Without the Wright brothers and Santos Dumont, aviation might have been created a few years later, but, overall, the consequence would have been small.
Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".
I usually like to take the example of WWI, it was probably going to happen regardless in Europe eventually. But King Wilhelm II was an individual that has specific psychological aspects that drove it to happen the way it did. A different king would not have created the alliance situation that made the specific powers fight on their specific side. If King Wilhelm didn't try and emulate and thus alienate England, we might have seen England and Germany against Russia and France.
Furthermore, the people who underpin various states and societies (and the cultures and movements that shape them) do ultimately choose who rules them. Leaders only have freedom of action within the window of what their political capitol affords them. The people, or even just the ones that call the shots (this should be a familiar concept if you've ever seen a TV show centered around a medieval royal family) very much do set that window. Grant and Eisenhower's "failure" to thoroughly exploit conquered territory would have made them unsuitable for further leadership in antiquity for that matter yet they were both more or less instantly elevated by the existing power structure and elected to the highest office.
It's great like a Great White Shark is great. Great like Great Britain is great. Large, impactful, encompassing. A person is said to be a "Great Person" if they are seen to have a disproportionately large impact on the course of history. It is this premise, of some individuals being able to have such disproportionate impacts (rather than everything being a product of the times) that certain philosophers and historians have objected to. It wasn't out of concern that we might be glorifying nasty people with the term; if that were it then we could simply change the terminology to "Impactful People" or something like that. Those who've lodged serious objections to the premise of great people would not be placated by this change in words.
But can anybody seriously say that if not for Napoleon, there surely would have been some other French general, inspired by Julius Caesar to conquer everything he could, who was simultaneously also a master tactician with enough skill to get as far as Napoleon did? I can buy the premise that somebody else in that political environment might have tried, but to get so far and embroil most of the world in war as Napoleon did wasn't a deterministic predictable consequence of the circumstance. You can probably predict a civil war, but not the Napoleonic Wars.
If "great man theory" is 100% false and each person is 100% replaceable with no change for historical events, why complain so much that $POLITICIAN is uniquely dangerous?
(my opinion is that both individuals and trends matter, there are people that changed history, but power of geography/economy/technology is also great - for example, once nuclear weapons were discovered it had some consequences. And no individual can uninvent nuclear weapons.)
Wars can also be decided my random misfortunes. If the 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very different world.
> If the 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very different world.
That's actually less true than it might seem. Warmer winters can be worse for highly mechanized armies like the Wehrmacht, really any army but tanks and mud are not friends. That part of the world especially in the early 40s where many of the roads were unpaved turns into a giant sucking mud pit during warmer winters. It's bad enough it's bogged down modern armies miles south in Ukraine when the weather warms up from the winter freezes and the mud season sets in. On top of that they needed a lightning victory because their fuel situation was already pretty bad in 41, part of the reason for going East in the first place was to get oil for the war machine.
A slight change in weather and England could have been invaded by the Spanish Armada.
Also I don't think it's a great pro-Great Man nor anti-Structuralist argument. Structuralist don't believe it's deterministic generally and if history is so down to random chance then how important are the "Great Men"? It's basically a wash for either side imo.
FWIW, I asked Grok and it said that with better weather Germany might have taken Moscow, but they were probably (80%) doomed anyway because of several factors, including Hitler's incompetent military strategy.
If they had attacked in April instead, Grok gives it 50% chance that they defeat the Soviets before the winter and Lend-Lease equipment makes it hopeless.
I know, it's just a word predicting piece of mindless software...
Still, I stick by my main point. The Spanish Armada example is better than mine.
Total side-note, I've actually seen Serbia's basic FU response to Austro-Hungary in Serbia :-)
It's kind of like how every religious founding document has a huge element of "and the sinners/bad people were struck down as they inevitably would be because they did not live by god/he was not on their side" when when describing the origin of whoever is god's chosen people according to that religion.
I didn't realize that you spoke for everyone. Maybe you were taught that info by your instructor, but that doesn't mean everyone followed a similar format.
