5 ms·

This piece is of amazingly low quality. Almost all the "discoveries and innovations" are echoes of work performed before the golden quarter. For example, Alex

by tacon 12y ago

This piece is of amazingly low quality. Almost all the "discoveries and innovations" are echoes of work performed before the golden quarter. For example, Alexander Fleming noticed the effect of penicillin in 1928. The engineering of a useful drug didn't happen until 1942. Sulfanomides were in regular use in the 1930s. But, hey, let's assign "antibiotics" to the Golden Quarter. But the laugh out loud quote is this: "if you were a biologist, physicist or materials scientist, there was no better time to be working" Physics is slower now because the energy levels to probe new phenonmena is getting awfully big, but biology? That is simply ludicrous. The golden age of biology is right now, and for the next fifty years. Today's material scientists are building things atom by atom, with undreamed of properties, and nanotechnology wasn't even a dream back then. I'd summarize the Golden Quarter as that time when the low hanging fruit dropped into the exponential growth of scientific and engineering advances. But the idea that we aren't innovating at a blistering pace today - so far off the mark.

sosuke 12y ago
Can you recommend any other articles that share your view? The perspective of the present time is strange. I share the authors view that progress happened much more rapidly in the past, and that the future always seems 10 years out. Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it?
- hbosch 12y ago
  > Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it? Just look at whatever device is currently in your pants pocket.
  - xnull2guest 12y ago
    Really? I feel like I can do mostly the same - and possibly a little less - with my pocket device than I used to do with my PC in the 90s. (For context I grew up in the 90s as a child programmer.) I feel like the devices do mostly the same stuff, just more of it, and more portably. With new caveats. Obviously the hardware improvements have been incredible. The software capabilities? I'm less inclined. (Software is probably more stable - I'll give it that.)
- dmytrish 12y ago
  It may be just a "distortion" of perception of the past: several decades in the past are much more "succinct" to our present view than a month half a year ago; we look at all the achievements in several decades before us at once, whereas it's an entire half of our own lifespan.
buro9 12y ago
Or another way to view it, WW2 had diverted innovation towards the war effort and the non-war items were stalled until long after the war when the opportunity to commercialise many decades of work arrived within a couple of decades.
beyondcompute 12y ago
Where is my "built atom-by-atom" computer? Where is the nanotechnology? Are you talking about the water-repelling coating on my pants which died away after several washes? Where are my 3D-printed organs? That's exactly the point of the article! We see thousands of amazing things in labs every year. When I will be able to buy any of them in a regular shop? The pace at which things get from labs to end consumers is baffling! We saw DNA-made nano-robots that could deliver drugs to tumors four years ago (in a TED talk). So why all the governments didn't rush to pour billions into that project? We could've seen first results in hospitals by now. And as I understand the article, that's what would happen had we lived in the Golden Quarter. And now we are too doubtful because we're conservative about financial risks and unfocused because we have so many advancements and we cannot fund them all. The author is right. Only amazing (indeed spectacular, jaw-dropping!) things that I've seen in my hands or on the streets in past 20 years are miniaturized electronics (including cameras) and ubiquitous communication (internet). And GPS is cool, by the way.
- dmytrish 12y ago
  Radius of a Silicon atom is about 0.11 nanometers; Intel produces CPUs that have 22 nanometers technology. Not exactly "atom-by-atom", but pretty close (only two orders of magnitude).
  - beyondcompute 12y ago
    Thank you, you are right. But do you get my idea? That the number of qualitatively new things (that give us entirely new capabilities like "not dying from smallpox" or "flying over Atlantic") is suspiciously low in past 20 years. Yes, miniaturization. Yes, GPS. Yes, communication/information access anytime anywhere. Yes, low-clost airlines. Anything else? My computer today can not do many things which Pentium-166 couldn't do. Navigation on iPhone 3G was as good as one on iPhone 5S (New versions of the apps are only getting slower so we're forced to buy new phone every year. But my old one was fast two years ago!)
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago

by tacon 12y ago

sosuke 12y ago

Can you recommend any other articles that share your view? The perspective of the present time is strange. I share the authors view that progress happened much more rapidly in the past, and that the future always seems 10 years out. Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it?

hbosch 12y ago
> Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it? Just look at whatever device is currently in your pants pocket.
- xnull2guest 12y ago
  Really? I feel like I can do mostly the same - and possibly a little less - with my pocket device than I used to do with my PC in the 90s. (For context I grew up in the 90s as a child programmer.) I feel like the devices do mostly the same stuff, just more of it, and more portably. With new caveats. Obviously the hardware improvements have been incredible. The software capabilities? I'm less inclined. (Software is probably more stable - I'll give it that.)
dmytrish 12y ago
It may be just a "distortion" of perception of the past: several decades in the past are much more "succinct" to our present view than a month half a year ago; we look at all the achievements in several decades before us at once, whereas it's an entire half of our own lifespan.

buro9 12y ago

Or another way to view it, WW2 had diverted innovation towards the war effort and the non-war items were stalled until long after the war when the opportunity to commercialise many decades of work arrived within a couple of decades.

beyondcompute 12y ago

Where is my "built atom-by-atom" computer? Where is the nanotechnology? Are you talking about the water-repelling coating on my pants which died away after several washes? Where are my 3D-printed organs? That's exactly the point of the article! We see thousands of amazing things in labs every year. When I will be able to buy any of them in a regular shop? The pace at which things get from labs to end consumers is baffling! We saw DNA-made nano-robots that could deliver drugs to tumors four years ago (in a TED talk). So why all the governments didn't rush to pour billions into that project? We could've seen first results in hospitals by now. And as I understand the article, that's what would happen had we lived in the Golden Quarter. And now we are too doubtful because we're conservative about financial risks and unfocused because we have so many advancements and we cannot fund them all. The author is right. Only amazing (indeed spectacular, jaw-dropping!) things that I've seen in my hands or on the streets in past 20 years are miniaturized electronics (including cameras) and ubiquitous communication (internet). And GPS is cool, by the way.

dmytrish 12y ago
Radius of a Silicon atom is about 0.11 nanometers; Intel produces CPUs that have 22 nanometers technology. Not exactly "atom-by-atom", but pretty close (only two orders of magnitude).
- beyondcompute 12y ago
  Thank you, you are right. But do you get my idea? That the number of qualitatively new things (that give us entirely new capabilities like "not dying from smallpox" or "flying over Atlantic") is suspiciously low in past 20 years. Yes, miniaturization. Yes, GPS. Yes, communication/information access anytime anywhere. Yes, low-clost airlines. Anything else? My computer today can not do many things which Pentium-166 couldn't do. Navigation on iPhone 3G was as good as one on iPhone 5S (New versions of the apps are only getting slower so we're forced to buy new phone every year. But my old one was fast two years ago!)
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago