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Cellphones As a Fifth-Order Elaboration of Maxwell's Theory (ieee.org)
schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum that reflects on the "Stages of Electronics" based on James Clerk Maxwell's theory: Now that the world has become addicted to portable electronics, billions of people have come to see the companies providing these gadgets as the most innovative, and the people who head those companies as the most exalted, of all time. "Genius" is a starter category in this discussion. But clever and appealing though today's electronic gadgets may be, to the historian they are nothing but the inevitable fifth-order elaborations of two fundamental ideas: electromagnetic radiation, the theory of which was formulated by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s, and miniaturized fabrication, which followed Richard Feynman's 1959 dictum [PDF] that "there's plenty of room at the bottom." Maxwell was a true genius. The history of science offers few examples of work as brilliant as unifying electricity, magnetism, and light as aspects of a single phenomenon: electromagnetic waves. As Max Planck put it, "in doing so he achieved greatness unequalled."
Vaclav Smil writes via IEEE: "As I pass the zombielike figures on the street, oblivious to anything but their cellphone screens, I wonder how many of them know that the most fundamental advances enabling their addictions came not from Nokia, Apple, Google, Samsung, or LG. These companies' innovations are certainly admirable, but they amount only to adding a few fancy upper floors to a magnificent edifice whose foundations were laid by Maxwell 152 years ago and whose structure depends on decades-old advances that made it possible to build electronics devices ever smaller."
Vaclav Smil writes via IEEE: "As I pass the zombielike figures on the street, oblivious to anything but their cellphone screens, I wonder how many of them know that the most fundamental advances enabling their addictions came not from Nokia, Apple, Google, Samsung, or LG. These companies' innovations are certainly admirable, but they amount only to adding a few fancy upper floors to a magnificent edifice whose foundations were laid by Maxwell 152 years ago and whose structure depends on decades-old advances that made it possible to build electronics devices ever smaller."
Without his work on the information theory, it seems that this feat would also not be possible (got my master in electronics a couple of years ago, and information theory was more important than both other points).
Modern consumers almost never consider the origins of complex digital devices (or any other inventions for that matter), and our societies go as far as mocking the "nerds" than make such inventions happen. They don't realize that Apple didn't invent cellular technology because they simply don't give a shit. To the average consumer, a cell phone is only marginally different from a piece of fruit picked from a tree.
There is no such thing as a genius; there's a reason Maxwell and his work happened when it did.
I know that technological innovation is driven by theory and math but I don't understand how.
Someone has a theory.
Someone later figures out how to use that theory to do something cool.
Profit.
So, what theory/math needed to be figured out to give us the iPhone?
Without his work, it seems that Shannon's feat would not be possible.
That should be the universal law, like some crazed version of Kant's categorical imperative. It would stop people bumping into me as I go about my daily business too.
On the other hand, I did build a (sort-of) computer in about 1966, but the discrete transistors, solder, printed circuit blanks etc. etc. came from an electronics supply store. So I probably wouldn't be able to make this suggestion using a computer that I bought pre-built.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
>But clever and appealing though today's electronic gadgets may be, to the historian they are nothing but the inevitable fifth-order elaborations of two fundamental ideas: electromagnetic radiation, the theory of which was formulated by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s, and miniaturized fabrication, which followed Richard Feynman's 1959 dictum [PDF] that "there's plenty of room at the bottom."
Maxwell and Feynman were indeed geniuses. But a historian would know that just because something happened (the invention of cellphones and similar gadgets) doesn't mean it's inevitable. Also it is very reductionist, but maybe that's the point? One could also include Planck or Boole or Shannon or Turing or others too.
And while Feynman can rightly be considered the grandfather of nanotechnology, work on integrated circuits had already begun at the time of his first talk on nanoscale manufacturing. I love the guy but it didn't take Feynman's ideas (or Drexler's for that matter) for people to understand the benefits of integrated circuitry.
Those companies are innovative, but if you're going to point out the foundations they build on, I'd like to also point out the government and non-profit research organizations like universities.
GPS and the internet for example, they were not invented by companies.
The government is the single largest risk investor. Companies only integrate these technologies into market-fitting packages, which is the most visible part, and thus they get too much credit.