It was also the first flight in front of a crowd, so pretty relevant to history.
Sources: https://old.fai.org/news/personalities/42650-12-november-190...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/10-milesto...
This isn't one of those cases, like light bulbs, where it can be reasonably debated who was first. The Wrights were in front of the competition by literal miles.
This applies to "negative" inventions, too: Eugenics was a pretty favorably and openly discussed concept in the early 1900s (e.g. Winston Churchill was a pretty vocal proponent), but Hitler basically gets all the credit for the whole idea.
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour-extras...
Merit and ability sit atop of the works of all humanity but without it nothing would be accomplished.
I'm also not saying it's 100% structural or economic just the education tends to highlight individuals instead of fully covering all the others that were just behind the person who's getting the lion's share of the credit historically.
Of course other people are involved - stating the obvious isn't enlightening. Individual merit, insight and achievement should absolutely be celebrated. This whole effort to say we'd be where we are as humans scientifically regardless of individual effort and intellect is shades of cultural revolution and 100% rewriting history.
It's the equivalent of saying individuality isn't needed and it's 100% wrong. Recognize other contributors of course, but don't discount individuals.
But if you go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum where the Wright Flyer is currently on display, maybe a third of the room's displays document the achievements of the wide array of pioneers of flight besides the Wright Brothers, followed by maybe another third of the room documenting the fast followers who competed with the Wright Brothers (and many of their tragic deaths).
I’m having flashbacks to a corporate environment where several people would rush into any successful project, contribute something small, and then start telling everyone they created the entire initiative.
Our conflict-averse CTO would then declare that it doesn’t matter because we all created it together.
Then the other party would take that as permission to say they created the thing in meeting, presentations, and politicking. If anyone tried to argue the accurate history of who created it, they’d invoke the CTO’s proclamation that we all created it together.
Thus the collectivism became a way to rewrite history and take credit in contexts where they could get away with it, with a safe fallback to claiming we all created it together whenever someone objected.
I get the same feeling whenever there’s debate about order of historical events and someone tries to tell me it doesn’t matter. Clearly it does matter, because some people think it matters enough to try to rewrite history in their favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
History is not a collection of objective records.
In 1937, Claude Shannon introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse, however, did not know of Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently[11]: 149 for his first computer Z1, which he designed and built from 1935 to 1938.this is the one factor that makes me question whether it should be considered first.. conditional branching is pretty significant to what we consider a computer. better informed people than myself have come up with a variety of takes on this, i read all that i see because i find Zuse fascinating but i still am not sure if its fair to call one system or the other "first".
the advent of computing podcast has some interesting well researched episodes, scroll down a little to 145 and 146: https://adventofcomputing.com/
Without Wright Brothers' innovations controlled flight is simply impossible.
Other people had things that looked similar to the Wright airplanes, but only the Wright airplane was able to take off, do figure 8s in the sky, and then land.
For example the rest of the world was operating off of aerodynamic mathematics of lift and drag that was simply incorrect. The Wright brothers built the air tunnels and created the math for better ones that actually worked.
The also figured out the principals to using rudders to counter adverse yaw in controlled flight. This is the tendency of the airplane to turn (yaw) against the direction of a turn.
And there are a few things beyond that. Without this controlled flight is not possible. Without figuring these things out airplanes are not really possible.
Now would of somebody else eventually figured it out?
Sure.
But it was the Wright brothers that did it first and that is the point. This is why they were able to create the first airplane and other people didn't. Even if they looked very similar it doesn't matter because they didn't incorporate the necessary features that made the Wright's plane work.
During Isaac Newton's time, several contemporaries were making similar scientific discoveries:
- *Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz*: Both Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. Newton formulated his version in the 1660s but didn't publish it immediately. Leibniz began his work on calculus in the 1670s and published his findings in the late 17th century. This led to a prolonged dispute over who first invented calculus.
- *Robert Hooke*: Hooke proposed ideas about planetary motion and gravitation. In the 1670s, he suggested that planets are attracted to the Sun by a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This concept influenced Newton's formulation of the law of universal gravitation, though the two scientists had intense arguments over the credit for this discovery.
