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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."
>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.
The robber barons (Google, Facebook, Uber) remember government very well, when they want to externalize the costs of beating up protesters and jailing dissidents who oppose their profiteering.
It is funny how many people on here are insisting so strongly that the number of people involved in discovering something like electromagnetism is so small. Multiple posts act as if people could be counted on one hand of revolutionaries, explicitly stating they were the types to create things in a vacuum without the help of others.
Yet Maxwell is a perfect example of this. While his contributions are significant, the equations famously attributed to him are mostly the work of Gauss, Faraday, and Ampere. He found a missing term in Faraday's work that was important, but still his work depends heavily on those before him, and much of their work depends on experiments and preceding work, etc. Maxwell also didn't fully realize the implication of these equations, and it took the work of many that followed to see this and figure out how to make it apply to actual inventions (hell, the original version of Maxwell's equations were much messier and harder to work with due to quaternion notation instead of modern vector notation that makes it much more compact).