Forum Overview :: Rants :: It was a plot device, and you just don't get it

[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"][quote name="Grebble"][quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"][quote name="withheld"]Well yeah IDEALLY we'd all invent our own railroad super alloy and be in top demand[/quote]Try again. Rearden Metal in Ayn Rand's <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> was not merely a "railroad super alloy" it was a better type of general purpose use metal, period. The book mentions how when Rearden was forced by the government to sell it to all comers, that his most important customers couldn't get adequate amounts of metal for their critical needs. The 500 ton limit per customer wouldn't do more than a few miles of rail nor would it be enough to brace even just one of Dannager's coal mines. But manufacturers of golf clubs could get enough to make them out of Rearden Metal. And when Dagny makes her admission on the radio that she was Rearden's mistress, the microphone was made out of Rearden Metal.[/quote] Really? And this clown "invented" it?[/quote] Yeah. And it took him twelve years to do it. [quote name="Grebble"]This is why that was such a shitty book. Ayn Rand thought that basic chemistry was just shit that supar-geniuses could INVENT in their own mind with sweat from their brows. [/quote] And you might get your own facts straight; the development of metals is metallurgy, not (mere) chemistry. Whole different discipline. And the word is "super" not "supar," consider watching the spell checker in your browser when it redlines an item that maybe it's spelled wrong. And if your browser doesn't have a spell checker for input areas, consider switching to one like Firefox that does. Beyond that, <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> was a <i>story</i>, and the idea of Rearden Metal was a plot device. And have you ever considered that the very computer you're using right now was created because someone figured out you could make the basic components - the microprocessor, and the dynamic memory - out of <i>sand</i>? What do you think silicon is? It's sand, melted to create a solid object, the way glass was done. Would anyone have believed back in, say, 1940, that someone would make huge powerful calculating devices where the base element was sand? Also, there are many new forms of metals that have been developed as a result of work on new alloys. How about carbon fiber? Titanium? Gallium arsenide? There may be huge increases in what we can do with memory by doping the silicon with it; even I can't follow all the new things being done. If you go through the science fiction of the 50s, 60s, and possibly into the 70s, and you had a lot of very bright people, all of them missed the development of the computer; nobody thought about the capability that eventually everyone would be able to have huge amounts of computer power at their fingertips, and the capability that could come out of that. All of the major science fiction writers: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Clifford Simak, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke, H. G. Wells, Phillip K. Dick, and others I've left out, they all missed it. [quote name="Grebble"]She was too stupid to know the first thing about science and I love that people who honestly think that book is good have to handwave over the fact that she was retarded when it came to basic science.[/quote] Someone or some group thought a lot of things up. Teflon. Freon. Nylon. All other things that some "clown" invented with a lot of hard, hard work and serious skull sweat. And most educated people - of which I think you do not qualify - probably would have thought these things were not possible. Edison himself said if he hadn't seen how it was done he wouldn't have believed what it would take to develop tungsten and make it into a wire for use in light bulbs. And you seem to forget that first, and foremost, Rand was trying to get people to read her story in order to pass her ideas along. That meant the story had to be entertaining. And so she used the inventions in the book as plot devices. We also can't make energy from electrostaic charge in the atmosphere (and before you dismiss the idea, Nicola Tesla was trying to do it back near the start of the 20th century), and we can't build a device that transmits sound waves as a form of weapon that can destroy buildings. But you wouldn't know about either of those plot devices in the book either - or you'd probably have mentioned them - because it's very likely you never read the book in the first place.[/quote]