Name: 科学で悲惨な計画を止める：ベイモデル (Stopping a Disastrous Plan with Science: the Bay Model)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:36:29.000Z
Duration: 4 min 34 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

These days if you want to simulate something in the physical world

and you needed to work out if a bold but questionable plan

to dam the San Francisco Bay was a good idea?

The answer is this: The US Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model.

The Bay Model is one and a half acres or more.

What you're looking at is one of our former scientific, hydrodynamic,

And this was the tool, the instrument, that they used to see

what the unforeseen consequences of the John Reber Plan was going to be.

In the 1940s and 50s a man named John Reber

had a plan to completely change the San Francisco Bay.

Enormous dams would create freshwater lakes.

There'd be brand-new reclaimed land for industry and for air and naval bases.

Reber said it would make the bay a defensible military fortification,

and the newly dammed rivers would provide huge amounts of drinking water.

He was a theatrical producer who had done a lot of research,

but because he worked in showbiz, he knew how to promote something.

And by most accounts he was a friendly, sincere, convincing man.

So unlike other ideas for giant engineering projects, the Reber Plan actually caught on.

Debate went back and forth for years but eventually

Reber's plan seemed realistic enough, at least to politicians,

that the US Army Corps of Engineers were tasked to see if it was practical

and they were given $2.5m, that's about $25m today, to find out.

This model when it was built was the next level, the next generation.

It was extremely accurate as an instrument.

At the time there really wasn't anything better.

There's 250,000 strategically placed little copper tabs in the bottom of the model

to keep the saltwater and the freshwater from going in and out too quickly,

but also to duplicate any little protrusions sticking up out of the bottom of the bay.

1:100 scale vertically and 1:100 scale in time.

That means about two hundred times a day,

because San Francisco Bay has tides and therefore, so does the model.

Everything was hand operated for the first thirty years.

It took probably anywhere between twelve and fifteen people to operate it,

sometimes it was as many as sixty people here at one time

And the interns were out there in chairs, in lab coats, in the water

measuring the various different ebb and flow of the tide.

It took three years for Reber's plan to be tested here

And for his supporters, the results from the model were devastating.

It looked great on paper, convinced a lot of people,

but when it was tested they found that it was only good on paper.

The end result was it failed on ninety-nine different accounts.

Wild and unpredictable catastrophic flooding was just one of them.

The dams wouldn't create lakes, they'd create evaporation ponds.

The tide would create dangerous currents and waves.

In short, not only would the Reber Plan have been a disaster,

it would have been a billion dollar disaster.

The ecosystem would have been devastated too,

but it was the 50s, so no-one was really thinking about that.

figured the model would come in useful again someday.

helping to test smaller and more practical schemes across the bay for decades.

These days, of course, computers can do all of that

for a fraction of the time and the money,

but it's still a good educational resource.

Last time I talked about a grand civil engineering scheme like this,

I said it was a testament to how big we can dream,

but this model is a testament to something else.

And then, when it fails, admitting that it's wrong.

and changing your mind based on new evidence

is something our world should be built on,

and it's exactly what this model made happen.

字幕リスト動画再生

科学で悲惨な計画を止める：ベイモデル (Stopping a Disastrous Plan with Science: the Bay Model)

stick

extremely

figure

enormous