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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine some average non-technical young person in his or her mid 20s who time travels and appears naked before someone like Newton or Maxwell.

It would be interesting to imagine the conversation when they try to decipher the future science and technology from the "commoner" from the 2019.

"You are Newton, you are famous man. You discovered gravity I think. But you were wrong and everything is relative. There are black holes that suck even light. Light has a speed and nothing can be faster than light."

"Maxwell. I have heard that name. Batteries or something. Anyways, there is this thing called quantum mechanics where everything is either particle and a wave and nobody knows how it works and its weird. Have you met Schrödinger and do you know about his experiments with cats?"

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"Like Connecticut Yankee except that none of us actually know enough to do much with the knowledge back in Ye Olden Times, so it wouldn't work out quite like that" has been done. Doubt this is the only example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_Whose_Bright_Eyes

One of the Hitchhikers Guide books has Arthur Dent in that situation, except he does remember how to make a sandwich.

In one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books, Arthur ends up on a planet of people with Neolithic technology and is very excited to recreate civilization, until he realizes that the only modern artifact he understands how to make from scratch is a sandwich. Luckily, everyone loves sandwiches.

Even a highly technical person would likely be useless, unless one were very lucky.

"Everything is made of atoms, and you can split them to generate enormous amounts of heat. It's very dangerous but fortunately I know all about how to design a vessel that can do it safely. We can all live like kings and make filthy coal smoke a thing of the past! All we need is some plutonium..."

"So, you can formalize the act of doing mathematics as "computation", and build machines to do it. The neat thing is that all such machines are equivalent in power! They're amazingly useful - you can, uh, well, make ballistics tables I guess? But they're so much better than that, trust me they can do anything! We just need some silicon... huh? damn. Okay, we'll use relays - I suppose it's easy enough to get a few hundred miles of extremely fine copper wire... what do you mean, "what's a volt"?

https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/

The ability to describe petroleum distillation column would be nice. Distillation was already known technolgy. The ability to produce kerosene for lamps would have been big invention.

It's a fun thought experiment to consider what you would be able to rediscover or reinvent from scratch millennia years ago.

Perhaps the easiest and most likely to promote scientific progress would be the telescope and microscope: though I don't know how to grind lenses, it seems there were several centuries where people knew how to make good spectacles, but hadn't figured out that putting two lenses in front of each other is really useful.

You could also promote Germ Theory, but the world would think you a nutcase you're entire life. Creating bacterial cultures using 1700s tech should be easy, especially since you know what the outcome should be.

Pasteurization is just cooking stuff. "I cooked these peas sealed in a champagne bottle last summer and they ares still edible consumes grey peas"

Penicillin was derived from mold. Once you can culture bacteria, you can demonstrate that penicillin is effective at killing it.

One could easily transplant these ideas to the Roman era. They'd likely take hold too, because of the huge impact they have on conducting war.

They weren't too far apart for their times, it took forever for techniques to spread back then, the big issue is the level of accuracy they could get in lens grinding. When you start stacking optical elements and defects in the primary element get compounded by all the elements after it so you need very good lenses to build a usable telescope.

You're right, and I didn't mean to imply that a few centuries was a particularly long time (just that this is the time in which my scant knowledge is useful).

Telescopes and microscopes also provided the motivation for improvements in lensmaking in the 17th and 18th centuries, but I don't know how much this had been limited by motivation vs technology before then.

> but I don't know how much this had been limited by motivation vs technology before then.

The answer I've always found has been it's a bit of both. Motivation drives technological development but motivation is also very heavily driven by the available technology. You have to conceive that a thing is possible before you can think about what tech can be developed to do it for example.

If I could identify what the hell saltpeter was, gunpowder would be an option. Of course, without better metallurgy it’s not that useful by itself. Likewise for steam engines.

My favorite for this one is Whitworth's 3 plate method and the technique of scraping iron for precision and bearing. That and/or gauge blocks and lapping for standardized measurement would get you a long ways into guns if you were past the puddling furnace already.

The Michael Crichton novel Timeline is basically about this. It’s good. Spoiler: saltpeter makes an appearance, as suggested by someone elsewhere in this thread.

If someone with power would listen to you, I think the biggest advancements the average person could take back 500+ years would be related to hygiene and medicine.

The mere introduction of hand washing in situations where people are intimately caring for one another has saved millions of lives.

I also think the average person now has an amazing amount of knowledge about the body and its operation compared to even a qualified doctor of 200+ years ago.

I think about this frequently during idle moments, what if I had been transported back in time? I mean, I know so much... yet so little.

Even "basic" stuff like batteries. I know the principle, but I doubt I'd manage to make a good one. I know steel is iron with some added carbon, but there's more to it than that. How about soap? I recall seeing some program as a kid about how soap is made, but without further research I couldn't even begin to make it.

There's such an amazing amount of details in engineering, chemistry, mechanics and production processes that I'm blissfully ignorant of that I depend upon in my daily life.

"The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it."

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

1632[0] is the first in a series of entertaining alternate history novels, where an entire West Virginian town is transported to the middle of the Thirty Years war. It touches on some of these problems in having to translate modern knowledge to people in the past.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_(novel)

This is a great premise for a hard-SF short story, most probably someone has written one along these lines.

I'd say, forget Newton or Maxwell, whose mathematical and physics prowess would be hard to beat but imagine the same scenario with Archimedes: finding the ratio of volumes of a sphere in a cylinder? No problem.

That sounds like a Bill & Ted movie.

Or with einstein "yeah you were pretty much right. we don't have anything new"

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