To have a good discussion it might be useful to distinguish between three phases in how technology spreads: invention, innovation and diffusion.
really, no.
the hardware enabling comes first. what you do with it comes second. there are inventions and then there are what you would call obvious ideas.
most visible advancements come from the latter while it's inventions and things that enabled those inventions which enable them.
for example, if there had not been apple, if there had not been nokia, you would still have that mobile phone - what these companies have mostly done is just applying inventions that enabled their devices to be made, like the transistor and so forth.
information theory therefore comes second, it's about what you do with them - but it is something that was born out of need for it due to other inventions already existing.
as obviously you are working mostly in applications of electric devices and what you can do with them, information theory is more important for you, because you aren't really trying to design a smaller chip and break chip manufacturing minimum size limits, in which case you would find the physics research to have been way more valuable for you - and without those devices that are enabled by science you wouldn't be using them for engineering solutions using them.
shannon seems mostly having been interested in the logic side of things: If you have a machine that does this and this what will be the logical conclusion that you can do with it - people like this are far more likely to pop up rather than the kind of people who come up with the new device itself - for example an internal combustion engine meant quite a lot of changes to the world, once you had that it didn't take quite as much imagination to use it for something as it did to actually come up with a design for a working motor - but once you had the motor it would be obvious to use it to generate electricity, to drive cars, to drive boats and so forth.
incidentally this difference is how you can smell bullshit sellers a million miles away: if someone is selling like a perpetual motion machine that makes water or a car that runs on water, you need to ask yourself: why isn't he applying it to such and such.
the thorium car from a while back for example: who fucking cares if it can run a car forever when, if they had a working model for the power source, they would be using it on a car as the last thing on earth making the whole design and articles about it utterly stupid. Having the power generating unit would change the whole world and the cars would be the last thing to change, so why try to sell the idea as a car engine as the first thing?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Cue in citation about standing on giants' shoulders by Sir Isaac Newton.
Yup in reality - unlike what TV show and glamour media want you to think - there isn't such a thing as a "revolution" and "geniuses" in science.
Science is mainly an iterative process that build upon what was known and possible up to now and pushes the boundary a little bit further on each step.
It's not powered by "geniuses", but by brilliant humans that are able to notice what is available to them and how to combine these things to push the above mentioned boundaries.
That means that you can't trace back the "smartphone" as a single revolution started by one single person.
Countless scientists have each added their small brick to the Great Wall.
(e.g.: We could also add Volta : all current gizmo are electricity powered).
The flip side of this is that geeks and nerds tend to never be amazed by new technology.
We tend to realise that the latest over hyped and marketing pushed "revolution", is basically an evolution of what we've done in the past decade, only a tiny bit better.
(Nope, Apple's iPhone didn't start the smartphone. Only the mass-marketed smartphone craze. Idea of portable computers have been in the wild for quite some time with companies producing PDAs like Palm, Apple's own Newton, Psion, etc.)
The *yawn* reaction that you get from /. isn't merely condescending. It's just that we are better aware on which giant's shoulder the latest craze is standing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A group of kids at school are building a tower out of legos. A new kid walks up and snaps a the final block into place and all the parents say "What a beautiful tower you've built!", hoist the kid on their shoulders, parade him around while cheering, and finally shower him with candy.
The other kids just sit there silently with a glum look on their faces. One of the parents says "what about them? I think we have a few pieces of unwanted candy we can toss their way".
Einstein described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton"
Electromagnetism is just a corner case of electroweak theory. Take that, Maxwell!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Most of them don't even know that they are a form of two-way radio. They think "cell" means some magic new "digital" technology, not the same waves that carried the Ed Sullivan show to their grandparent's homes via the rabbit-eared B&W TV on Sunday nights.
No mention of free markets? Iterative science is great, it is usually funded by non-geeks pursuing profitable business and products. And, uhh, hate to say it but most nerd frustrations come from a lack of a normal sexual progression, not "zombies on the streets" who dont know how a PCB works.
Don't forget fire. Without fire how would they melt all the components and form it into their correct shapes?
I stopped reading when I saw: "Now that the world has become addicted to portable electronics ..."
Not one of these authors mention the fact that many people will gladly do without portable electronics, but they have not choice but to use them.
The fact that mobile phones are affordable, almost all populated areas have coverage and they enable people to get in touch at any moment, brings the _expectation_ that everyone has a cell phone with then and can be contacted at any moment.
Let's say you live in a large city and you tell your boss "I will check with you when I get to a public phone".
Will your boss tell you "OK, check with me when you get to a public phone", or "Get a cell phone" ?
They stand on the shoulders of giants. They are not innovators. They just refine what was already there and make it more attractive to the average person.
See also: Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.
the thorium car from a while back for example: who fucking cares if it can run a car forever when, if they had a working model for the power source, they would be using it on a car as the last thing on earth making the whole design and articles about it utterly stupid. Having the power generating unit would change the whole world and the cars would be the last thing to change, so why try to sell the idea as a car engine as the first thing?
What if you discovered you could make free phone calls with a toy whistle you found in a cereal box, but you only ever used it to dial a joke?
Their moronic cousins spread across the globe are no better
That means the whole human race right? We're all descended from migration out of Africa.
Father of computational electromagnetics Zoltan Cendes, named his flagship product Maxwell(tm). He is the one figured out how to remove the null space of the curl vector from the computational solutions. Before that naively applying finite element formulation to Maxwell's equations yielded garbage. His edge-vector finite element formulation is the gold standard in getting computational EM results.
This brings up what Linus said recently. One would think Maxwell's equation was all "innovation". But remember, Maxwell did not work in the vector calculus! He was working in analytical geometry, Cartesian coordinate system. Laboriously wrote out the expanded forms of the gradient operator and worked through the equivalent of the cross product explicitly term by goddammed term. I see Computational EM developers struggling to keep up with the math even with the use of Matlab and Mathematica software packages handling symbolic algebra. That he did it all in analytical geometry, for the first time, without knowing all the gibberish he was writing down will eventually lead to a breakthrough....
Is it possible other great mathematicians of his day had this idea? Probably. Some might have even pointed the direction to Maxwell himself. But, in the end, trudging through all that algebra and coordinate geometry in the long form laboriously is what made that breakthrough possible. Yes, innovation is needed as the spark. But, blood, sweat and toil contribute a lot more to success.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
To us gravity surfers you're all a bit thick.
Holy pretentious twiddle twaddle batman. The excerpt in the summary reads like some nerd's passive aggressive love poem to his dead scientific man crush (more often seen with Tesla as the object). Good to see IEEE Spectrum keeping the quality high.
History has had some geniuses, usually people able to think through consequences, model mentally, where math is one of the languages.. I like Kepler who spend years calculating the course of Mars who's position was recorded by another fanatic. It drove him insane while he was fleeing from wars and losing children. Impressive stuff. When minds align with the physical reality you can move away from mere entropic outcomes..
Let's say you live in a large city and you tell your boss "I will check with you when I get to a public phone". Will your boss tell you "OK, check with me when you get to a public phone", or "Get a cell phone" ?
You couldn't get away with that in the USA. Public phones, or pay phones, are dead. Almost none exist any more. They are so rare that I've been known to take photos of them in amazement just to show people that a few of them actually do still exist.
I don't think anybody here thought Steve Jobs invented the electricity. Hopefully.
A fairly reasonable "decide that amount" is "you can have as much freedom as you want, as long as you don't deprive other people of the same freedom." That's been a legitimate social consensus for a very long time.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Is there anything else to say? ...
It seems to me it's always Version 2.? of a product that has the longest service life and is the most reliable, sometimes with hidden advanced features. Possibly because version 1 is just out of prototype and version 3 is starting to have engineered redundancy.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
And here you both argue the chicken and the egg problem, and you both are wrong.
Hardware and software go hand in hand. One pushes the other as much as the other pushes the first.
Turing did a lot of computer science and information theory developments that were ahead of his time, because there was no hardware capable of implementing them.
Fleming, developing the first vacuum tube diode, had no idea it would be later used to perform computations.
That was in the pioneering times. Currently, it's a constant push. Faster processors, to run available software faster. More elaborate software, making use of the new capabilities provided by the new processors. And again, faster processors to enable that software to run faster.
ID software pushed the CPU to its limits with Doom and Quake. Then 3dfx Voodoo was released, to offload the processor, and allow even more elaborate games. More advanced games pushed more advanced GPUs... and then protein folding happened. Computations that could take decades, finished within weeks, thanks to special purpose processors invented for gaming.