- *James Gregory*: A Scottish mathematician, Gregory made significant contributions to calculus and series expansions. He discovered the series expansion for the inverse tangent function, known as Gregory's series, and worked on methods of calculating areas under curves, which are fundamental aspects of calculus.
These instances highlight the phenomenon of multiple discovery, where different scientists independently arrive at similar conclusions around the same time.
I knew there were several people working on the same thing as Newton at the exact same time. I didn't know the exact dates and their names.
What would you do, Google it all? Good choice.
Why would you be a programmer at all if you're gonna let AI do the hard work?
Why even use a keyboard, that's for people that really don't know how to write themselves.
Seriously though, it’s a bit of an amusing coincidence that the Leibniz biscuit and the fig Newton were both independently invented in 1891 (at least according to Wikipedia).
The Hooke debate gave us a great quote from Newton. "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Hooke was a dwarf...)
Do you have enough flat surfaces where the wheels will work in the places people travel.
How cheap and dependable can you build it without adding too much weight to the luggage.
Are there enough people traveling and carrying their own luggage for them to purchase this.
Ever lugged a huge wheel-less piece of luggage around a big railway station? I have. It is hell.
Traveling salespeople etc. would often go on relatively short trips, even in the steam engine era. We underestimate mobility of pre-WWII people by a lot...
The point about simpler clothing is really interesting. I can imagine that this could be the crucial difference.
> The first railway hotels in London were built at Euston. Two hotels designed by Hardwick opened in 1839 on either side of the Arch; the Victoria on the west had basic facilities while the Euston on the east was designed for first-class passengers
And in Manchester:
> The Grand Junction Railway, Britain's first trunk line, was completed between Curzon Street railway station in Birmingham and Warrington Bank Quay railway station, Warrington, on 4 July 1837. Through trains began to convey passengers from the station to Birmingham, and a separate booking office and waiting room were provided. From 17 September 1838 there were through carriages to London Euston by some trains after completion of the London and Birmingham Railway in that year. This increase in long-distance services resulted in one of the first private railway hotels opening in Liverpool Road.
Here it is: https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/tours/tour1/area1pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_railway_station#Old_sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Liverpool_Road_rail...
Although perhaps I misunderstand your point--if your point is about someone else carrying the bags, maybe. But if that's the case, then why restrict it to flying, as opposed to travel by train or car?
Edit0: A good read : https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-...
Edit1: from the source: "Rather, and as Hernandez said (1950: 40), the ancient inhabitants of Mesoamerica did not apply the concept of revolving movement to transportation “simply because they did not want to, because of atavistic concepts worthy of being taken into account.” In a perceptive way, Hernández emphasized the indigenous ethos towards sacrifice and the offering of physical effort to the deities. Today, in Western thought, the constant technological innovation that leads to consumerism is valued, but in other cultures - ancient and modern - greater value is given to conservatism."
Oxen and horses were unavailable for pre-Columbian civilizations in the new world, and poor llamas cannot cut it.
It's thought the moyai on Easter Island were moved into place rolled on logs, they didn't have oxen or horses either, but rolling on logs or if they'd built a wheeled trailer make it much easier for a group of humans to move them without damage than just be dragging or rocking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramics_of_Indigenous_peoples...
https://www.wheelbarrows.co.uk/evolution-of-the-wheelbarrow/
Eventually. Horses only became extinct in the New World around 10,000 years ago — somewhere between 15,000 and 6,000 years after humans arrived.
The pre-Columbian civilizations (and by that I mean the highly organized socially stratified societies that we are aware of) only emerged several millennia after the paleo-Indians hunted horses to extinction, though.
They didn’t have the specific skill of making cart wheels.
Polyurethane wheels weren't introduced to skateboarding until 1971. It took off in popularity due to this because the previous wheels were made of clay and were basically terrible.
I don't know the history of luggage wheels, but it sounds like it was waiting for the invention of the polyurethane wheel.
