You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
Thinking about the camera, I think it'd be possible to go back even farther. I think you could go back to the time of the Greeks or Egyptians and possibly make it. I think you could definitely go back 2500 years and create it in China.
So then the followup to this thought experiment is: If an expert from our time could go back 500, 1000, 2500 years and create a piece of modern tech, then *what* prevented that culture/location from figuring it out? There really isn't much in a camera but, nobody made one.
Take a camera: People have been making glass for a long time, and you can just find glass anywhere there's sand and lightning or heat. A box. Yep, that's not hard. Pinhole cameras were known for a long time. Paper? Wood? Film, now *that's* the tricky part, but, just a camera?
Not exactly the same, but I recently gave myself a challenge of making an electrically activated switch using nothing but crap I could find around the house. In my mind I was thinking "how could I make a transistor?" It proved challenging.
Yeah, a computer is very difficult, even with transistors there's a mountain of tech. However, when I was a kid I made a tiny crystal radio with a quartz crystal, wire, and a toilet paper roll. I think that was it. Oh a speaker, that'd be hard without magnets.
They had camera obscura back then (and possibly way before) . But not the chemical knowledge yet to capture the photons on paper?
Not really, I think they *almost* had all the pigments from almost 2000 years of painting, they just didn't realize it. It's almost as if, once painters used the pigments for painting people didn't think "hmmm I wonder if I could use this for non-painter things".
gunpowder, steam, electricity could all have happened BC
Gundpowder and steam are all good ones. Electricity though is tough. Don't need decent magnets to do real electricity? But, batteries definitely could have been early electric power. That's just like junk metal in acid.
I read a book called "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk", which asks something similar: games of chance go back to the dawn of time, and you can run experiments with nothing but sticks and rocks. So why did it take until the 1650s to develop probability?
Basically, culture: the idea that randomness exists was a cultural blindspot for most of human history. How can you even approach probability theory if winning or losing is obviously the will of the gods and depends on your own virtue etc. Many people still think like that.
I think there wasn't the economy for it like if you could make a camera in ancient china, sure, the emperor would move the empire to get some photographs of him and that'd be it I've heard that ancient greece was in the verge of inventing steam machines but didn't need them
Nah, that's a tautology. You can't say something is only created if people want that something before it's created, but then how do they know they want it? Oh because it was created, but only if they want it? Why, oh 'cause it's created...? That's not how any invention worked.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