This is a joint progress, happening on too many fronts simultaneously, too many advances both contributing and demanding more advances, that trying to discretize it and say 'this before this' is silly.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I enjoyed this article. But I have to wonder. I just read an unflattering portrayal of people zombieing down the street glued to their social media phone. Before that, I read about how testosterone is not helpful for aging men. Has the Slashdot pendulum swung over into greybeard territory? How soon until every article sounds like my Uncle Kenny moaning about whats wrong with the world from his rocker?
A whole bunch of them are stupid as posts. They voted for Trump. Pretty sure they think Jobs invented the personal computer, too.
- that in reality is mere click-bait. I'm sad, where's my safe space.
I can do all of that. Hell, I could build you logic gates out of running water and bits of wood. If you want a computer, that'll take more water. And wood. :) It's not like it's hard. If you can cobble up a NAND gate, you can make anything you want from there. And all I have is a G.E.D. Well, that, and 50 years of experience in designing analog from DC to UHF, all manner of digital electronics, graphics and microprocessor systems, a commercial FCC license and an extra class ham license, topped off with 43-ish years (from 1974 if you're counting) of software experience that starts with toggle switching in monitors, boot loaders and other little gems in binary on up to major desktop applications written in various MLLs and HLLs with the occasional fallback to asm.
You know. Your basic unemployable old guy. But HEY! How are those PHP scripting jobs going for you folks?
Screw 3DFX. Motorola came out with the 6845 to offload video from the processor and boost video performance.
What, you're talking about fifth-order technology with no nods to Richard Seaton and Martin Crane? I think I'll just leave it at that, and see how old this makes me.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
- Quantum theory (which lead to modern semiconductor technology, and perhaps superconductors and superconductor-based switches and electronics in the future)
and
- The concept of a programmable machine - the computer, as a unit formed by hardware and software.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I have a T-shirt with Maxwell's equations on it. And I have walked actual streets wearing it to not one sh*t being given. Not that I expect any applause for wearing it, But probably 10,000 people have walked by me as I was wearing it and I do wonder what % of those people had any clue what the hell was printed on my shirt. I suspect probably 1 in 500 since only a fraction of 1% of the population take EE classes or enough physics to know Maxwell. My kids is a premed and took his physics prereqs like 2 years ago. 2 semesters worth. It was "calc based" physics but I looked at the work they did and it really wasn't very calc based and even in 2 semesters they never dove deep into Maxwell. Most kids get at most 1 semester and never get much beyong F=ma and vectors. Very sad....
Ought to have mentioned Heaviside, as Maxwells four equations in differential form are a product of Heaviside. He is also responsible for coaxial cable, the Laplace transform, and many other things. Heaviside made Maxwells equations practical.
Really, why is it necessary to rain on the parade of tech innovators, even if indirectly, in order to complement Maxwell?
It seems that to a Physicist, "there are 4 fundamental forces and all else that follows is mere detail". Which again, reminds me of the pointless and chest bumping arguments as to which science is "best", Physics, Biology, or Chemistry.
Maxwell is great. He did not, however, manage to change mass culture. These are different spheres of greatness, requiring different tools, different innovations, and different skillsets. The tech ecosystem which created and sustains smartphones is therefore rather more than "... only [...] a few fancy upper floors..."
If that's all that microprocessors, cellular networks, software design and development, and a reasonable revenue model were, then Maxwell would have accomplished this on his coffee break on Friday after a long week sweating over Electromagnetic Theory. He didn't, nor did any of his contemporaries and that should tell you something.
The fact that Vaclav Smil also didn't accomplish any of this but manages to dismiss these accomplishments also tells me something.
you're way off dude. Have you ever even heard of the stork?
There's a similar story to tell on the software side, of course. The principles underlying the operating environment go back to the mid sixties or earlier, and the user interface concepts were developed (on much larger and much slower systems) primarily in the early to mid seventies. Some of these things have been re-invented, and there are admittedly many innovations in modern systems, but other concepts and techniques are directly traceable to artifacts created in industrial and university research laboratories decades ago.
I still got my Voodoo 3 3500 w TV In/Out. I also have my previous video card, a 4 MB S3 Virge! Dungeon Keeper never looked so good!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Surely, without Aristotle's work, Boole would not have been able to produce his work.
