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Nobel Prize for iPod
I think what is most interesting about today's Nobel prize in physics is how quickly the discovery of a new effect, giant magneto-resistance, led to real devices including the iPod. From the totally unknown to the utterly familiar in less than twenty years. The world really is speeding up.
The Nobel Prize Foundation has a very nice write-up of giant magneto-resistance and its applications.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on October 9, 2007 at 03:58 PM in Economics, Science | Permalink
Comments
I'm sorry to have to say this, Alex, but... the correct use of grammar and punctuation is a form of signaling. There are people who will distrust your arguments merely because they reason that imprecise writers are probably also imprecise thinkers. Don't allow your good ideas to be lost this way.
Posted by: at Oct 9, 2007 4:07:39 PM
Meh. I prefer the Ig Nobel Prizes. They're way more fun. Like 2001's Dying to Save Taxes or this year's medical effects of sword swallowing.
Posted by: Chewxy at Oct 9, 2007 4:29:00 PM
"I'm sorry to have to say this, Alex, but... the correct use of grammar and punctuation is a form of signaling. There are people who will distrust your arguments merely because they reason that imprecise writers are probably also imprecise thinkers. Don't allow your good ideas to be lost this way."
Then there are people who will distrust Alex merely for being Canadian (trust me, it's tempting.) Personally, I distrust people who distrust others for petty and irrelevant reasons. They can't be trusted to focus on what's important.
Posted by: Michael Giesbrecht at Oct 9, 2007 4:50:53 PM
Punctuation fixed.
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Oct 9, 2007 4:52:10 PM
Of course, as flash memory becomes cheaper, Apple is phasing out hard-disk based iPods... I think the bigger story is how something like Google couldn't exist without cheap, dense hard drives.
Posted by: Kenf1234 at Oct 9, 2007 5:07:40 PM
It's funny how I thought the same thing after reading about the Nobel annoucement - the world is really speeding up, from lab to real life in 20 years. The steam engine (although a much more important invention) took far longer to wind it's way through society. It was in some paper. Can't find it now.
Posted by: sa at Oct 9, 2007 5:24:10 PM
> The world really is speeding up.
That's why The Singularity Is Near.
Posted by: anonymous cowrd at Oct 9, 2007 6:39:03 PM
The world is not speeding up. It is slowing down. Twenty years after the invention of the light bulb, the gaslight was gone. Twenty years after the invention of the telegraph, the world was tied together with the same speed of communication it has today, 150 years later.
The speed of air travel has not increased in nearly 50 years. The speed of automobile travel has not increased since the interstate highway system was largely in place, 40 years ago. Improvements and changes in the first half of the twentieth century dwarf those of the second half.
Posted by: Ak Mike at Oct 9, 2007 9:29:35 PM
I'm with Ak Mike.
The rate of change from 1890 to 1940 was probably the biggest ever, and makes current times look like just fiddling around the edges.
You had people going from the stone age to the nuclear age in one lifetime. It was perfectly possible for someone to be an Indian Warrior at Little Bighorn as a teenager, and end up working at a nuclear reactor or computer centre or with jet aircraft.
Wyatt Earp ended up making movies about himself.
On the other side of the world, Africa and New Guinea had entire peoples, not just tribes but settled farming cultures covering hundreds of tribes, that had never known an outside world. Within decades they had World War 2 being fought through their villages.
The only comparable time was the early 16th century. A man could go crusading as a youngster and end up living on a cattle ranch in california.
And that was another fundamental scientific discovery. A basic discovery in the science of geography (hey, if you go WEST you find a big, unexploited land!) lead, not just to new products, but to entire new Empires within a couple of decades.
Posted by: doctorpat at Oct 9, 2007 10:41:54 PM
Longitude. Watt engine. power loom. cotton gin. self winding clock. the 18th century was no slouch in immediately applicable life changing inventions, either.
Posted by: Allison at Oct 9, 2007 10:57:46 PM
Apple pie hasn't changed in at least 100 years, you fool!
