I just came across a piece by Om celebrating Ethernet's 50th birthday. A must-read if you don't know the history of this foundational technology. Bob Metcalfe called it Ethernet as a play on the luminiferous aether that was used to explain how light could populate through the universe
I won't go into how the concept of the luminiferous aether came about, other than it was something of a hack that was needed given the knowledge of the day even though it was clear much about it was wrong. Science is full of explanations that become dated with new discoveries. Sometimes the old models work so well that they still find use for calculations and pedagogy. Newtonian mechanics is still used in intro physics and is good enough for SpaceX, but falls apart for the map on your smartphone.
By the mid 19th century issues with the luminiferous aether were beginning to fill books. Issues that made it appear more like magic than science. It had to be a fluid to completely fill space, it had to be massless, it had to be billions of times stiffer than steel and have zero viscosity, it had to be perfectly transparent, and so on. Most people would probably say "we don't understand it", ignore thinking about it and just proceed with what they had the tools to work on.
A few experimentalists tried to prove or disprove its existence. Michelson and Morley showed there was no difference in the speed of light caused by the motion of the solar system. That and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity pretty much put a nail in the coffin of the luminiferous aether. The vacuum of space back then was a void.
All well and good except it isn't.
Michael Faraday, playing around with electricity and magnetism nearly two hundred years ago, had the remarkable insight to think of electric and magnetic fields to explain how electric charges and magnets worked at a distance. He didn't have the math to create a robust theory, but his insight is one of those astonishing events that changed history and one of the great moments in science. Next, around the time of the American Civil War, James Clerk Maxwell published his equations - the first field theory that united the electric and magnetic forces.
The move to towards field theories in fundamental physics continued and Quantum Field Theory is the most accurate theory in all of science. The Standard Model, how we think about the Universe (except for gravity) is a collection of about 17 fields (depending on how you count) - one is associated with each fundamental particle. "Particle" as a tiny ball that might be charged or have some other property isn't what's happening. Rather there's a field that fills space for each type of particle. Electromagnetism uses two - the photon and electron fields. Neutrons and protons use up and down quark fields, the Higgs field basically allows the universe as we know it to exist, and so on..
What we think of a particle is an excitation of the appropriate field. A proton is something we learn about in grade school. It isn't fundamental, but rather made of three quarks.1 So a proton is a collection of up and down quark excitations. To a physicist the vacuum isn't a void.. it contains all of these fields. If unexcited there won't be a particle (although they crackle with virtual creation and extinction all the time .. so fast that you mostly don't note it), but if you whack the vacuum hard enough, there's enough energy to excite one or more of the fields and a particle appears. The large hadron collider is able to concentrate enormous amounts of energy in tiny spaces to do just that - whack the vacuum.
So the universe is filled with these fields - it's fair to think of them as a fluid of sorts. The view of an aether is a nice description of the vacuum, except the banishment of the luminiferous aether as made the use of the term taboo.
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1 A proton is much more complex than just three quarks, but for the purpose of a non-technical description. And further on there are some deep mysteries about the vacuum indicating there's much to learn.
bondi blue
a minipost
Ask elite beach volleyball players to name their favorite beach and Bondi Beach often comes up. The sand isn't world class, but the water - that amazing blue - can take your breath away. There's a bit of a controversy on pronunciation, but I've heard an Australian player go with bond-eye.
The surprise success of the iMac set off a tidal wave of design element copycats. Suddenly everything from routers to hair dryers sported translucent cases - often in bondi blue. As far as I can tell the new design language didn't case a sensation in any of the non-Apple markets.
In the past month I've seen partly thought-out plans to include LLMs like ChatGPT in some way into existing or newly dreamed up products. None of them were clearly articulated. Somehow ChatGPT or an equivalent would supply the appropriate magic. LLMs have become the new bondi blue (bondization?) There are clear usage cases as well as those that aren't. I suspect a lot of money will be burned with a single digit survival rate .. sort of what one sees during Cambrian explosions.
I won't comment here on the dangers of these technologies other than noting regulation is necessary with a well-defined "open", ownership of rights to all training data, evolution of regulation, etc. History across many industries tells us industry shouldn't be involved in its own regulation.
Posted at 04:57 PM in general comments, history of technology, miniposts, society and technology, technology | Permalink | Comments (0)
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