue of his experience, did not foresee this potential problem. He became overconfident in his ability to conduct this experiment because he had done it so many times before and he had so much experience in this domain.
A stall is a very scary thing. So that's when an airplane loses airspeed and literally starts falling out of the sky. Every pilot, when they learn how to fly an airplane, this is one of the most important things that they train for. So they actually will purposely put the airplane into a stall and then learn how to take it out of the stall. How do you take a plane out of a stall?
Well, actually, what you need to do is point the nose of the plane down counterintuitively. You want to go up, but you actually have to point the plane down. You have to increase your acceleration. You have to regain airspeed, and then you can actually achieve an altitude correction.
When they recovered the black box from this airplane, surprisingly, what they found was that this very experienced pilot had done was exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do in a stall situation. He was actually trying to pull the plane up, but without any airspeed, that's just impossible. There's no way that the plane could recover.
And so, unfortunately, this led to this devastating outcome.
Yeah, they did very extensive analyses to try to figure out what went wrong. And one of their overall conclusions was that pilots in general have become too reliant on automation and have lost some of their basic flying skills. Modern airplanes, especially modern jetliners, are so technologically sophisticated that a lot of the time the software and the airplane are doing most of the work.
The pilot is almost like an observer watching the airplane do the job. The pilot, of course, has to be there to intervene in unusual situations when something goes wrong. The problem is that those situations are becoming more and more rare because the software is becoming more and more capable.
So in cases where an intervention is necessary, the pilot might not be as prepared as they should be because they become too reliant on the automation.
I've had the exact same experience. In fact, I've heard stories of people driving into lakes because that's what the GPS tells them to do. Yeah. My own personal experience with this is I use self-driving software all the time when I'm driving now. It works remarkably well. But one thing I've noticed over the last few years is that I've actually become a worse driver.
No one wants to admit to themselves that they've become a worse driver. But for me, the evidence is kind of incontrovertible at this point because I've gotten into a few fender benders recently. Over the last few years, which I've never done before. And so I've asked myself, what is going on here?
And I really think it's because I've become so reliant on the car doing the work that I've lost my situational awareness. And then when something unusual happens and I need to take over, I'm not ready to do it. Just like a pilot on an automated airline.
The financial crash in 2008 was in a great part due to a massive decline in the value of these financial products, a certain kind of financial product called a derivative. Derivatives are really complicated financial instruments, and it's really hard to predict exactly how they're going to behave.
Traders like derivatives because they can often generate really good returns in Financial markets return is always correlated with risk.
So if something has a high return, it's also gonna have a high risk The problem with derivatives is because they're so complicated It's often impossible to see the risk or it's very hard to see the risk the risk only emerges in sort of unusual situations so it's like
that the product is, you know, it seems to be behaving just very safely, but then something changes and all of a sudden, instead of losing 10% of its value, it loses 90% of its value or something like that.
Now, what ended up happening in the financial crisis was that these derivative products were ending up in places where they didn't belong, in places that should not have been taking on this amount of risk. Things like pension funds that should be relatively safe investments. Why did they end up there? Because the people buying them just did not appreciate or realize how complicated they were.
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