If you could travel back in time with a battery-powered DVD player, or a couple of walkie-talkies, you could probably convince primitive people that you had magical abilities.
How far back in time would you have to go before any of our technologies looked like magic to the people. And by ‘magic’ I don’t mean sorcery, but simply that the people would be absolutely dumbounded by it, and not even begin to understand how it worked.
My first thought was CGI. You wouldn’t have to go back more than 50 years before someone watching the best CGI would be totally unable to even guess at how it worked, I’d think. Whereas I’d think you would have to go back to maybe the 1700’s before mere movies would be ‘magical’.
Anything else?
I think you have to define by what you mean by people. For example I have a tablet computer and the pen has no battery in it yet it can control the mouse without touching the screen. I, for one, haven’t the slightest clue at to how it works but I am sure someone in the field would be able to guess how it works. Similarly if I take a computer back to 1950 there will be people who could guess how it works but for the majority of people it would be magic.
My grandmother got all upset and berated me the day that I explained to her how her microwave oven worked. Radio waves vibrating molecules causing friction to generate heat was something entirely beyond her ken. She accused me of telling her some bullshit story because I thought she was a gullible old woman.
We don’t have to look too far. We have plenty of experience with people from isolated and less techologically advanced societies coming in to contact with the greater world. Generally the first reaction is “Ohh neat” followed by acceptance. Very few people freak out.
I wasn’t looking for anyone to ‘freak out’. And I was talking about travelling back within our own society, not the people of New Guinea.
What I meant was, which technologies today are utterly unfathomable to our ancestors. I bring up CGI because there are so many technologies in the chain to CGI that didn’t exist half a century ago, that people of the time simply wouldn’t get it. You could teach them, sure. But I mean, if you just had them watch some CGI, and then asked them to think hard on how it worked, no one would be able to come up with a satisfactory answer. We needed transistors to get to circuit boards to get to microcomputers and ICs, along with major advances in software and display technology.
If you showed Cecil B. DeMille “Star Wars III”, he’d simply be dumbfounded. He would have no clue as to how to even begin to guess at how it was done.
I remember reading an old article reprinted from Astounding ( IIRC ) which proposed this scenario : A ramjet powered drone is flown through a mushroom cloud from a nuke, and somehow is transported to the 1920s. What could they figure out ?
The answer was, almost nothing. The radar uses waveguides, which are just empty spaces if you don’t have the theory. The ramjets look like empty tubes, with no apparent means of making the drone move. The nuke has covered the drone in substances which they “know” are impossible. The electronics work at a frequency that doesn’t even register on their instruments as anything but continuous current, and the transistors appear to be simple, one part nodules with no means of functioning.
… and just for accuracy’s sake, the necessary theory for radar waveguides was completely known in the 1920’s. And they were building radars in the 1930’s, without benefit of time-travelling devices.
But I agree in general with the idea that most advanced technology would be pretty incomprehensible.
I’m not sure what you mean by CGI. If you simply mean animation, I think that people from the 50s understood animation. They may not understand exactly the technology of it, but then again neither do I. For that matter, I’m not sure I fully understand the technology that Disney used in its movies from the 50s. To me it’s all animation based on technologies I don’t know but I accept as entirely possible.
Most people today don’t understand how modern technology works. We get used to the idea that certain things are possible, but even engineers and scientists have a poor idea of what goes on in other fields. I’m a scientist (astronomer) but things like DNA sequencing seem like magic to me.
I’ve been told thatr when Winsor McCay’s cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur first came out, and McCay performed with it (he came out on stage and talked to the cartoon Gertie, giving her commasndfs, “throwing” her a pumpkin, and finally being picked up by her – all done, I assume, with a bit of sleight-of-hand and stage magic) some people in the audience thought that there was really a giant mechanical “Gertie” on stage. The idea of an animated cartoon was so completely alien to them (there had, arguably, been other cartoons before McCay, but none of them were well-known or – more to the point – wuidely seen) that this was the only way they could comprehend what they were seeing.
