On Tuesday, August 20, 2019 at 11:33:33 PM UTC+1, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:19:58 +1000, SolomonW <Solo...@citi.com>
wrote:
Here is a science fiction story which I read many years ago.
It is of an alien race that knew all science. They built a supercomputer >and programmed it so that anyone that had a science question could ask this >supercomputer a question on science and it would give the answer. Sonn >after the alien race disappeared.
Long after some humans went to the supercomputer to ask it some science >questions, they asked the questions, and the supercomputer answered. The >computer made it clear that their problems made no sense or sometimes its >answers made no sense. The humans tried again to ask more questions, and >again, the answers made no sense.
Finally, the humans decided that the problem was that to understand the >answer, you needed to know much of the answer already. So they left in >frustration none the wiser.
I have often wondered if I was magically teleported 2500 years back and was >in either the academy of Athens or Jerusalem and tried to answer their >questions on science would I be faced with a similar situation?
Any thoughts.
I have had thoughts along parallel lines. Way back in the 1970s I
bought one of the first HP25 programmable calculators. I found it a
wonderful device for speeding up moderately complicated calculations
and it occurred to me that the outcome of the second world war might
have been different had Nazi Germany been given the technology back in
the 1930s. But then it further occurred to me they would not have been
able to learn anything much from it. For a start they didn't have the technology to detect the trace elements which make transistors work.
They wouldnt even have thought of looking for such minute quantities
of trace elements. But even if they had found them, they lacked the technology to make suitable silicon crystals or create the masks
required to etch the circuitry required to make it work.
So much of our knowledge in any particular field depends on quite
different knowledge in an apparently unconnected field with the result
that science and technology advances over a wave front rather than
dashes from point to point.
I see that now computing devices are on the verge of advancing into 5 nanometer technology. Twenty years ago this would have been a science
fiction pipe dream. I wonder what is coming next?
--
Eric Stevens
There are two classes of people. Those who divide people into
two classes and those who don't. I belong to the second class.
My parents, who witnessed their first cars and planes and then saw space flight, are example enough!
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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