Get the latest tech news
Eight Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency Trying to Make Britain Great Again
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency—ARIA—is the UK's answer to Darpa. But can it put the country back on the scientific map?
He was also a prolific blogger, publishing long essays that railed against what he saw as a turgid, mostly incompetent civil service that he now calls the “deep state.” But he was also fascinated by organizations that transformed the world: the Manhattan Project, Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, ARPA and early NASA. When I visited ARIA in spring, the agency was squeezed into a single room on the fourth floor of the British Library, an imposing red brick building a short walk from London’s King’s Cross station. The nuts-and-bolts of progress can become obscured by the narrative-building that surrounds genuine breakthroughs: J. Robert Oppenheimer and his boys in Los Alamos got the Hollywood treatment, but the lion’s share of Manhattan project dollars went to the complex in Oak Ridge that enriched the uranium for that first atomic bomb.
Or read this on Wired