This isn’t a case like the one that showed up on this Board several weeks ago, where it was claimed that Indians living in the Caribbean couldn’t see Columbus’ ships because they had no concept of them. In this case people were clearly seeing something, but not interpreting it properly. (There had been “animated magic lantern” slides before this, but Gertie was a lot more flexible and moved around an awful lot more than those, changine perspective and all.)
For those confounded by the unfamiliar animated film, it sounds as if it meets your criteria. And you don’t have to go back more than a century.
For that matter, you wouldn’t have to go back an awful lot more than a century until the atomic bomb is inexplicable. X-rays and natural radioactivity bowed in about the same time in the mid 1890s, and before that discussions of cathode rays and canal rays wouldn’t explain how such a device could work (although Soddy predicted it pretty soon, and Wells worked it into his novel “The World Set Free” long before it became a practical idea.)
I think the Internet would pretty much astound anyone pre-computers: Endless information: Billions of sites…instant world-wide communication, including not only text, but sound and video. All at the click of a mouse. Show them a tablet PC on a wi-fi connected Internet connection (look, no wires!) and they’d go nuts…of course, you’d need to bring them into the future rather than the other way around for that to work.
I also think that Mozart and Beethoven would probably think that an iPod Nano was about the most amazing (not magical, these were brilliant people) thing they could imagine.
Something astonishliingly like the Internet as we have it appeared several times in science fiction before computers. Murray Leinster’s ashort story “A Logic Named Joe” has a device called a “logic” in every home. Everyone has a “tank”, which seems to be like a home computer, with input devices and screens. You can get information from these, buy tickets, communicate, etc. The story gets interesting when one “logic” gets self-aware and defeats its “censorship circuits”. What happens is like a critique of the Internet – people start downloading ways to kill people, ways to break into banks. Kids start downloading porn. The story appeared in 1948, but was, I think, written earlier.
As Martin Gardner has pointed out, H.G. Wells had predicted something very similar much earlier. And I note that a recent book on the history of the telegraph is subtitled “The Victorian Internet”.
In a related anecdote, I was told that (one of) my great-grandmother, when she first saw television, wondered how they fit the “little people” inside the box. She also reportedly gave a thumbs-up assessment to a cooking program by complimenting the flavorful aroma of the food being cooked on the show…
The thing is, the best CGI looks absolutely real. WE know it’s not, because we’ve come to understand that real-looking things may not be so any more.
But if you showed a clip of Star Wars EP1 with the droid army, the best minds in animation say, 70 years ago wouldn’t even begin to understand how it was done. They’d think it was maybe great puppetry, or the best stop-frame animation they’d ever seen, but they’d be totally unable to duplicate it.
Or if you showed them a naturalistic CGI of a big spaceship with fighters streaming out of it (say, Battlestar Galactica), they’d simply have no clue how to begin doing that. Model animation and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-frame animation would be the terms they’d be thinking of, but when they’d see the camera swooping around, zooming in and out, and zooming right down on tiny details like actors being visible through the spaceship window, they’d just be baffled.
I can usually figure out how just about anything mechanical works. Yesterday I was troubleshooing the top-loading bobin mechanism on the sewing machine though…
Sewing machines in general, I’m convinced, work only because of the tiny little elves that dodge the needle under the foot.
I remember reading a piece written in the mid-1980s which speculated that if you took a PC back in time and showed it to the brightest minds of the 1930s/40s (Einstein, Bohr, etc., etc.) wouldn’t be able to guess when it was made, because it so far outstripped anything they had of that era.
There’s the story (probably an UL) in which some folks took a primitive fellow (one of the South American natives or some such) who’d never had any contact with modern technology and gave him a ride in an airplane. During the flight, he was more interested in the drinking fountain onboard than anything else. When they asked him why he explained that birds can fly, and humans are smarter than birds, so there really wasn’t anything remarkable about that, but a drinking fountain inside a flying object was something else entirely.
Mechanical things would probably be easy to explain to the technologically savvy folks of previous time periods. I doubt that Hero or Archimedes would have difficulty understanding the basic principles of a car, and they might even be able to grasp some of the rudiments of electricity fairly quickly. Getting your average Greek or Roman to understand that is a different matter entirely.