Breakthroughs do cluster, but that’s because of the tendency for a group to be working on a lot of related problems at once, and a breakthrough in any one area might resolve a key issue in any number of other areas.
For example, the motor/generator is a moderate breakthrough in the field of mechanics that solves several larger issues in electrical distribution. The relay, created for electrical distribution, led to the vacuum tube and then the transistor.
In a purer sense, better smelting practices provided more consistent steel, which allowed the polishing of more precise lenses, developing better telescopes which provided more information about the crystalline structure of metals yielding better metallurgy. The cycle doesn’t recurse infinitely because we virtually never have some project that is just waiting on a development that is two steps ahead of current understanding.
Sorry- the need of optics to have metals with certain properties is part of any history of optics, and in order to understand metallurgy one needs to see metals as crystalline, which requires optics superior to those which have been created without applied metallurgy.
There’s a certain advantage in that much of materials science can be cheated by experimentation without understanding, such that it is possible to work steel without knowing what steel is.
I was under the impression that the discovery that metals were crystalline was due to Bragg in 1912, and the wide angles involved don’t require significant lens quality.
Metals do have microstructure that’s very metallurgically relevant, which can be seen under a microscope (and there lens quality is rather relevant). While understanding the underlying crystalline structure helps the analysis, as you point out the experimentalists were able to find useful alloys and cooling recipes without knowing about the crystalline structure, with some help from knowing the microstructure.
I think the word “crystalline” was what was throwing me off from your description, though it is unclear to me how much advances in optics helped experimental metallurgists.
Most of the alloying and cooling was developed without even looking at what you call the microstructure. Current-generation optical microscopes are easily capable of observing individual surface crystals under elastic and inelastic deformation.
The effects of a given heat treatment on a given object is fairly simple to measure, but to predict the effect of an untested combination requires deeper understanding. Trial and error can create isolated useful developments, but understanding the next level allows accurate prediction of interesting developments. For example, the effects of alloying agents in iron remain experimentally determined, rather than predicted.
Breakthroughs do cluster, but that’s because of the tendency for a group to be working on a lot of related problems at once, and a breakthrough in any one area might resolve a key issue in any number of other areas.
This is an explanation for clustering in modern breakthroughs. But there’s a different sort of clustering: Discoveries and inventions are happening more and more rapidly. A few thousand years ago they happened at best every few hundred years. By the time one reached the late middle ages they happened every few decades. In the 19th century discoveries and inventions occurred at a breakneck pace. There’s a decent argument that things have slowed down again in the last few years (possibly with a peak around 1900 and a decline since then) but it is this sort of more and more rapid pace in the large scale that suggests this type of model.
So, there were more than 20 clusters of related discoveries in the 19th century? What were they?
A large number of related discoveries about e.g. electromagnetism should count the same as the large number of related discoveries about food preparation, or chipping flint, or masonry, or architectural engineering.
So, there were more than 20 clusters of related discoveries in the 19th century? What were they?
Well, electricity is one area where there were easily at least 20. Volta made the eponymous pile, Ohm discovers his law, Faraday discovers induction, Maxwell discovers his laws (and notes that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is the observed speed of light), Faraday invented the first generators, Siemens refined it, Seebeck discovered the thermoelectric effect, Edison made a practical lightbulb, Edison made large scale electric grids, Hertz transmitted radio waves, Marconi used them to transmit signals, Daniell makes the first practical batteries (later improved to gravity cells), lead acid batteries also occur in this time period. Etc.
But this is missing part of the primary point: Discoveries help out even in not directly related areas. Better communication helps all areas. Thus for example, the ease of modern transportation and communication helped make the late 19th century transits of Venus to be observed with far more careful coordination than previous transits. And Darwin and other 19th century naturalists were able to do much of their work because sea travel had become substantially faster and more reliable in the 19th century than earlier. This is part of a general pattern: technologies and developments beget more technologies and insights even to areas that aren’t directly connected.
If fire and composting each count as one cluster, then electricity, electromagnetic radiation, and the relationship between the two are each one cluster. Also, I think that both Newtonian physics and Aristotelian physics count equally much as major developments, along with a very large number of developments that have been completely abandoned and forgotten. Combined with the developments that ‘everybody knows’ now (e.g. how to create and extinguish fires, till soil, make plants edible), I think that the rate of new discoveries has remained roughly proportional to the number of people alive and the degree by which they exceed subsistence living.
Granted, that is a huge increase in absolute rate, but it isn’t strictly linked to an increase in intelligence or reasoning abilities.
Even if it is an increase proportional to the population, that still means that a model where increased technology (which allows a larger population) is responsible for further increases. So the upshot is still the same, which is that it is highly plausible in that context that other species had enough intelligence to make civilization but never got the first few lucky technologies.
A dolphin’s ability to invent novel behaviours was put to the test in a famous experiment by the renowned dolphin expert Karen Pryor. Two rough-toothed dolphins were rewarded whenever they came up with a new behaviour. It took just a few trials for both dolphins to realise what was required. A similar trial was set up with humans. The humans took about as long to realise what they were being trained to do as did the dolphins. For both the dolphins and the humans, there was a period of frustration (even anger, in the humans) before they “caught on”. Once they figured it out, the humans expressed great relief, whereas the dolphins raced around the tank excitedly, displaying more and more novel behaviours.
