A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Faraday, after demonstrating how moving a magnet through a coiled wire induced a current in the wire was asked by a visiting statesman what was the use of this.
Faraday responded, "In twenty years, you will be taxing it"
Similarly, at a demonstration of hot air balloons in France, Benjamin Franklin was asked "Of what use is this?"
Franklin replied, "Of what use is a newborn baby?"
Everything I've ever heard about Franklin makes him a boss. This is a new one.
Was he the guy that started that rental car company?
/s
His customers lamented that driving was so boring and they wished there was some magical way for the cars to play music.
Oh well. Nothing to be done there.
This post tickles a fond memory of mine. I was talking to a right-wing libertarian, and he said there should be no research done ever if it couldn't prove beforehand its practical applications. I laughed out loud because I knew how ignorant and ridiculous that statement was. He clearly had never picked up a book on the history of science, on the history of these things:
Bullshit. Lasers have been intended to gain interplanetary superiority since the dawn of time. We just didnt know how to make them or that they could also be used to read music from a circle
When talking with libertarians you should keep in mind they have completely different axiomatic values. It is often the case that they understand a certain policy would be on net bad for everyone, they simply don't care. They are rarely utilitarian about those issues.
I get along much better with libertarians who justify libertarianism with values extrinsic to just "muh freedom" -- they are usually much more willing to yield ground in places where I can convince them that a libertarian policy would be net negative, and they have also moved me to be more open minded about some things I thought I would never agree with.
I feel like I hear about this guy once every second
Whatever you do, love Hertz
He probably would have figured it out had he had time to evolve into Megahertz.
He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior, and much too young, wasn't he in his late-30s or early-40s?
In fact, I believe that had Hertz remained alive and won his prize, the Nobel Committee would not have felt obliged to give it to Marconi a few years later.
Marconi was a back-stabbing asshole who became one of the wealthiest men in the world by abusing the gentlemanly trust of others, and coasting on someone else's technology - particularly the way crystals oscillate, and some of them serve nicely as a sort of "translation point" between electromagnetic waves and the physical apparatus that transmits and/or receives the signal.
Then ascended to become pure EM spectrum as his final Gigahertz form.
With great power comes great corruption and tyranny. So begins the dark era of Terahertz
Only can Petahertz rise from the ashes of darkness and re-engineer the Universe before the incoming Heat Death
"Hello, is that DarkHorse comics?
Boy, do I have an epic 5-phase graphic novel for you!"
If you think about it, almost all computer-technology is radio. Wifi, bluetooth, GPS, radar, and cellular are literally radio. Meanwhile everything else runs on transistor tech developed and refined... for radios.
Our modern economy couldn't exist if people like Hertz and Maxwell didn't get to toy with their useless hobbies. But we can't rely on the curiosity of the leisure class anymore. Basic research is expensive, necessary, and a public good. I'm afraid that the Trump regime has already spoiled the secret sauce that makes America the technology leader of the world.
Even more than that, just proving Maxwell was right was a key stepping stone to all of modern physics. Maxwell, not Einstein, was the first to show that the speed of light is invariant, and Einstein's Relativity was a framework for explaining how tf physics works if that's actually true. Prior to Einstein, physists all just kind of assumed there was some flaw in Maxwell's theorems to lead to this crazy speed invariance, but as the evidence just kept piling up in favor of Maxwell, they started having to wrestle with the uncomfortable thought that this could actually be true. In this sense, Hertz can also be thought of as an important step to Einstein and beyond, and almost all of our modern technology.
It's getting pretty drafty up here. Giants on shoulders of giants all the way down. I can't even see the bottom anymore.
Transistors were mostly developed for telephone systems (the ones with wires) as a replacement for tubes. And the modern tech used for radios is very different from that used for computers.
Ithink you could be more charitable in your reply. Transistors were developed to replace tubes in telephone systems... Okay but the tubes had been developed to where they were because of their usefulness in radio.
And while computers don't inherently rely on radio, it's radio communication that's taken computers from one in every office to one in everyone's pocket. Right? The main thrust of the previous commenter is true.
I mean, it would be some 25 years until the radio was invented. And Hertz' machine required a 30kV spark on a 2.5m meter long antenna with 2 solid 30cm zinc spheres, and his transmission range was something like "barely down the hall".
Not the most practical method.
I'm sure someone thinks it's perfect for their use case, semi relevant xkcd:
At least physics will never get patched. The spark device with zinc spheres will always do that thing.
FCC: And get you arrested
Fun fact: The german word for using a radio is "funken"; literally "to spark". A radioman is, or was, a "Funker". When you are talking over the radio, you are doing it "Über Funk".
I LOVE SIGNAL PROCESSING
Half of the field is viable thanks to a single algorithm: FFT
FFT was a DARPA project. It alone probably makes all their funding worth it.
I feel like this is a very "scientisty" thing - the theoretical aspect is so fascinating and being able to fit all the pieces into a model that is mathematically accurate is the reward.
Considering the practical application of the model and how it can benefit society (or in other words, be marketed for profit) takes a different set of skills.
I absolutely detest the equivocation of "benefits society" and "marked for profit".
Plenty of things have been discovered to have practical applications which can benefit society yet are shelved or have its implementation frustrated because it cannot be exploited for profit or threatens the profits of a preexisting application which it would replace.
There's a good NPR podcast in the same vein as this: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/21/533840751/episode-779-shrimp-fight-club
It's about congressman talking about government waste and targeting the sciences. It's like, you don't get the "cool" applications without the "weird" research. I'm doing a horrible job describing it, but I thought it was a good listen.
Planet Money has some really good episodes. Unfortunately, a lot of filler as well.
this type of science-discovery to usefulness-realization latency is the norm, pretty sure Curie didn't envision nuclear power plants
I suppose it's like asking a biologist what type of dishes would they do with a plant species they just discovered
Is that not what drives biologists, trying to eat new discoveries before someone else
This may be an even better example than the positron. Originally a theoretical antimatter form of the common electron, with no practical application.
Turned out to be a vital tool for medical imaging. If you or someone you know has ever had a PET scan, now you know what the P stands for.
And this is why science shouldn't be beheld to the whims of politicians and capitalists
I mean, why would a guy that started a car rental company know anything about radio waves?
Gotcha!
I thought he was a baker. When I was a kid people would always be talking about "Hertz donuts". Then they'd punch me. I never knew why.
~~Aperture~~ Science! We do what we must because we can!
