The Watering Hole: November 18 – On the Shoulders of Many

I'm Thinking

I had the weirdest dream on the Sunday to Monday cycle…

In short, I dreamed that humankind had discovered the psyche, a thing like the soul.  There was no God, only a series of existences that could be drawn upon as humanity progressively went through time. New psyches could be created using normal reproductive processes and those psyches passed from the what we call life today into psychic existence.  Psyche society was based on a  discovery of a process which allowed psyches to interact after the death of the physical body.

In my dream, I was chosen as one who could help find the path to a branch of science and fabrication that was critical to the continuance of psyche existence. The effort was called “The Seed”, a quest for the origin of a branch of science, lost in time,  that became unimportant to human psyches at some point in the 21st century.  My contributions became unimportant back in a  time in the 1940’s. The next psyche chosen was that of Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of the circuit designs which, while executed in silicon today were built of coils, plate capacitors,  resistors and vacuum tubes in his time.

Then my dream stopped. I woke up…

This is our Open Thread. Please feel free to add your thoughts on this, or anything else that comes to mind.

Then tonight (Monday), on Jeopardy, a question came up on John Michell. I have heard of him before  as a man and a priest,  who was far ahead of his time in gravitational theory – he theorized about the existence of black holes in 1785 (Plus or minus 2 years). He believed that light could be influenced by gravity – the crux of the matter was that he was right, he believed that photons had mass. He may be right – another explanation for the  missing mass. Could it be that black holes are absorbing photons?

The next point that comes up are the Lorentz Transforms by Hendrik Lorentz in 1887 (Plus or minus 2 years). These predicted that a body of any mass would achieve zero dimensions or time would begin to stop or  reverse should that body  hits or goes beyond the speed of  light.

Since Michaelson and Morley had proven that the speed of light was a constant, Einstein had all of the information needed to develop the Theory of General Relativity (Add Maxwell and stir to actually close the loop.)

In other words, he was nothing more than a hacker born at a correct time with lots of idle time in his job as a patent inspector.

Who knows the boundaries of concepts that marked human progress. Older generation computing machines were used to design and build a next generation of machines. This extends from those that were wired with solder and intense labor to the modern silicon foundries. I might also note that vacuum tubes were built on metallurgy studies performed on analog measurements which  represent a lost technology.

I do say that I have some really strange dreams…