I have to wonder how much dolphin anatomy factors into their apparent lack of civilization-building. Then again, I haven’t read anything about dolphins developing anything like agriculture (whereas some social insects seem to manage some impressive achievements, such as ants domesticating other insects, farming fungi, and building vast inter-connected colonies). Yet it seems pretty clear that social insects are nothing like intelligent in the way that primates and dolphins are.
Breakthroughs do cluster, but that’s because of the tendency for a group to be working on a lot of related problems at once, and a breakthrough in any one area might resolve a key issue in any number of other areas.
For example, the motor/generator is a moderate breakthrough in the field of mechanics that solves several larger issues in electrical distribution. The relay, created for electrical distribution, led to the vacuum tube and then the transistor.
In a purer sense, better smelting practices provided more consistent steel, which allowed the polishing of more precise lenses, developing better telescopes which provided more information about the crystalline structure of metals yielding better metallurgy. The cycle doesn’t recurse infinitely because we virtually never have some project that is just waiting on a development that is two steps ahead of current understanding.
That doesn’t sound like the history of solid state physics / materials engineering that I know; what do you have in mind here?
Sorry- the need of optics to have metals with certain properties is part of any history of optics, and in order to understand metallurgy one needs to see metals as crystalline, which requires optics superior to those which have been created without applied metallurgy.
There’s a certain advantage in that much of materials science can be cheated by experimentation without understanding, such that it is possible to work steel without knowing what steel is.
I was under the impression that the discovery that metals were crystalline was due to Bragg in 1912, and the wide angles involved don’t require significant lens quality.
Metals do have microstructure that’s very metallurgically relevant, which can be seen under a microscope (and there lens quality is rather relevant). While understanding the underlying crystalline structure helps the analysis, as you point out the experimentalists were able to find useful alloys and cooling recipes without knowing about the crystalline structure, with some help from knowing the microstructure.
I think the word “crystalline” was what was throwing me off from your description, though it is unclear to me how much advances in optics helped experimental metallurgists.
Most of the alloying and cooling was developed without even looking at what you call the microstructure. Current-generation optical microscopes are easily capable of observing individual surface crystals under elastic and inelastic deformation.
The effects of a given heat treatment on a given object is fairly simple to measure, but to predict the effect of an untested combination requires deeper understanding. Trial and error can create isolated useful developments, but understanding the next level allows accurate prediction of interesting developments. For example, the effects of alloying agents in iron remain experimentally determined, rather than predicted.
This is an explanation for clustering in modern breakthroughs. But there’s a different sort of clustering: Discoveries and inventions are happening more and more rapidly. A few thousand years ago they happened at best every few hundred years. By the time one reached the late middle ages they happened every few decades. In the 19th century discoveries and inventions occurred at a breakneck pace. There’s a decent argument that things have slowed down again in the last few years (possibly with a peak around 1900 and a decline since then) but it is this sort of more and more rapid pace in the large scale that suggests this type of model.
So, there were more than 20 clusters of related discoveries in the 19th century? What were they?
A large number of related discoveries about e.g. electromagnetism should count the same as the large number of related discoveries about food preparation, or chipping flint, or masonry, or architectural engineering.
Well, electricity is one area where there were easily at least 20. Volta made the eponymous pile, Ohm discovers his law, Faraday discovers induction, Maxwell discovers his laws (and notes that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is the observed speed of light), Faraday invented the first generators, Siemens refined it, Seebeck discovered the thermoelectric effect, Edison made a practical lightbulb, Edison made large scale electric grids, Hertz transmitted radio waves, Marconi used them to transmit signals, Daniell makes the first practical batteries (later improved to gravity cells), lead acid batteries also occur in this time period. Etc.
But this is missing part of the primary point: Discoveries help out even in not directly related areas. Better communication helps all areas. Thus for example, the ease of modern transportation and communication helped make the late 19th century transits of Venus to be observed with far more careful coordination than previous transits. And Darwin and other 19th century naturalists were able to do much of their work because sea travel had become substantially faster and more reliable in the 19th century than earlier. This is part of a general pattern: technologies and developments beget more technologies and insights even to areas that aren’t directly connected.
If fire and composting each count as one cluster, then electricity, electromagnetic radiation, and the relationship between the two are each one cluster. Also, I think that both Newtonian physics and Aristotelian physics count equally much as major developments, along with a very large number of developments that have been completely abandoned and forgotten. Combined with the developments that ‘everybody knows’ now (e.g. how to create and extinguish fires, till soil, make plants edible), I think that the rate of new discoveries has remained roughly proportional to the number of people alive and the degree by which they exceed subsistence living.
Granted, that is a huge increase in absolute rate, but it isn’t strictly linked to an increase in intelligence or reasoning abilities.
Even if it is an increase proportional to the population, that still means that a model where increased technology (which allows a larger population) is responsible for further increases. So the upshot is still the same, which is that it is highly plausible in that context that other species had enough intelligence to make civilization but never got the first few lucky technologies.
source
And cue the Douglas Adams reference.
I have to wonder how much dolphin anatomy factors into their apparent lack of civilization-building. Then again, I haven’t read anything about dolphins developing anything like agriculture (whereas some social insects seem to manage some impressive achievements, such as ants domesticating other insects, farming fungi, and building vast inter-connected colonies). Yet it seems pretty clear that social insects are nothing like intelligent in the way that primates and dolphins are.
Well, there is the complex hunting behavior, and indications of limited tool use. Why is agriculture special?