The challenge, of course, is defining what "deprive others of that freedom" means. Does it mean you can't deprive other people of the freedom to have the source code to your work that extends the original work, or does it mean you can't deprive other people of the freedom to make private extensions to the original work? That's fundamentally the difference between the GPL and BSD licensees is what other group of people you want to deprive of freedom.
Arguably, the BSD license is more free because the existence of a private fork doesn't deprive anyone of anything; the original work is still freely available. But on the other hand, you could argue that some of those changes merely fix bugs, and thus are not rightfully new works, and should be available to anyone who has the original software. It's a fine line, and there's no absolute right answer.
The reason the public mocks nerds, of course, is that they argue vociferously over which license is correct, which takes time away from actually making the technology better, and is often seen as a waste of everyone's time. On the other hand, without those arguments (which expand the community's understanding of the licenses and their eccentricities), there's a possibility of critical projects choosing a license that is inappropriate and ending up stuck with it to the detriment of everyone.
For example, the FSF's decision to relicense GCC under GPLv3 created stagnation in its largest user base (the Mac community), with OS X users stuck at a much older version for years, until eventually Apple worked with the LLVM team to replace it with Clang. To be fair, in the end, everybody benefitted from a more modular compiler architecture that could better be integrated into things like IDEs, so the resulting platform is more capable than GCC ever was (or ever will be, in all likelihood), but the bad licensing decision meant that the teams couldn't take advantage of each other's work, which no doubt made that transition take much longer than it otherwise would have and resulted in a lot of duplication of work, ultimately culminating in GCC becoming an evolutionary dead end that's still a giant time sink to maintain (and that, no doubt, will continue to be maintained for many years, for no real reason other than because it exists and has to work).
So in spite of the public's belief that this is all a bunch of silly squabbles like Star Wars versus Star Trek, the reality is that there are real-world implications of these arguments, making them at least somewhat valuable (up to a point, anyway).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Playing the devil's advocate
There was a time people believed combustion was "phlogiston" exiting the material;
Which isn't entirely wrong. It's just the same usual equations but with an arbitrary minus sign in front of the oxygen.
(Just as you could mathematically describe orbits with a complex bunch of circles, but using ellipses makes it way much simpler for everyone).
blood was generated and consumed in the body (not circulated);
(medieval dark-age medecine hardly qualifies as a science. more of a superstition.
christian middle-age somewhat focused on a very small subset of the knowledge (mainly Aristotle) available in antiquity that happen to play nicer with their religious believes.)
(Real notion of blood circulation can already be found in many other greek scientist and as far back as egyptian antiquity.
Middle age just settled on Aristotle body humors for an arbitrary reason)
the Sun revolved around the Earth;
and then Einstein came and declared that everything is relative and it's only a matter of referential.
(You can pretty much put whatever you want in "your center", all relativist equation remain valid).
All of these ideas were eventually discarded through a process that was not incremental, but revolutionary.
and which yet still build-up on several other smaller past discoveries to arrive at the big conclusion:
mice could be "created" by leaving some food and rags alone in a bucket in a barn for a few days, while fly maggots were "generated" in meat.
the disproving of which requires both preliminary advances in chemistry (e.g.: Le Chatelier - matter can't just pop up into existence) and general understanding of evolution (e.g.: Darwin - mice must come from other mices or at least ancestrors close to modern mices) and in turn has interesting implication in germ theory (Pasteur - bacteria can't just pop into existence, exactly as mice can't neither) and for medecin (Koch and the identification of agents causing diseases).
Around Maxwell`s days it was believed aether was needed for the propagation of electromagnetic waves
And yet Maxell didn't competely invent electro magnetism out of the blue. (again, e.g.: Volta for a much older contributor) Even the word Electrictiy come from old Greek "electron" =amber, i.e.: the thing that you need to rub with cloth to generate static electricity.
And in turn his models were perfected by Einstein, and then further into quantum physics (Heisenberg and co).
and the age of the Earth was under estimated because the radio active processes preventing a more rapid cooling down were unknown.
yet, some geologists did came to differing conclusion due to plate tectonics.
And you needed the advance by the Curies couple to then be able to advance calculation of the Earth thermal cooling. And isotope dating too.
Yup. Some steps are wider than others, but they still built upon all the knowledge that was accumulated up to this point and start as far back as when the first monkey-man lifted up his nose and started wondering about the stars in the sky instead of just thinking about where to get the next fruit.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
that would be funny