>I’ve seen a few sci-fi stories in which it is naturally assumed that if boffins get their hands on something from the future
Thats 100% fair and its a good point. It might be seen as a curiosity, or more likely, the experts would never get to see it and even if they did it would be an uphill battle to spend proper resources on it. I could see a good argument that its just a weird natural formation. Or the work of a prankster.
So, I guess the consensus is that tech thats more than 10 years in the future might be difficult or impossible to analyze and build upon.
>I’ve seen a few sci-fi stories in which it is naturally assumed that if boffins get their hands on something from the future
Thats 100% fair and its a good point. It might be seen as a curiosity, or more likely, the experts would never get to see it and even if they did it would be an uphill battle to spend proper resources on it. I could see a good argument that its just a weird natural formation. Or the work of a prankster.
So, I guess the consensus is that tech thats more than 10 years in the future might be difficult or impossible to analyze and build upon.
So let’s bring a paper copy of Tiger Direct’s catalogue back as well. Drive 'em crazy.
Years ago I read an article in an Analog magazine from the 1950s–it might have been an actual John W Campbell editorial–posing the same question with respect to aviation tech.
What if a ramjet missile from the 1950s was sent back to the 1920s? The same problems arose. The 1920s people couldn’t get the missile flying, because it was launched from a carrier plane at sufficient speed so the ramjet would ignite and burn properly, and the lowest speed for its ignition was higher than the highest speed any aircraft in the 1920s could attain. And the missile had flown through the outskirts of a nuclear test, so it had all sorts of radioactive particles on it, like iron and nickel. But those aren’t radioactive! Except that these particles are, and they’re iron and nickel.
Not exactly so. Just visit any, say, musical instrument or firearm museum. High-end pieces from the 16-17th centuries, and earlier, exhibit extreme precision implemented on a variety of hard materials with simple hand tools. Such as intricate steel mechanical parts hand-filed to very small tolerances, cast items with moving, airtight parts, flawless ivory and silver inlays on hardwood etc.
True, methods then were often very labor-intensive (although skill has a huge effect on work hours). But labor was cheap, to the ruling class, anyway. I don’t think it’d take a team of skilled pre-industrial artisans more than several weeks or so to come up with a decently working replica of a parka zipper.
A good fictional example of time travel reverse engineering is in the book Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove. The premise is that visitors from the future give AK-47s to the confederate army during the Civil War. One of the plot points in the book is can the southern industry in that era reproduce the weapon and it’s ammunition. The book discusses some of the issues others have mentioned in the thread. Check it out.
Here’s a question: Which would advance the field of microchip design faster (so that, today, microchips would be more advanced than our existing designs):
sending a 2009 chip back to the 1950s (as per the OP)
sending a 1979 chip back to the 1950s
Would the 1979 chip be close enough to their grasp for them to get a handle on it and leapfrog a few years ahead? Or still so far off as to be useless?
They were making fine clocks and such back then, so the tooling was available.
I imagine that for zippers you would need brass, some kind of drawing bench to create wire, some stamping and cutting tools, and possibly a broach tool. It wouldn’t be trivial, but I imagine that a smart individual could get it to work.
I read an entire book on the zipper. (Yes, I’m a geek.) The issue was getting a good interlocking mechanism, not manufacturing tolerance, so I agree that people in the late 18th century probably could have reproduced it.
There were two problems that kept the zipper from catching on. The first was poor quality from poor design, which meant that the traveling salesmen who sold them to general stores didn’t return for a long time. The second was the lack of a killer app. People used to buttons didn’t need them. The first successful product with a zipper was a tobacco pouch, where it kept water out much better than buttons. The second was for boots. Finally, in the '20s, zippers became a fad and the market took off.
I’m not so sure that they’d be able to glean all that much useful information about modern electronics if all they had was just a modern processor, sans any sort of explanation of its function and mechanics. I mean, how much could they really determine about the chip’s internal structure? You have to bear in mind that all they would have available to them would be period laboratory equipment. Without microscopes that have modern resolving power, the structure of the chip would just be a big blur. I don’t think they’d even be able to tell that the chip was composed of discrete layers. They could determine the chemical composition of the chip, and that might give them some ideas about semiconductors, but I think it would be difficult – if not impossible – for them to work out any specific mechanics by examining the chip. They just wouldn’t have the right instrumentation to do it. I’m not sure how helpful the composition by itself would be. They already knew about some of the peculiar electrical properties of germanium and silicon, anyway.
If you wanted to jump-start the electronic age, it would probably be more useful to give them several types of large, discrete transistors from just a decade or so down the road. They already understood the concept of transistors – they’re functionally equivalent to mechanical relays or vacuum tubes. They even had some knowledge of semiconductor phenomena, they just hadn’t yet worked out things like silicon doping. Giving them a working transistor on a scale that they could actually see would likely be more useful than giving them a modern VLSIC with integrated transistors that are on the scale of a just a few dozen nanometers across.
One of the benefits of seeing something made in the future, though, is the knowledge that it can be made in the future. Perhaps your course of research isn’t a dead end road after all.
Take low energy nuclear reactions, for example. If we were given a cold fusion device from 2109, maybe it would take us until 2107 to make it commercially feasible (you know, plus two years to market), and so there’s no net gain. On the other hand, it would eliminate all doubt as to whether cold fusion were even feasible, and people wouldn’t be embarrased in asking for cold fusion grants or having their names attached to cold fusion papers.
(Spoiler alert: Select the text to make it readable.)
Anyone really interested in this thread would probably love to read Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court - especially the part where he builds a telephone network for Arthurian England. Free downloads available here from Project Gutenberg.
The 1950’s weren’t completely backward - Scanning Electron Microscopes existed, and light microscopes were probably about as high-resolution as we have today.
However, slicing the chip and looking at it’s layers with an SEM isn’t going to get you very far into understanding how it works…
This reminds me of Scotty wondering how something that looks like a blob of grease is going to take the place of muscles (Return to Tomorrow) - at some point the technology is simply beyond current understanding.
They wouldn’t be able to analyze much of what the electronics were doing, because they didn’t have equipment that worked at such high frequencies.
Not only would they be unable to get the ramjet to work; they would have trouble figuring out it’s an engine. No moving parts except for the fuel pumps, which feed into what’s just a tube.
They might not even notice the wave guides for the radar as anything other than part of the structure, or possibly ventilation; without the concept of wave guides they just look like empty space.
Yes, and they already had transistors made out of them: The solid-state transistor was invented in 1947 and the first patent on the basic principles was granted in 1925.
Well, you’ll notice that I didn’t give the incorrect version of the quote. From what I’ve seen, Microsoft thought that 640K was looking at least decade ahead and it turned out to be a problem/limitation within just 5-6 years.
