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After several days Performing military drills on the California coast USS Palace he headed home. A massive aircraft carrier large enough to transport 25 helicopters flew to the port of San Diego with a swift clip. Inside the cockpit, located on the navigation bridge, two levels above the flight deck, the atmosphere was lively. Crew members would soon land and enjoy the coast. Conversations about where they were going to have dinner that night. Then, suddenly, the porter exploded in the voice of the ship’s engineer.
“Bridge, main control,” he barked. “I’m losing the pressure of the steam drums. No apparent cause. I’m closing the spikes. “
A subordinate officer, in the oversight of the ship’s navigator, hurried to the porter’s lodge and spoke, “Shut the triggers, yes.” The navigator himself approached the captain, sitting on the porch of the front yard. “Captain, the engineer is losing steam in the boiler for no reason at all,” he repeated.
Everyone in attendance knew that the message was urgent. Effective loss of steam pressure meant a loss of strength throughout the ship. The consequences of this unexpected development were soon revealed. Within 40 seconds of the engineer’s report, the steam drum was emptied, and all steam-powered systems were shut down. A high-pitched alarm sounded for a few seconds; then the bridge collapsed a lot quietly as the electric motors and other devices on the radars turned and stopped.
But the loss of electricity was not the full measure of the emergency. The lack of steam made the crew unable to slow down the speed of the ship. The ship was going too fast to drop anchor. The only way to reduce the torque would be to reverse the ship’s propeller – which of course works with steam. Moreover, the loss of steam hampered the crew’s ability to steer the ship, which soon became another significant consequence. Concerned with the bow of the ship, the navigator told the helmsman to turn the rudder to the right ten degrees. The helmsman turned the wheel, but it had no effect.
“Sir, I have no motto, sir!” he shouted.
The mailbox had a manual protection system: two men were sweating in a stern compartment of the boat, exerting all their might to move even an inch of unsupported rudder. The navigator, still looking at the bow, whispered, “Come on, damn it, rock it!” But the 17,000-ton ship moved forward, headed for the crowded San Diego harbor, and was now far from its original route.
Seeing all this happen on that day in 1984 was Edwin Hutchins. Hutchins was a psychologist at the Naval Personnel Research and Development Center in San Diego. He entered Palau as an observer who examines the cognitive requirements of ship navigation, taking notes and recording interviews. Now, the ship was in a state of crisis – a “victim,” in the language of the crew, and Hutchins was on a voyage.
From the corner of the pelota court, Hutchins looked at the crew chief. The captain, he stated, was calm, as if all this were normal. In fact, Hutchins knew, it was “everything that was unusual”: “Taking off his jacket that revealed a sweaty blond shirt on this cool spring evening, an occasional raspy voice, a damn curse, told the true story: Palau it wasn’t completely under control, and their careers, and maybe their lives, were in danger. “
Hutchins was on the ship to study a vessel phenomenon the same it calls it “socially divided cognition” or the way people think with the minds of others. In one book this arose from his experience Palau, Cognition in the Wild, he wrote that his goal was to “move the boundaries of the cognitive unit outside the skin of the individual person and treat the navigation group as a cognitive and computational system”. Such systems, Hutchins added, “may have interesting cognitive characteristics of their own.” In the face of a problem that could not be solved by a single intelligence, socially distributed knowledge Palauthey were going to test the crew.
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