We could have been flying in the neolithic period.
Not sure why it took a while for manufacturers to reimagine to a more stable orientation.
There was some parallel technical innovation--such as the wheels and bearings for rollerblades--that was going on during the 80s.
I think there's a loose threshold for when something is "viable," and that becomes the genesis of invention. Even in the Wright Brothers' case, the first flight was viable only in demonstration, there was no practical application for a few generations of aircraft.
And as this article highlights, US hegemony kind of ruled via the "winners write history" theory. Which is why some people still say Edison invented the light bulb.
Correct. The electric bulb had at least 12 inventors and radio communication at lest 3 inventors.
We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.
No, we couldn't. The Romans were missing several other critical technologies that were necessary to make steam engines more than a toy.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
My understanding is that no, it couldn't have happened at that time because metallurgy wasn't good enough at the time for anything beyond toys.
So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down.
You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.
Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a moon base and Mars landings long before now.
Good things can happen in the private sector or the public sector. SpaceX is a good thing happening in the private sector. No one's brain has to go running to Republican-bashing and history compression to counterbalance that to avoid thinking new thoughts.
> "break[ing] something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is."
It is possible that this will occur going forward now that Elon is a de facto government official, though. Also, the engineers in 1970s NASA are what created the Space Shuttle.
Sure we do, just watch For All Mankind :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)
Uh, SpaceX didn't come into being until 2002. And the Space Shuttle was not in any way cheap, nor a pile of things we did with it. Nor did the US Government in any way subsidize SpaceX, anymore then it "subsidizes" paper manufacturers by... ordering paper for its printers. It contracted with SpaceX for commercial services at a fixed price, and has saved billions and billions of dollars as a result. You seem a touch confused on timelines here.
And my entire point was that whatever could have been done, it wasn't. As I said, the government absolutely could have pursued other far fundamentally better concepts at the end of Apollo. Or it could have done commercial way earlier, getting out of the launch business entirely and working to switch over to a competitive private market 30-40 years earlier. What actually happened is that without the focus and level of discipline provided by a big ambitious goal and national spirit as a guiding star, more typical political incentives crept in and rapidly distorted the space program. Which resulted in enormous waste and stagnation as well as killing a lot of incredible people for no reason.
But regardless of how it happened, again the point is that it wasn't the scientific and tech environment that created a small window of a few years where inevitably practical economic mass launch designs would come about. It still took the right vision and right spark.
So yea, definitely a prudent investment. But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing. And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
No, the initial NASA contract was for cargo delivery via the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which dated to 2006. CRS and CC came significantly afterwards. Momentum did build but it was in fits and starts. It's a pretty fascinating bit of history in turns of twists and turns on both the political and technical sides, I highly recommend taking a look at the book Liftoff if you're at all curious. Like, even if it was selfish motivations it's worth noting that Commercial Crew probably would not have happened in 2010 without the support of Boeing itself.
>But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing.
Eh, I wouldn't fully agree with this sentiment honestly. The future we've arrived at was definitely not clear when the contracts were signed, and shit happens. If you're really serious about developing a new capability and place a few fully independent investment bets and some pay off handsomely while others are a bust, I wouldn't call it a waste because if you just couldn't know which would work and which wouldn't. That's just how it works. It's worth noting here too that Boeing has lost enormous amounts of money on its failures with Starliner. NASA has held them to the fixed price aspect of the contract. I suppose an argument could be made that NASA was more generous with milestone payments then they might have been, but at the same time that ultimately was Boeing shooting itself in the foot and NASA giving them rope because getting some money earlier didn't change the total pot at all. So if Boeing rushed, well that came back to bite them very hard.
>And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.
Sure, that’s true. But my point is that those initial investments were a subsidy. They weren’t buying a product that already existed, they were paying someone to develop a product so that they could buy the product once it existed. It definitely paid off, even counting the money spent on Starliner.
> That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.
