carey_jim

Two Lessons from the Last Century

Most people are agreed that virtually all the wars fought in the twentieth century were mistakes, so the first thing we learn from the history of the twentieth century is that we couldn't profit from that knowledge.

Clearly it is better for us humans to dedicate our scarce resources to 'butter' instead of 'guns' and especially if the war is a futile reality show war for the rich, such as the Vietnam war or the Iraq war.

So if we are going to learn anything from the history of the twentieth century, it will be that more futile wars, based on the paranoid fantasies of the rich, will be fought in the twenty first century and therefore weapons manufacturers will prosper.

The next lesson is that we haven't got the slightest idea which technological and scientific discoveries will bring value into our lives or even if new ones will be discovered.

For example, it is NOT an urban legion but is true that around 1900, the head of the U.S. patent office advised that the patent office should be closed down, not because he thought it was a socialist plot to take over America but because he honestly thought most inventions had already been discovered and so there was no need for a patent office.

This was a common attitude around 1900. It was also thought that physics had discovered everything there was to be known and would thereafter be even more boring than the average citizen thinks it is today, because it would just be a matter of memorizing results.

But there were a few tiny, almost academic puzzles which were barely visible on the horizon but which produced the quantum physics and relativity revolutions which blew away the illusions of the classical physicists and ushered in modern technology.

That is to say,almost everyone was wrong about the future of technology at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Consider: When railroads were invented in the early nineteenth century, it was thought that they would be useful only as feeding lines to canals because shipping was considered the major form of hauling goods.

When Marconi invented the radio (the wireless) in the beginning of the twentieth century, he thought it would only be useful in ships because it wasn't possible to lay wires between ships and the shore. Some people thought it might be useful on Sunday because it was the only time when people sat around and listened to one man talk.

David Sarnoff, who was a poor immigrant, was the only one with enough vision to imagine it could be used for other things and he became the president of RCA.

When the laser was invented at AT&T in the mid-twentieth century, the scientists and lawyers at AT&T didn't even think it was necessary to patent laser technology because they couldn't foresee any applications in the telephone business. Of course, lasers turned out to be, arguably one of the most important and lucrative discoveries of the twentieth century.

This list could be expanded almost indefinitely.

We also don't even know where to direct our basic research:

Bernard Riemann was an obscure German mathematician of very poor health and almost pathologically shy. In the 1870s, he developed a very arcane area of pure mathematics called differential geometry which had no applications at all and was considered by everyone to be of academic interest only. Riemann had no interest in money and made very little.

In the early years of the twentieth century, an obscure physicist with a very bad academic record who also had no interest in the practical world or in money, just happened to be working in a government patent office, where he used the differential geometry discovered by Riemann to build a theory that solved one of the obscure puzzles of physics. He called his solution Relativity Theory.

Relativity Theory was scoffed at by most classical physicists well into the twentieth century as of academic interest only, and as a kind of mathematical trick without practical value. After 1945, all scoffing stopped.

The lessons of the twentieth century:

1. Wars will continue to be fought and associated stocks will rise.

2. The most important scientific and technological research will be in areas that conventional scientists and citizens will scoff at and think completely impractical and useless.

3. When great scientific discoveries are made, they wont be appreciated until long afterward and by that time will become party of the machinery that obstructs further scientific progress. (Microsoft is an example of this.)