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Comment by Will on May 31, 2012 at 7:49am

Yeah, I couldn't believe people could print that.  Woman calls herself a man, has a baby, and they make news stories about a man getting pregnant!  I could call myself a grasshopper and you could be amazed at a grasshopper typing at a keyboard.  [/rabbit trail]

Comment by Shane on May 30, 2012 at 3:48pm

Carl, that was a woman with a male sex change. It was 50 year old tech that let that happen. Innovative, maybe. Invention, definitely not.

Comment by Shane on May 30, 2012 at 3:42pm

6, 7, 8

I'll add to that, 150 years ago a person with a high school (equivalent) education knew everything there was to teach about the world.  So maybe that goes along with 8.  Big discoveries (today) require big science.  Or maybe, "low hanging fruit".  hmmm

Comment by Shane on May 30, 2012 at 3:26pm

An iPad isn't an invention though.  It's a conglomeration of current technology.  However well Jobs held that reality distortion field together, the iPod was just an MP3 player and the iPad is just a reworked tablet which failed to take off in the mid 90's.

I wouldn't class any new vaccine as "big" in this context unless there is truly something revolutionary going on.  Like gene therapy.  Or how AIDS was used as a carrier for a cancer cure.

If you follow my thought process, I'm seeing the big ages of invention aligning with the defining/discovery of the four Fundamental Interactions.  Gravity first defined, though not precisely understood (in fact we're still working on that one).  Electricity and magnetism next, and then unified almost by accident.  The nuclear age and the strong and weak forces.

For the most part, we've worked those out and now we're in the refining stage.  That is, we're just getting smaller and faster refinements and new combinations of what we already know.

It just so happens that the last three Fundamental Interactions were discovered in quick succession and we didn't need to wait 2500 years in between.  It also happened that it occurred just before our lifetimes.  So, in my opinion, we're on the tail end of a pretty dramatic bubble.

I also think, we're on the cusp, perhaps, of unifying all four interactions the way electricity and magnetism were unified two centuries ago.  Many of our advances in quantum mechanics are because theoretical physicists are working so hard on a unified field theory.  Once those interactions are unified, we'll see the next (perhaps last) great wave of innovation. 

Following that, the only way I can see (simple minded perhaps) any truly revolutionary work would be if someone figures out how to Faraday gravity.  Once that occurs, the universe itself might not be a closed system for us anymore.

Comment by Will on May 30, 2012 at 3:13pm

I'll go ahead and say what those suspicions are.

1) We're a risk-averse society now.  New inventions are risky, for the user, for the maker, and for the financier.  Better to make tweaks on existing technology.

2) We're a lawsuit society now.  Makes it all the riskier.

3) We're a regulated society now.  FDA approval times for drugs keeps getting longer.  Pfizer laid off a huge chunk of its R&D staff, because (I have read) it's just not making it back on the new drugs.  Safer financially to keep selling the old ones, making some minor tweak on an existing one so you can get a new patent periodically.  Much of our verifiable innovation in the past 3 decades has been on the computer, which was largely unregulated.  

4) We're more into virtual products these days:  real-estate bubble, dot-com bubble, people selling financial services and diversity training and legal consultation.  Part of the motive for invention is the profit motive, and invention (and production) have a lot of competition these days if you want to strike it rich.

5) More of our wealth is going into these virtual products and into compliance with regulation.

6) There might be something wrong with the way R&D is done, especially on campus, where pure research is glorified.  Unsure about this one, and I'm not sure what the problem would be, or if the problem is new.

7) We may legitimately be too busy, as Shane suggests, refining and understanding and developing existing technology, to see a clear reason to go to the next one.  In Popper's terms (I think it's Popper), we're not near a paradigm shift, because our existing paradigms still work pretty well.  One day they won't, and if we're smart, we'll get the Next Big Thing.  This is a happy one, and I'd like to believe it's dominant.

8) Maybe the Next Big Thing requires big science:  supercolliders, expensive labs, etc.  We got 'em, but "big" is often unable to innovate, so we lost the "guy in his basement" flexibility, simply by nature of the problems at hand.  The guy in his basement is inventing a computer game anyway.

9) A change in the culture toward consumption and away from perspiration and inspiration.  But I don't know what that change would be, or if it's true.

Comment by Carl Monster on May 30, 2012 at 3:05pm

Didn't a man have a baby recently and no one batted an eye? We are also more jaded to all this stuff as it comes.

Comment by Will on May 30, 2012 at 2:54pm

I can get behind that.  I know I'm repeating myself, but:  I can't believe that an iPad is as significant an invention as the computer itself, or vaccine X is as significant as vaccination, period.  I probably can't believe that our big new inventions for 2050 are here and we haven't noticed.  But I can believe that the path of discovery is bumpy, and we happen to be in a dip.  I suspect there's more to it than that, but suspicions are cheap.

Comment by Shane on May 29, 2012 at 10:37pm

It occurred to me that the great progresses we've made over our history have come in spurts.  There's the initial Eureka (literally) moments, and then a slight lag as we suss out what that means.  And then an explosion of invention.  And then simple incremental improvements on what we know until the next best thing is discovered.

We can see this farther back than history takes us.  Tool making.  Domestication of livestock.  Agriculture.  Writing.  Looking at the Greeks you'll see the initial "AHA" moments in maths and engineering.  Gravity was defined.  The explosion of invention in machines which followed, and then the incremental Roman advances to create very big things.

During the Age of Invention 2500 years later we discovered the properties of electricity and magnetism which coincided with the harnessing of portable power in the improved steam engine.  With some considerations and calculations into what that all meant, a century and a half of invention followed.

And then we began unfolding the mysteries of the atom.  And with that a new explosion in materials science began.  Building upon what we knew of electromagnetism and Edison's light bulb, the vacuum tube was born.  Understanding the atom and our new material science led to a solid state vacuum tube, the transistor.  Since then we've been making incremental changes.

Germ theory led to a great deal of medical science.  ~100 years later DNA would be unwrapped.  And we're still trying to figure out what all that means.  It was only 10 years ago that our collective genome was mapped, and now we're close to a single day, $1k, mapping of anyone's genome.

Einstein and Oppenheimer broke the atom even smaller.  The strong and weak nuclear forces are worked out.  Quantum physics is defined.  It may be a while before we truly understand those implications.  But, we're already putting those theories to practical use.

We have great leaps, and great lulls, in our history.  We're at the end of an age.  But looking around, I think we may be on the brink of the next.

Comment by Will on May 29, 2012 at 9:53pm

Yes, we can do some fantastic things today, but I think we are more measured in how we introduce these advances into our daily lives.

I think we're going to continue to get more measured.  

Comment by Stephen on May 29, 2012 at 4:16pm

The problem with these lists is that it's always going to be patchy. People didn't invent the steam engine in 1770 and sit on their hands for the next 10 years before inventing one more thing. People always kept going to work and solving problems.

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