Agreed. I am just saying that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. At this point we’d be better off cancelling SLS and doing our next moon mission by launching smaller craft into Earth orbit on Falcon Heavy and docking them together. Like Apollo but with several launches spread out over a week instead of a single giant rocket. We could even assemble a cycler that way.
Currently, almost half of NASAs budget is spent on manned space flight.
Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?
Orbital is what actually provides any significant economic value. But the nature of the Rocket Equation, effects with atmosphere, and how those interact with the limits of our material science means that there is an absolutely enormous gulf between a sounding rocket and getting to orbital velocity and back again. All of that is what makes it so hard but it's also required to be of any real practical use. So the DC-X was a noteworthy historical milestone/demo and test bed but going from there to something like the Falcon 9 let alone Starship takes an tremendous amount of further innovation and engineering (and investment of course). The new engine work alone SpaceX has done is a hufe deal and is what defines the envelope for the rest of the system.
The first few launches were very difficult. A NASA project with 10 crashes would have been destroyed by the press and congress.
The superpower of Elon is to shield the technical team from the negativity, pipe it to null and post "close but no ciggar".
Once Apollo was running the success rate was 100%, with no boosters lost - an incredible achievement, not just of tech but of project management.
NASA of the day didn't need shielding, because it was already doing the job with no excuses.
I think in he previos programs they had unmanned missions, but once they reached Apollo they (always?) have to use manned missions because docking was not automated. Once you have persons inside the rockets they should not explode, so you must be extra careful with the design.
> because it was already doing the job with no excuses.
We will have to wait until someone makes another cheap reusable rocket to know how hard it is to design them without exploding a few of them. The move fast and break think applied to rocket science may be a brilliant strategy or a stupid excuse, but we will not know until someone else try. (I'm not counting the Space Shuttle. It was not reusable, it was expansively refurnishable after month of work.)
I would have thought that a leader is judged by their results, and regardless of personal feelings for Elon - one can't argue that he managed to build SpaceX where many others would have failed. Could NASA have built something just as good? Possibly, but history doesn't do hypotheticals.
fake quote> He is rich only because his father had an esmerald mine, and he can not even build rockets with 1960 technology.
Why do you keep giving engineering credit to a Paypal Billionaire? By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin? I guess none other than opening a check book?
Why didn't BlueOrigin surpass SpaceX? Is it only a funding issue?
My take - a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to choose is better for tech company than a business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".
You do know Bezos has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton unlike Musk, right?
https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creator-says-elon-m...
> He asked, 'How do I run this Python script?'" Palmer said, per Crikey.
That is exactly what a programmer would ask, python scripts are not self contained they have a lot of dependencies, also typically you need to invoke them with a lot of parameters.
In addition not all programmers are python programmers, getting some commands you need in order to get started is just run of the mill when you get code from someone.
(Arguably, the best thing Musk did for SpaceX as a businessman was to delegate all the business to someone else. He tends to ruin companies where he does not.)
Perhaps invention is slightly different, but in the empirical sciences there's a bunch of stuff that occurred at roughly the same time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
Science and technology are closely related, as the latter builds on the former, and so it is often the case that sometimes a little bit of luck / timing determines who is "first", e.g.
That's not to say the same thing is true for any other invention or technological advance.
SpaceX is taking existing tech and rebuilding it up from ground up principles. It is the method they are applying to all of his businesses. Get something working. Then go back and throw everything out until it stops working. Then put that thing back. Then throw out more. The idea is if you still work perfectly fine without something you did not need it. Following the optimization method of 'the most optimal thing is the thing that is not there.' It is what took Tesla from a bespoke 1-5 cars per year company to the capability to build thousands per week. It is a brutal painful process that works.
Archimedes even demonstrated the principle of heated water caising a sphere to rotate
But there was little use for it, without substantial investment in other areas. Horses for land transportand human rowers for ships were just cheaper and more practical
It would take another 1500 years before Watt found its use for a pump
Part of the steam engine's success was how it contributed to itself - it helped mine coal that would fuel it, and that would fuel furnaces in which steel was made, some of that steel going into... making more engines - and all of that moved around by means of steam power.