Posted by: josh at Oct 10, 2007 8:14:19 AM
"Twenty years after the invention of the telegraph, the world was tied together with the same speed of communication it has today, 150 years later."
We can download an encyclopedia's worth of information from the other side of the planet in seconds. Try tapping that out in Morse code.
Posted by: anon at Oct 10, 2007 9:46:34 AM
Anon - massive amounts of information have flowed electronically for generations. Businesses, government, and universities have enjoyed high bandwidth data transmission for thirty or forty years at least.
By contrast, the change from two weeks to get any information at all across the Atlantic to less than a second revolutionized the world far more profoundly, and in a very short time, than anything we or our parents have experienced.
There has been less change in our lifetimes than there was in our parents' lifetimes, and less in their lifetimes than in our grandparents'.
Posted by: Ak Mike at Oct 10, 2007 1:22:33 PM
Anon - to respond more directly to your point, the speed of communication is exactly the same now as in 1850. In the last century and a half we have managed to crank up the volume.
Posted by: Ak Mike at Oct 10, 2007 1:37:03 PM
Posted by: MilkLover at Oct 10, 2007 3:52:04 PM
doctorpat: Little Big Horn was fought in 1876. Yeah, late 1800's/early 1900's was a time of change, but do you really think someone fighting in 1876 was able to serve in high tech capacities in the 1940's and 50's? Closer to "perfectly impossible" than "perfectly posssible".
Posted by: HistoryAware at Oct 10, 2007 3:55:32 PM
We went from the machine-powered transport (the steamboat) in 1807 to the moon in 1969. Change has slowed down dramatically in my lifetime.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Oct 11, 2007 2:53:35 AM
Change has slowed down dramatically in my lifetime.
Depends on how you measure it. And it should be unsurprising that if you measure it in terms of further change in the things that changed fast in the early 20th century, you are likely to conclude that the fastest change was in the early 20th century. At different times, different things change rapidly, so depending on the changes you're looking at, you'll bias your conclusion one way or another.
Posted by: Constant at Oct 11, 2007 4:47:31 PM
The world really is speeding up but the future still will not come fast enough. I'm still waiting for the AMD quad core processors, Spore, and Duke Nukem Forever. Joke aside technology is advancing at a crazy pace. I remember about five years ago when I got my first gaming computer. It had a 20GB hard drive. 1000GB hard drives have been released recently. Not so long ago we looked at the blocky graphics of games like Final Fantasy VII and now we look at ultra realistic games like Crysis and Final Fantasy XIII. Where will it end? Nanotech and stem cells are on the horizon. In 50 years we may very well be cyborgs who knows. Until then I guess I'll have to deal with dial-up.
Posted by: Kranchan_WCU_1836 at Oct 16, 2007 4:37:47 AM
It's simply amazing how fast technology has moved in the past 100 years, let alone twenty. 100 years ago,
cars were a new luxury item that were bulky and couldn't go fast at all. Today cars are a standard and are
becoming less dependent on fossil fuels. 50 years ago computers where the size of entire rooms, and only
had the computing power of our current calculators. Now we have computers that are the size of your
hand and can connect to the internet and do things that were unheard of even 15 years ago. And
Kranchan_WCU_1836 brings in a great point about video games. The video games now look better than the
"super-high-tech" 3D models and movies that we were amazed at not too long ago. This rate of technological
growth is absolutely staggering and I can't wait to see what is down the road. I personally am looking
forward to giant robots.
Posted by: wcu1291 at Oct 16, 2007 1:51:40 PM
HistoryAware: 12 years old in 1876 is 78 years old in 1944. Hardly likely to be a test pilot or chief scientist, could possibly be night watchman or senior janitor.
My 70 year old father is still a working farmer.
More generally, we seem to have two opposed camps, those convinced change is slowing down, and those convinced it's speeding up.
This is wierd.
Posted by: doctorpat at Oct 18, 2007 11:53:02 PM
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