I wrote fundamental breakthroughs. And it isn’t just engineering. Lasers and semiconductors for two examples were new science, but they have all been working out the implications of earlier breakthroughs.
What is the difference between a fundamental breakthrough and a not fundamental breakthrough? What method can I use to tell if a breakthrough is fundamental?
How about: a fundamental breakthrough enables new techniques/manipulations?
So all of the ‘archaic’ examples are for tasks we could already do but perhaps not as fast or as easily. The obscure-novel guy could resort to techniques honed by centuries of librarians & researchers to find out about it; the sound-effects collector could invest in the magnetic reels or whatever ‘professionals’ used. The man could easily stay in close contact—with a little more money. The customers who seek encyclopedic information get pretty much the same thing today. In all of these cases, the Internet & computers don’t enable new things but cheaper, quicker versions of what we already had.
The fundamental breakthrough computing represents is letting us calculate things we could never afford to calculate even with the global GDP, and in the paradigm shift towards representing everything as a computation (and not, say, differential equations).
So, cracking the atom is a fundamental breakthrough, because we simply couldn’t do that before. No matter how much money you spent, you could only exploit natural atom-cracking in radioactive decay—you could not vary the rate. So that was a fundamental breakthrough. Going from A-bomb to H-bomb, not so much (we could always just use a couple A-bombs where we could now use an H-bomb).
So, cracking the atom is a fundamental breakthrough, because we simply couldn’t do that before. No matter how much money you spent, you could only exploit natural atom-cracking in radioactive decay—you could not vary the rate. So that was a fundamental breakthrough. Going from A-bomb to H-bomb, not so much (we could always just use a couple A-bombs where we could now use an H-bomb).
H bombs would seem to be a different fundamental breakthrough than atom splitting. The similarity is their engineering application more than their fundamentals.
Well one thing is that this standard only works for engineering breakthroughs. What new manipulation techniques did natural selection give us? Or the Copernican revolution? Or even Newton’s laws of motion? Better ballistics would appear to fall into the non-fundamental category, no?
Also, it all still looks like a matter of degree to me. Does heavier than air flying count? We could still fly before the Wright brothers, just not as fast and not as heavy. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have had back and forth written communication with hundreds of people in real time. That seems pretty new to me. What about the light bulb… surely a huge breakthrough, but oil lamps worked pretty damn well before then.
A fundamental breakthrough is one that could not be developed from earlier knowledge (that required a new idea) and that formed the basis for further developments. That is, not an incremental advance.
The laser, for example, was not a fundamental breakthrough, because it was a direct development of quantum electrodynamics (which is the last fundamental breakthrough I can think of).
ADDED: QCD may be, but I can’t think of any further developments it has contributed to, nor, the last I checked it out, had there been any definitive tests of its accuracy.
QED wasn’t totally original, we obviously needed some earlier knowledge- like say about the photoelectric effect, black body radiation, and Maxwell’s wave theory of light. Maybe the conceptual jump to QED was bigger than the jump to lasers and so maybe it is fair to say that we haven’t has a big a breakthrough since. But I’m not sure what justifies putting a very small set of breakthroughs in a special category and only counting those. Is there a long enough list of breakthroughs as big as QED to even justify looking at the frequency with which they occur?
I wrote fundamental breakthroughs. And it isn’t just engineering. Lasers and semiconductors for two examples were new science, but they have all been working out the implications of earlier breakthroughs.
What is the difference between a fundamental breakthrough and a not fundamental breakthrough? What method can I use to tell if a breakthrough is fundamental?
How about: a fundamental breakthrough enables new techniques/manipulations?
So all of the ‘archaic’ examples are for tasks we could already do but perhaps not as fast or as easily. The obscure-novel guy could resort to techniques honed by centuries of librarians & researchers to find out about it; the sound-effects collector could invest in the magnetic reels or whatever ‘professionals’ used. The man could easily stay in close contact—with a little more money. The customers who seek encyclopedic information get pretty much the same thing today. In all of these cases, the Internet & computers don’t enable new things but cheaper, quicker versions of what we already had.
The fundamental breakthrough computing represents is letting us calculate things we could never afford to calculate even with the global GDP, and in the paradigm shift towards representing everything as a computation (and not, say, differential equations).
So, cracking the atom is a fundamental breakthrough, because we simply couldn’t do that before. No matter how much money you spent, you could only exploit natural atom-cracking in radioactive decay—you could not vary the rate. So that was a fundamental breakthrough. Going from A-bomb to H-bomb, not so much (we could always just use a couple A-bombs where we could now use an H-bomb).
H bombs would seem to be a different fundamental breakthrough than atom splitting. The similarity is their engineering application more than their fundamentals.
Atom combining, as opposed to atom splitting?
Hm; you’re right that that is a bad example—H-bombs are man-caused fusion, not fission.
Although, I’m not sure we couldn’t fuse before the first H-bomb: sonoluminescence, which might be caused by bubble fusion, was first produced in 1934.
Well one thing is that this standard only works for engineering breakthroughs. What new manipulation techniques did natural selection give us? Or the Copernican revolution? Or even Newton’s laws of motion? Better ballistics would appear to fall into the non-fundamental category, no?
Also, it all still looks like a matter of degree to me. Does heavier than air flying count? We could still fly before the Wright brothers, just not as fast and not as heavy. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have had back and forth written communication with hundreds of people in real time. That seems pretty new to me. What about the light bulb… surely a huge breakthrough, but oil lamps worked pretty damn well before then.
A fundamental breakthrough is one that could not be developed from earlier knowledge (that required a new idea) and that formed the basis for further developments. That is, not an incremental advance.
The laser, for example, was not a fundamental breakthrough, because it was a direct development of quantum electrodynamics (which is the last fundamental breakthrough I can think of).
ADDED: QCD may be, but I can’t think of any further developments it has contributed to, nor, the last I checked it out, had there been any definitive tests of its accuracy.
QED wasn’t totally original, we obviously needed some earlier knowledge- like say about the photoelectric effect, black body radiation, and Maxwell’s wave theory of light. Maybe the conceptual jump to QED was bigger than the jump to lasers and so maybe it is fair to say that we haven’t has a big a breakthrough since. But I’m not sure what justifies putting a very small set of breakthroughs in a special category and only counting those. Is there a long enough list of breakthroughs as big as QED to even justify looking at the frequency with which they occur?