*Factorio vibes intensify*
You had to have enough pieces together: demand for coal and steel and moving them distances, sustained long enough to exhaust simple options, and become a problem the steam engine could solve. It was then that the steam engine turned this into self-reinforcing loop, and kickstarted the modern world.
I think this is the blog in question, and the most relevant part. If something else comes to me, I'll share it here.
Which came about by the merchant fleet of the British empire.
So long as you don't also add the "useful" qualification. If you want useful steam engines you things that didn't exist then. The iron alloys available to the Romans didn't allow for useful steam engines. Even the first steam engines were only useful in deep coal mines (where fuel was practically free) which the Romans didn't have.
I read here on HN that this might be not really true. Because the romans did not heavily invest into high pressure chambers, aka cannons, like it was done in medival times. You don't just need a metal pot to build a steam engine. They must be able to hold much pressure and if they don't, they explode.
So the romans likely would have been able to make it work, but it would have required a significant investment - as they did not had experience in building pressure chambers.
They had basic concepts but could not have produced a steam engine that did useful work.
The Archimedes device you mention (the aeolipile) was basically a kettle mounted on an axle that did indeed spin. But it had no way of building up pressure to the degree necessary to move something other than itself.
The Romans probably didn't have good enough materials tech to build vessels that could hold sufficient pressure to do useful work. Early steam engines could explode catastrophically and they were built by cultures that had centuries of cannon-making experience behind them. The Romans also lacked a compelling application that would have driven tech development and didn't have the iron/steel/coal industry required to build railways, etc.
It's telling that the first commercially viable steam engines were basically water pumps for getting water out of mines, and it didn't matter if they were massive and underpowered. It took another 60/70 years for the tech to improve enough to power vehicles.
IIRC I read somewhere it depended on the previous development of firearms, as it allowed metalworking to advance enough to produce metal tubes with very smooth and regular bores, that avoid leaks, jamming and uncontrolled explosions, to be fitted with pistons. The Roman empire had no firearms.
WRT. rocketry, this is a story of technology getting almost, but not quite there - it was all evolving at a rapid pace, until suddenly demand disappeared. It's not that demand for rockets wasn't there at all - just not at the price point which designs from the 80s/90s commanded What Elon did with SpaceX, was to focus on dropping the price. That involved revisiting the reusable boosters idea, which didn't pan out then because they didn't have to worry about money as much. It got perfected and productized by SpaceX now, because it was a road to cheaper launches - and they got them cheap enough to meet the existing demand (and create more of it).
Public enterprise can be great because it enables societies to leverage huge amounts of capital (at one point, the US was spending 4% of GDP on the Apollo program each year--the equivalent of $1 Trillion/year today) to accomplish goals that are beyond the capacity of private industry at the time. It suffers from being totally divorced from the normal constraints of economy, and so tends to way overspend (4% of GDP is frankly insane) and to get stuck at local maxima (see SLS).
Private enterprise is basically the opposite. It can never match the government in terms of spending big to pull tech forward by decades--the profit margin doesn't really work that way. But it lavishly rewards the efficient allocation of capital, which (so long as there is meaningful competition) creates a drive to constantly improve tech. It's painful to think about where rocket tech would be without the recent advances born of private capital!
My favorite examples are gunpowder, the printing press.
Both were known by the Chinese and Koreans for thousand years before the Europeans. However, it was the Europeans that began using gunpowder in handheld guns (Chinese used it for fireworks) and combined the printing press with metallic moveable types and oily ink, making it far more efficient.
Also: how much James Watt improved the already existing steam engine.
Surveyor 1 was the first automated vertical soft-landing rocket AFAIK, in 1966. DC-X was the first using turbo-pump engines.
I think his most unique work may have been the contributions to optics but stacked up against a fundamental description of what gravity and time are that completely changed our thinking on it… Not to mention that still to this day 100 years later we’re building machines to verify some of Einstein’s predictions. Oh and he invented the idea of lasers despite not believing in quantum mechanics.
