Zed A. Shaw, Painter

Here's a challenging thought experiment: What is the most modern technology that you could go back in time the farthest and still make? Ex: I think I could go back about 500 years and make: A simple camera. An electric battery. An electric guitar (but not an amp). You?

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.

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.

The switch/transistor project was actually kind of cool. Don't use Google. Just fool around and try to figure out how you might do it from a few basic physics principles (building an electromagnet was part of it). But maybe I need to get out more.