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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

You just pressed a key on your keyboad.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

You engaged a cascade of motor neurons to coordinate the contraction of thousands of muscle cells, which pulls a lever attached to your calcium crystalline framework, grinds across a glucosamine joint. This forces your calcium crystalline frame-member to depress, compressing your saline-filled lipid-polymer foam skin against the keyboard. As you do this, you constantly measure the pressure against the lipid-polymer walls to ensure you are not deforming your muscle cells too much or too little.

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Reality has inordinate complexity. When humans build roads or build narratives or build websites, we are simplifying reality for ourselves and others, including other animals.

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You just pressed a key on your keyboard. Simple, isn't it? What just actually happened?

The electromagnetic forces comprising the atomic structure of your fingertip repelled against those of the plastic polymer forming the key with which you made 'contact'. The two atomic matrices combine kinetically to move in the direction of overall force...

To add to your penultimate sentence: "Reality has fractal inordinate complexity".

Indeed!

I was expecting to see this kind of comment. Not that I entirely disagree but isn't there something to be said about all the layers the author mentions having been directly designed by humans and not pre-existing facts of nature (minus a few of the electrical properties he goes into).

I agree. I think OP is navelgazing.

"You just baked an apple pie from scratch. What just happened?"

"Laws" of physics... Big bang... cooling... particles... hydrogen... stars... fusion... heavier elements...

Oh, no cosmology? Okay, the entire history of evolution, then civilization, then industry leading to humans with electricity and ovens and supermarkets.

Yeah. After all, as Sagan stated, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"

At least with technology, someone somewhere understood what is going on. With biology/biochem/physics all the way down... there is no expert who designed the system originally!

Can you imagine computer science if we had no prior knowledge of computers and had to research the entire process starting at the end point? What a task.

It never really occurred to me that natural science is an effort to reverse-engineer the universe.

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

-Carl Sagan

> someone somewhere understood what is going on.

Not quite. A huge group of someones in aggregate understood what is going on. There is still no single expert who designed the system originally. Eventually, or perhaps already in many cases, some portion of the system has no living expert who designed it.

I can imagine a future where expertise on some deep components of the system has been lost to the sands of time, and people have to study them blindly to determine their function in just the same way that we currently study nature.

Neat.

edit: I think raelshark and Carl Sagan said it better than I did.

In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep he describes the role of the programmer-archaeologist, whose job is to sift through mountains of abstraction layers and black-box code modules written in dead languages thousands of years prior, determine their function, and stitch them together to perform a desired function.

In the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, one of these modules, buried beneath said layers, contains a booby-trap set by an ancient civilization that only the protagonist knows about. I believe the Unix epoch is mentioned briefly.

Why don't they just code new software from scratch?

Because GitHub.

It's a logical continuance of the current state of affairs. Even in the early 90s when these books were written, few people wrote entire applications in assembly language, or punched machine code into cards; they wrote in a higher-level languages that are eventually compiled into machine code, or were interpreted by other tools of which they know nothing about the internal workings.

Hell, we are inventing entire languages today that compile to Javascript, which in turn is interpreted or JIT-compiled by other tools. Or we write advanced HTML5 frontends that talk to advanced Node.js backends that in turn talk to legacy systems written in COBOL running on IBM mainframes. Programmer-archaeologists already exist.

In the book, all time is measured in seconds since the epoch, because days and years have no meaning for an interstellar civilization. But the programmer-archaeologists believe the Unix epoch is when humans first landed on Earth's moon. :)

"The first day of the first full year after Man landed on Earth's moon" is probably a fair way to describe the UNIX Epoch in the far future.

I guess the other interesting events are first Fission (weapon or test), and when we first land on Mars.

seconds don't have (consistent) meaning either, in a universe with a speed of light.

Or the co-founders/original engineers no longer work for the once-startup-now-corporate company, and 3rd-tier engineers are left to figure the rats nest out, because of course, there are no docs.

You just missed the whole point of the article.

No one, nowhere fully understands how technology like a computer works. That's because it's possible to design systems on top of systems without fully understanding the nuances of all the dependencies.

Actually, you missed the point of my post.

I never meant to imply that one person understood the whole technology system (that's truly absurd), rather that each individual component was designed and implemented intentionally and it's likely that each niche in the industry had at least one person who truly understood it.

Now, take that paradigm and compare it to natural science: No one anywhere ever had any understanding of the system, and now we look at the end result of a constantly changing system and try to ascertain everything from how it works today to how it all began.

I apologize, I could have been more clear in my original post, sorry!

I think it's likely that what we now call computer science will end up being essential to understanding the systems of the universe...it just so happens that we are using computers to discover it, like previous investigators used weighted balls, inclined planes, or chemicals.

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