Not to mention that Newton’s foundational contributions to math and science stopped around 28 when he started focusing on alchemy and other things. By comparison Einstein kept making contributions to physics throughout his life and his contributions “stopped” when he focus on the grand unifying theory trying to bridge quantum mechanics and relativity, a problem still unsolved 70 years after his death despite an accelerating understanding and technology in the world of physics.
> This idea was pointed out by mathematician Marcel Grossmann and published by Grossmann and Einstein in 1913.[7]
János Bolyai, not Bolshai. And certainly in the 1820s-1830s he investigated the Euclidean parallel postulate, arriving at a hyperbolic geometry in which it does not hold true (i.e., initially close parallel lines diverge), and eventually studying geometries which take no position on the parallel postulate. Lobachevsky also independently arrived at a hyperbolic geometry, and continued develop a substitute postulate for the parallel postulate.
However, all of the above is several long steps before developing differential geometry with its inner products encoding angles and distances on the tangent spaces at each point on an arbitrarily curved smooth manifold of higher dimensions, and an even longer one from the pseudo-Riemannian manifold of 3+1d General Relativity. Although many hands contributed to the positive inner product -> non-degenerate inner product, the reason anyone was doing that was because of Einstein's work on gravitation (in turn provoked in part by Poincaré's 1905 argument about Lorentz-invariance of the wave equation for gravitation, in the spirit of Special Relativity).
You will see: computer (Neumann), holography, discovery of vitamin C, ballpoint pen, helicopter, electric locomotive, telephone exchange, Word and Excel, and so forth.
I mean, I am Hungarian, so what? Why should I be proud "to be Hungarian" because those things were invented by Hungarians (outside of Hungary, mostly in the US I believe)? I don't get it.
Perhaps you're right in a technical/technological sense. But there's a deeper question I think we need to explore: will we as American citizens be patriots? (where by patriots I mean simply people who love their country and fellow countrymen/women and have a shared cultural identity).
Brazil ought to be lauded for their fierce patriotism. Their insistence that Dumont is the real inventor is great - it means they care about their shared history and cultural identity. It's part of how Brazilians as a people-group care about and love one another. US citizens ought to feel the same way about the Wright brothers. As a citizen myself, I'm proud to say that the Wright brothers were the first to fly an airplane that carried a human. It matters to me because this is my country. If you're a US citizen, it should matter to you too.
--
Zooming out a bit... A house divided against itself cannot stand. Love is what holds families together. To love family members is to care for and prefer them more than people outside the family -- that is a good thing. A strong family with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the family.
In the same way, a country divided against itself cannot stand; and love is what holds countries together. To love fellow countrymen/women is to care and prefer them more than people outside the country -- that is a good thing. A strong country with strong love can be a strong resource to help people outside the country.
We need that in the US (and many places in the West) again. TA isn't so much about who is "right" but the difference between Brazilian national identity and the USA (which used to have a strong national identity).
I take it as given that (a) individual human flourishing is an important and worthy goal, (b) love (seeking the good of others) and hard work are the principal means of attaining that goal, and (c) formal human institutions (like marriage, family, and country) are the best means of organizing the human relationships and activities that fall under [b].
Given (a), (b), and (c), it follows that:
- to promote the health and flourishing of those institutions is to promote human flourishing itself
- thoughtfully managing shared values and expectations of members in those institutions promotes flourishing of the institutions
- love and preference for other members of each institution promotes the health of its members and of the institution itself
I also posit (but don't have the space/time to work out the reasoning) that just as individual people should not live for themselves only, each institution must not exist merely for its own sake, but also for the good of those outside of it; that its own internal health and cohesion is an important prerequisite for being able to effectively benefit the rest of society; and that institutions that exist solely for their own sake with zero outreach are unhealthy.
However, to say that an institution is wrong or unhealthy because members of it love each other more than people outside the institution is to deny that the institution itself is a good thing. We intuitively know that healthy married people love each other more than others, and that healthy family members love each other more than others. In a healthy company, we work for the good of our own company first, not other companies. The same principle should apply to countries. To reduce the principle to a pithy saying: "Put your own [country's] oxygen mask on first."
