Sure, if you exclude the multiple trips to all of the inner planets, rovers on Mars, trips to the outer planets and some of their moons, some asteroids, a comet, and beyond the solar system.
We have enough understanding to make GPS incredibly accurate. I’m impressed, even if you aren’t.
Eh, one man’s pedantry is another man’s failed attempt at a joke. I’ll try harder next time.
Well, the discovery of penicillin can only occur once you understand germ theory of infection. If you have no concept of germ theory, then using an antibiotic to combat it is not going to seem logical.
Likewise, knowledge of electric charge does not help you build either a generator or motor. You have to understand the relationship between charge and magnetism to do that.
I think this is the key factor. We had a revolution in the way we develop new technology. The old way was individuals working by themselves. The new way is to figure out a line of research, break it down into parts, assign a team of professionals to each part, and then combine their collective results.
Thomas Edison, for example, didn’t invent the light bulb. He hired a team of engineers to invent a light bulb. They spent tens of thousands of hours trying out different ideas. Edison would have died of old age trying all these ideas out on his own.
Regarding penicillin, I’m sure I’ve recommended this excellent book on its development at some time in the past:
The Mould in Doctor Florey’s Coat.
Covers the story of the development of penicillin into an actual useful medicine, at the time of WWII. Suffice it to say, it was a very hard problem, taking the resources of multiple labs across different continents, working at the cutting edge of the available technology of the time. Creating useable penicillin is a lot more than just chowing down on any old bit of mouldy bread.
Quite wrong. The discovery of the Higgs boson was only the latest triumph in a long century of incredible discoveries regarding advanced physics. We have quantum entangling, the earliest foundations of quantum computing (how many qubits are we up to now?) and other delights. We’ve had tunneling electron diodes in our home stereos since the 1980s, and quantum spin read-write heads in our hard disk drives for nearly a decade.
(To partially answer my own question, the “world’s largest quantum computation” used 84 quibits… And this was in 2012.)
Discoveries regarding relativity are coming out all the time. The latest issue of Scientific American had a new model for Black Holes that might solve the paradox of information loss. (Black Holes were understood to destroy information…but information cannot be destroyed.)
Anyone saying we aren’t making progress in the sciences is hopelessly out of touch with the latest science news.
In my own ponderings on this subject, I have often come to the conclusion that the invention of the steam train, allowing for rapid and far-reaching travel for the first time, and then the invention of the telephone, allowing for instantaneous international communication, has allowed technology to rapidly spread and widen access to it exponentially. Coupled with affordability to all, so now even the poorest person can contribute a new idea to existing technology, and then easily share it, that’s how we got to where we are today.
Imagine how different the world would be if we hadn’t invented the internal combustion engine.
Penicillin is just some mouldy bread and a few thousand man-hours of work in a lab with the tools, method and understanding that flat-out didn’t exist thousands of years ago. You might as well say a Faberge egg is just a few rocks you can find in the bottom of a mountain stream.
To say that electricity can come from wind or water power is to miss the point entirely. The availability of the prime mover doesn’t do anything towards the discovery that a moving wire in a magnetic field creates an electrical impulse, still less towards understanding what to do with this impulse once you’ve created it. Faraday’s great innovation that he demonstrated to the Royal Society (or whoever it was) was that an electric current through a wire could deflect the needle of a magnetic compass. The electric motor and all the manifold uses we make of it today was still well in the future.
The law of accelerating returns as written by Ray Kurzweil is a good read. It is an estimation of future trends and accomplishments, but you can take it backwards too and look at how technology advanced more in the recent past vs the longer past.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
An existing pool of tools, researchers and knowledge makes it easier to create a newer generation of tools, researchers and knowledge. I say ‘researchers’ to mean that as tech increases the division of labor goes up and people aren’t forced to farm or work in factories to make ends meet (plus, up to a point, population grows which means more minds). Brighter minds can pursue careers in science, plus they develop machines that also assist and take over research tasks. You couldn’t have the industrial revolution without the agricultural revolution. You couldn’t have the medical revolution that started in the 19th century without the industrial revolution. You couldn’t have the 2nd industrial revolution (1860-1920) without the first industrial revolution, can’t have the robotics revolution without the second industrial revolution, etc.
The problem is that as knowledge grows, in many ways quality per piece of knowledge goes down. Germ theory was a very valuable bit of knowledge (and without it and other bits of knowledge you can’t have penicillin). However, learning a small bit about a particular protein in one particular species of bacteria is not nearly as important. Much of the ‘low hanging fruit’ has been picked in some fields (medicine, aviation) so those fields aren’t seeing radical improvements right now. They saw massive, radical improvements then kind of leveled off with only improvements at the edges. Granted tech follows S curves, so maybe something far better than current aviation will come along but I have no idea what or when.
Medical knowledge may be doubling every few years, but how much of it is so esoteric that it can’t be translated into clinical treatments that improve patients’ lives?
If that it accurate, medical knowledge will start doubling several times a year in the next decade. However it won’t really increase quality much compared to earlier advances. Medical knowledge may have doubled between 2010-2014 (if those stats are accurate) but medicine itself probably only improved 1-2% during that same period (and 1-2% is probably a very liberal estimate if you compare the advances from the beginning of time to 2010 vs 2010-2014. It might more accurately be portrayed as a fraction of 1% improvement).
To me, the change started around the 16-18th century onward with things like the scientific revolution, shipping/trade improvements, enlightenment, agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, etc. Those gave birth to new changes and improvements, which gave birth to new ones, etc. until we have the world now.
As to why we didn’t have a scientific, cultural, or agricultural revolution until the 15th century onward, I have no idea. The black plague may have played a role by cutting labor but no idea.
I agree that trains were a factor but not for the reason you mentioned.
What I think was more important as that trains forced companies to develop new management techniques.
Older businesses had been pretty site specific. Even large businesses were located in a central location. So the managers of the business could effectively supervise the whole company just be walking around and keeping an eye on things. Even the rare businesses that were split up into more than one location were treated as a group of semi-autonomous units that were each supervised by a local on-site manager. If you were the owner of a merchant fleet, for example, each of your ships would have its own captain.
But train companies couldn’t be supervised like that. The train business couldn’t be run by a manager walking around the trainyard and seeing what was going on. People running railroads needed to develop off-site management techniques so they could learn about and address situations happening hundreds of miles away from where they were.
I think increasing life expectancy refutes your point. Example - in 1962, at the age of 45, my father had a blood clot. He was in the hospital for over a month, and it was close. In 2007, at the age of 90, he had another. They put in a double stent through his leg, so they wouldn’t have to open him up or give him a general, and he was out of the hospital in two days. My wife’s detached retina was somewhat repaired by laser attachment and a band placed around it in the back of her eye.
My heart got rebooted, and I’m taking new and complex drugs to regulate it.
We can’t cure everything, but we are doing miracles. And will do more.
This. Technological advancement isn’t a straight line, it’s an exponential curve.
Patent protection is one reason. Along with everything else already mentioned.