Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 ]
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" ?
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
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