> National identity is a relatively recent concept
I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Every successful society since ancient history, from local tribes to the great ancient empires to modern countries had (at a minimum) social cohesion, shared values, and a shared identity. Individual members of Visigoth and Viking tribes identified as Visigoths and Vikings and had a shared sense of identity; same with Greeks, Romans, Germans, French, English, Swedish, etc. The United States at its inception and for a long time afterwards was no exception.
This doesn't mean we should be unfriendly and not care about others. Love is not a zero-sum game. Members of families that are affectionate to one another also feel very loving to people outside the family. The healthiest countries in the last 100 years were also some of the best international partners and best places to travel...
My citizenship is not something I chose, it's an accident of birth. I'll support my country when they do things I think are good. I'll support other countries when they do things I think are good. Supporting your own country even when they are doing things that are bad seems bad to me.
Would you say the same of your family?
If a family member were doing bad things, I would still love them and be loyal to them. But I would show that love by confronting them thoughtfully, not rejecting the family entirely. In that sense, our mutual family membership could hopefully become a means of calling them back to their senses, especially if multiple family members are involved in talking to them over a period of time.
> It's like football hooligans fighting over their favorite sports teams.
That take trivializes human institutions in which we are members. These institutions ought to be taken as sacred. When they fall, we fall. (Not so with a sports team losing to another team :)
Plus: if your country goes bad, your best move might be to take your family and get the hell out of there. There are plenty of recent examples.
Yes, some falls were good. The falls of the Nazi Germany, the USSR, East Germany, and Nicolae Ceaușescu were very good, primarily because those regimes oppressed their populations and murdered tens of millions of people. Yet many falls were bad. The fall of Germany to the Nazi party, the falls of Russia and China to communism, and any invasion and subjugation of a free and noble people is a bad thing.
Let me ask you this rhetorically -- would you rather the USA be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, or the US government? Imagine the consequences of each -- I think you'd agree that each is objectively better or worse than others for specific reasons. If such a choice were presented, it would not be morally or practically neutral - it would carry tremendous implications for human flourishing (or suffering).
We ought to consider carefully and not hand-wave historical (or potential future) events that carry such massive consequences.
> if your country goes bad, your best move might be to take your family and get the hell out of there
Agreed, but that's a last resort. Many did so as Germany was falling to the Nazis, and as Russia and China were falling to communism. I have a friend whose parents escaped to Taiwan by holding on to the underside of a boat as it crossed the channel... I wouldn't tell them it wasn't a big deal. Many people who did so lost everything except their immediate family in the process.
So many people couldn't flee, though. And so much that had been built (people, skills, knowledge, families, institutions, relationships, social capital) was lost forever.
Some things only exist because a single person got too outside of the groupthinking, or decided to dedicate their life into making it.
Who invented calculus? Leibniz? Newton?
Same goes to the Fast Fourier Transform, CRISPR-CAS9, etc.
AlexNet that started the deep learning revolution. Was there other groups trying to solve Image Net by training convnets on GPU’s in 2009?
OpenAI and the scaling hypothesis. Before chatGPT it was only OpenAI training larger and larger language models.
TRPO, PPO line of RL algorithms invented by John Schulman
In fact I would say, in general a lot of inventions only happen because 1 person or 1 group willed it into existence and it would seem very unlikely for it to happen if that 1 person or group did not exist.
Do you happen to still have the homework questions/solutions somewhere ?
At the moment the new ones are locked behind CMU credentials.
I don’t have any of the code for the solutions.
Bicycles do not need precision bearings nor pneumatic tires, as proven by the fact that bicycles predate them by decades. Also radial style ball bearings were invented for bicycles. Bicycles were the catalyst for precision bearings, not the other way around. Similarly pneumatic tires were created for tricycles (long after pedal bicycles were already invented)
Yes we absolutely could have had 2 wheeled transportation centuries earlier. Roads, the actually necessary infrastructure, was long since a thing for carts and wagons.