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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

One my personal trick: imagine that you are magically transported into the 19-th century (or earlier). Can you teach the subject to a well-known scientist of that era?

E.g. if you want to explain radioactivity to somebody from 1860-s, how would you do that? Or for math, how would you explain calculus to Archimedes?

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Radioactivity in 1860:

In 1860 Lavoisier and Dalton have already published their work and died, so they know chemistry and atoms. Napier is much older, so they will understand exponential decay. It looks easy to explain.

I'm worry about getting some samples. Let's go to Poland and dig in random sites? Before the time travel I need a few days to study in Wikipedia where I should go and what mineral to look for.

I can try to guess how to purify it because I went to a high school with and specialization in Chemistry. (Let's dissolve everything with Nitric Acid, and then use Sodium Carbonate to precipitate Calcium and then Sodium Sulfide to precipitate all heavy metals including Uranium. I'm not sure if it works.) Anyway, one extra day to study this will be helpful.

To show the radioactivity I guess I can use a photographic plate. Luckily, it look like they already have some. (I was going to use Silver Nitrate and hope the best, but the chances of success are better if some of them already know what they are doing.) Add another day of preparation just in case.

Also, as an application, I'd try to irradiate food. 1860 is just in time for Pasteurization. Can I get enough radiation??? Is it safe???

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Calculus to Archimedes:

That's easy. Archimedes was using Calculus 2000 years before it was cool. The guy calculated the area of a parable slicing it in small parts. Also the volume of a sphere slicing it in small parts. (And then the surface of a sphere with a trick.)

I taught Calculus in the first year of the university, and also in more advanced courses and also in high school. (It will be necessary to start explaining formulas or a translation of formulas to geometric figures. Also, the idea that a formula is related to a graphic in paper is hard, so it will take some time.) I guess I can enter the time machine on the spot.

Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?

Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of Africa/Australia, maybe?

Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even begin to explain how to actually engineer it. As far as I'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.

Nate Bargatze has a great standup routine about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X1m16-Jvc&t=204s

> Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?

That's an interesting topic, and there's a whole community that is interested in this. Mostly for historical and educational reasons.

Surprisingly, there are quite a few things you can reasonably do. You will never be able to build a useful internal combustion engine starting in a pre-industrial time. But you'll be able to introduce the positional decimal notation (took 4000 years to invent!), double-entry bookkeeping, paper making, printing press.

If you know a bit of technology, then you can create water plumbing (just avoid lead), and at least some metalworking.

This thought experiment reminds me of Mark Twain's novel "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", in which the main character is a 19th-century American man transported back to 6th-century Britain. He used his experience in firearms manufacture to introduce modern weapons and had bicycles constructed for the knights to ride around on. I always thought it was pretty farfetched that he'd be able to recreate such complex technology without the aid of modern tools, much less set up factories to manufacture it in pre-industrial times. But it is a bit fun to imagine someone using knowledge of modern technology to pose as a wizard. As Arthur C Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Nineteenth century kit wouldn't really be all that difficult to replicate with the materials available in the early middle ages. Even the precision stuff of the time, you can make a surface plate just by scraping an iron sheet. With a surface plate you can make everything else you need. The hard part would be higher quality metallurgy, but it's certainly doable, the Chinese were making cast iron as early as 5th century BCE. Even steel was possible with even Bronze Age equipment.

Germ theory is great, for sure. For the rest, aim a bit lower to reach things you can figure out how to manufacture in your lifetime: working with steel was just starting to be properly understood in 1850s, and pre-industrial seems to be defined as 1750-1850, so depending on exact timing you could perhaps become the greatest blacksmith in existence, or a rich industrialist/inventor. As a modern person, the simplest lessons you can take back on that topic are probably "add more oxygen to the fire", and that some combinations of metals burn in very specific ways (think fireworks, burning magnesium, etc).

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-hearth_furnace

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