And I'm stunned... Absolutely stunned by the amount of knowledge that mankind has discovered.
The scientific discoveries, the mathematics behind it...
BUT what I'm stunned isn't that we have discovered it, but rather, how long ago we discovered it.
It appears that mankind has known of a lot of the mathematics of science for pretty long.
Quantum mechanics was already a thing in the time of Einstein, around 1920, although he was working more on relativity. Early quantum theory was profoundly re-conceived in the mid-1920s by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and others.
In 1964, Belgium's Francois Englert and Britain's Peter Higgs independently theorized the existence of a subatomic particle that came to be known as the Higgs boson.
Many of us weren't even born yet!
It appears that many many scientific discoveries, scientists have calculated, made predictions of the existence of, analyzed things, many many years ago.
BUT only manage to be slowly refined merely recently.
And many of us, will never know or read about these discoveries, simply because it's not in our place.
We'll never know the history behind all these discoveries unless we are interested in it, OR it applies to some form of technology which we eventually use.
It is like... computers...
Long long time ago, there were computers, apparently in the 18xx somethings, some guy called Charles Babbage invented something like a calculator...
https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/inventions/who-invented-the-computer.htm
it's not the digital kind of calculator we know now...
Then we have those other computers which did calculations for the governments.
And for war time use for decoding encrypted messages...
And we keep fast forwarding that...
And now we have a laptop, a smart phone... Everyone has one... and yet just a couple of decades ago, it would seem that not everyone would own a computer.
We've come a long way. But we hardly realize that the knowledge has been around for sometime. Just that the technology isn't adequate yet.
It's like the calculation of the Higgs Boson was known for very long, but it wasn't proven until pretty recently when the Large Hadron Collider was built.
And that's what really amazes me. That really some of the brightest minds are looking into these things.
And many of these things we don't know about, we don't hear about it, cos it's not in our field of knowledge.
But it's out there. The knowledge is out there.
But we don't know about it cos it has nothing to do with us. Or nothing to do with us yet.
It's like quantum physics most of us don't know much about it... but we're starting to look at quantum computers. IBM, Google, Microsoft are all looking into it. And apparently it would potentially unlock significantly larger computing powers.
Once again these computers are big and need to be in sub-zero temperatures to work... but someday, maybe... we might get there.
So the thing is... I'm baffled. And amazed... and I wonder. What else have I not read up about?
I don't even know what to search for.
Maybe there's medical ideas which have been thought through but not yet actually practiced cos of the lack of technology.
Or other ideas which are mathematically possible but the technology hasn't caught up with the idea yet.
Or maybe the opportunity to test for the phenomenon hasn't presented itself yet...
Like gravitational waves, theorized more than 100 years ago, where there is a ripple in space-time due to a cataclysmic event like when 2 black holes crash into each other, similar to dropping a pebble in a pond, the clashing of the 2 black holes would send a ripple through space-time. But humans had to wait til only in 2015 when they had the opportunity to detect such a phenomenon cos the ripple took time to travel from the "crash site" to Earth so that we can actually detect it.
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gravitational-waves/en/
And personally, I find all these sad, cos... for me, I love science and knowledge. Ideas, possibilities, thoughts, and... I feel it's a pity that we don't hear about these more often.
Many of us don't know that there are a lot of researchers in many countries working on the bleeding edge of science and technology. And the stuff we see and use... in terms of knowledge, these are obsolete.
It's just that all these different forms of knowledge hasn't trickled down in terms of technology to us.
The science is there, but the engineers haven't built stuff based on the knowledge yet.
So whenever we see or use any form of technology, actually, it's being built on science or principles decades old.
And I find it amazing... When I look at the stuff we use, the stuff we own.
We, as mankind have gone a long way. And I wonder what other discoveries and technology will be available for us to use in future.
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