Computer Science as a Technological Craft

A few posts back I described how James Watt made improvements to the Newcomen Steam engine that raised the energy efficiency of steam engines from 1% to 3% and in the process sparked the Industrial Revolution. The reason for exploring the history of steam engines from an IT perspective is two-fold. First of all, it will lead us to some very applicable concepts in the form of the second law of thermodynamics and the interplay of entropy (disorder) and information at the coding level; secondly, it is an interesting story of a technological craft developing into a science. A technological craft is a collection of skills and techniques gained through trial and error that is passed down through the generations. A prime example is early metallurgy. People began to smelt copper about 3800 B.C. in Iran. A thousand years later, in 2800 B.C., the Sumerians in Iraq learned how to combine copper and tin into a very hard and durable alloy called bronze - the distinguishing hallmark of civilization. Around 1500 B.C. the Hittites began to work with iron, which was softer than bronze at the onset, but which made possible the discovery in 1000 B.C. that when iron was reheated with charcoal, it formed a very hard alloy we now call steel. Over many thousands of years of trial and error, people learned many useful metallurgical techniques, like how to harden metal by quenching hot metal in water and then to temper the brittle quenched metal by reheating it and allowing the metal to slowly anneal. Over thousands of years, mankind developed many impressive metallurgical skills and practices, but during all this time, nobody really had any idea of what was going on in the metal during all these intricate manipulations. Acquiring technology by trial and error is a very slow process indeed. Today, metallurgy has evolved into a branch of the material sciences and studies metals at the atomic level within crystal lattices. A modern metallurgist might use x-ray diffraction patterns, electron microscopy, neutron bombardment, or a mass spectrometer to figure out what is going on in a new alloy under study.

Although IT and computer science are populated by very intelligent and gifted people, I would like to suggest that computer science is still an emerging technological craft on the threshold of becoming a true science. In the current state of affairs, even software engineering is little more than the formal instructional framework of a guild. It outlines the procedures to follow to develop and maintain software without dealing with the ultimate nature of software itself. It’s like describing the formal procedures to heat treat the blade of a sword without going into the nature of the steel in the blade itself. In the modern world, civil engineers would find it very difficult indeed to design bridges without knowledge of the tensile strength of structural steel. That is where softwarephysics can be of help to software engineers by providing a theory of software behavior, just as physics comes to the aid of civil engineers by offering a model for the behavior of steel under load.

In 1979, when I transitioned from being an exploration geophysicist to become an IT professional, I left a diverse exploration team exploring for oil in the Gulf of Suez to become a programmer in Amoco’s IT department. Exploration teams are a multidisciplinary team consisting of geologists, geophysicists, petrophysicists, geochemists, and paleontologists. Oil companies throw all the science they can muster at trying to figure out what is going on in a prospective basin before they start spending lots of money drilling holes, just as it is prudent to try to understand the internal nature of an alloy before trying to improve it. When I moved into Amoco’s IT department, I came into contact with many talented and intelligent people, but I was dismayed to discover that there was little sharing of ideas from the other sciences like I had found in my old exploration teams. It seemed that computer science was totally isolated from the outside scientific world. I realized that computer science was a very young science at the time and that it was more of a technological craft than a science, but that was nearly 30 years ago! It’s time for computer science to learn from the other sciences! Fortunately, we are beginning to see this in computer science with the Biologically Inspired Computing (BIC) community in the computer science departments of many universities. The BIC community is, at long last, bringing in ideas from biology, physics, and biochemistry into mainstream computer science and ultimately IT.

