^Hey! Want a quick history of humanity's engineering (and
science) achievements in a single post from Kenneth Udut's
perspective? No? Well here it is anyway.
Science - Yes - it's about 400 years old. If I had to point to
the greatest advances gained in 400 years in Engineering and
also in Science, it would be, in no order:
a) our studies of electrostatics (especially Columb)
b) Michael Faraday and all those that took his field lines and
translated them into formulas and even investigated them
further, breaking them into little chunks to make it easier to
study.
c) flying
d) Industrial Revolution
e) My personal favorite: the first underwater telegraph cable
linking Nova Scotia and Ireland 160 years ago - for me, that was
the birth of the Internet.
f) Packet switching (1963)
g) Newton (and those who clarified his ideas further like
Einstein)
h) That guy in 1948 whose name I forget (sigh) that wrote the
paper on communication and noise - the one who estimated the
redundancy of English language at 73% - I tripped over it in
high school (I'm 42 now) while I was still into CB radio and
just starting BBS's (then ARPANET/Usenet/www etc) - and I've
always had an ear for cutting through the noise to find the
signal. I don't always *find* the signal but I'm always
listening for it.
Prior to that, I'd go with the water wheels (led to Engines,
with magnetic field lines instead of water), patterned sewing
machines/automated weavers (led to computer programming)... and
prior to that Algebra in the 12th century Constanople (and the
fact in general that the area of modern Turkey/Greece were still
teaching ancient Greek classics while the West was mired in the
"middle ages" - how else did the renaissance get their
knowledge? it was never lost!
Before that, the Roman Empire and the Greeks that led up to the
Romans (Romans were great at business, the Greeks were great at
philosophizing - but both were excellent civilzation builders.
Prior to that, you've got the making of alloys... especially the
mixing of carbon into iron.. best idea ever. (my sink would be
rusty without it).
and Egypt with their understandings of surveying (many of their
techniques we use to this day, thousands of years later)... and
prior to that, cutting flint into chunks in successively sharper
methods to allow cutting things.
The Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) is today's version of using a
very sharpened flint to cut something open to see what's inside.
We're just cutting open much much smaller things with a much
sharper flint.^
