Elastic by Leonard Mlodinow

Author:Leonard Mlodinow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

7

The Origin of Insight

When the Unimaginable Becomes the Self-Evident

On December 21, 1941, two grim weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt told his Joint Chiefs of Staff in a meeting at the White House that it was imperative that Japan be bombed as soon as possible, both to boost morale at home and to plant the seeds of doubt in the Japanese people, whose leaders had told them they were invulnerable. Despite the urgency of the mission, it seemed like an impossible task: No bomber had anywhere near the range necessary to fly to Japan.

One cold day a few weeks later, a submarine captain named Francis Low was reminded of Roosevelt’s challenge as he watched bombers on practice runs at a naval airfield in Norfolk, Virginia. The rectangular outline of an aircraft carrier deck had been painted on a runway to provide the bombers their mock target. Like everyone else who’d been told about the challenge, Low had been drawing blanks. A lifelong navy man and a submarine captain by training, bombers were far from his area of expertise. But as he watched the shadows of the planes cross that painted outline, an idea suddenly exploded into his consciousness. It was an idea an expert would have dismissed as absurd. What if they launched their bombers from the deck of a carrier?

It was an instance in which the key to solving the problem was ignorance, or at least pretending that what you know isn’t true. Low wasn’t completely ignorant—he understood some of the many reasons his idea “couldn’t work”—but he decided to ignore them. He instead embraced the assumption that it had to work, and began analyzing how to overcome the obstacles.

There were many such obstacles. Aircraft carriers are designed to transport nimble and lightweight fighters, not bombers, which are too heavy to take off from a carrier’s limited runway. Bombers are also not very maneuverable and, hence, are easy to shoot down, so they must be escorted by fighters, but an aircraft carrier hasn’t the space to carry both. Most important, even if a bomber could somehow be placed on a carrier and the carrier could take it close enough to Japan for it to be within bombing range, the high tail and weak tail structure of a bomber made it impossible to install a landing hook, and so the returning bombers would not be able to land on the carrier. Low didn’t have most of the answers, but he didn’t accept the prospect that none could be found.

After returning to Washington, he went to see his commanding officer, Admiral Ernest King. Low was always uncomfortable in his superior’s presence, and now he was especially nervous. His suggestion was bound to strike the stern admiral as outlandish. Low waited until King was alone and then, during a pause in their conversation, he blurted out his idea.

Though the scheme seemed unlikely to succeed, the times were desperate. So over the next months, bombers were stripped down to their bare essentials to reduce their weight and fitted with extra fuel tanks to extend their range.

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