Now back to steam engines. Watt did not know that he had increased the energy efficiency of steam engines because he had never even heard of the term energy. The concept of energy did not arrive on the scene until 1850 when Rudolph Clausius published the first law of thermodynamics. But Watt did know that his engine used about 1/3 the coal of a standard Newcomen steam engine with the same horsepower. Unfortunately, the science of the day was not of great help to 18th-century steam engine designers. They had to deal with some very poor effective theories at the time. There was a lot of confusion about the nature of heat in those days. In 1667, Johann Joachim Becher published the phlogiston theory of combustion. The phlogiston theory was an effective theory that proposed that flammable substances such as coal contained a mysterious substance called phlogiston. When coal burned, it released phlogiston to the air. The ash that remained behind was the residual "dephlogisticated" form of coal, while the fumes from the burning coal were "phlogisticated air". Air could only hold so much phlogiston before it became saturated, and that was why a candle could be snuffed out by an overturned glass. The phlogiston theory of combustion held sway until it was replaced by the caloric theory of heat by Antoine Lavoisier in 1783. Lavoisier proposed that when coal burned, it really combined with the newly discovered gas found in air called oxygen and released another mysterious substance called caloric. Caloric was the “substance of heat” and always flowed from hot bodies to cold bodies. Naturally, the hot flue gasses from the burning coal expanded as they took up caloric, making hot air balloons possible. Now during all this time, Daniel Bernoulli had proposed an effective theory of heat that is still in force today known as the kinetic theory of heat. In 1738, Bernoulli proposed that gasses are really composed of a very large number of molecules bouncing around in all directions. Gas pressure in a cylinder was simply the result of a huge number of molecular impacts from individual gas molecules against the walls of a cylinder, and heat was just a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules bouncing around in the cylinder. But the kinetic theory of heat was not held in favor in Watt’s day, and unfortunately for early steam engine designers, none of these theories of heat-related heat energy to mechanical energy, so Watt and the other 18th-century steam engine designers were pretty much on their own, without much help from the available science of the day. In the absence of a useful scientific model for energy, steam engine building in the 18th century became a technological craft, just as computer science has become a technological craft lacking a practical model for software behavior.

This all changed in 1824 when Sadi Carnot published a small book entitled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which was the first scientific treatment of steam engines. In this book, Carnot asked lots of questions. Carnot wondered if a lump of coal could do an infinite amount of work. “Is the potential work available from a heat source potentially unbounded?". He also wondered if the material that the steam engine was made of or the fluid used by the engine made any difference. "Can heat engines be in principle improved by replacing the steam by some other working fluid or gas?". And he came to some very powerful conclusions. Carnot proposed that the efficiency of a steam engine only depended upon the difference between the temperature of the steam used by the engine and the temperature of the room in which the steam engine was running. He envisioned a steam engine as a sort of caloric waterfall, with the difference between the temperature of the steam from the boiler and the temperature of the room the steam engine was in being the height of the waterfall. Useful work was accomplished by the steam engine as caloric fell from the high temperature of the steam to the lower temperature of the room, like water falling over a waterfall doing useful work on a paddlewheel. It did not matter what the steam engine was made of or what fluid was used.

"The motive power of heat is independent of the agents employed to realize it; its quantity is fixed solely by the temperatures of the bodies between which is effected, finally, the transfer of caloric."

“In the fall of caloric the motive power evidently increases with the difference of temperature between the warm and cold bodies, but we do not know whether it is proportional to this difference.”

“The production of motive power is then due in steam engines not to actual consumption of the caloric but to its transportation from a warm body to a cold body.”

Later we will see that Carnot’s ideas were really an early expression of the second law of thermodynamics.

Although we no longer have much confidence in the caloric theory of heat, and now favor the kinetic theory of heat in its place, Carnot was able to make a great contribution to the science of steam engines and thermodynamics by creating an abstract model of steam engines that provided a direction for thought. However, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire created little attention in 1824 and quickly went out of print. Carnot’s ideas were later revived by work done by Lord Kelvin in 1848 and by Rudolph Clausius in 1850 when Clausius published the first and second laws of thermodynamics in On the Moving Force of Heat and the Laws of Heat which may be Deduced Therefrom. In a similar manner, softwarephysics attempts to provide an abstract model for the behavior of software that provides a direction for thought.

So what happened to Sadi Carnot? In 1832, Carnot died in a cholera epidemic at the age of 36, a victim of the miasma theory of disease described in an earlier post. Unfortunately, because of the fear of choleric miasma, many of his writings were also buried along with him, leaving only a few additional surviving scientific writings.

Next time we will continue on to define the first and second laws of thermodynamics and encounter another strange mysterious substance called entropy – the true bane of all programmers.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston