Sexy hollywood hot actress Carla Gugino gallery

Sexy hollywood hot actress Carla Gugino gallery

Listverse: 10 Mind-Bending Implications of the Many Worlds Theory

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10 Mind-Bending Implications of the Many Worlds Theory Feb 22nd 2013, 08:00 In quantum physics—the scientific study of the nature of physical reality—there is plenty of room for interpretation within the realm of what is known. The most popular mainstream interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, has as one of its central tenets the concept of wave function collapse. That is to say, every event exists as a “wave function” which contains every possible outcome of that event, which “collapses”—distilling into the actual outcome, once it is observed. For example, if a room is unobserved, anything and everything that could possibly be in that room exists in “quantum superposition”—an indeterminate state, full of every possibility, at least until someone enters the room and observes it, thereby collapsing the wave function and solidifying the reality. The role of the observer has long been a source of contention for those who disagree with the theory. The strongest competition to this interpretation, and probably the second most popular mainstream interpretation (meaning, a lot of incredibly smart people think it’s a sound theory) is called the Everett interpretation after Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957. It’s known colloquially as the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), because it postulates simply that the wave function never collapses; it simply branches into its own unique world-line, resulting in every possible outcome of every situation existing in physical reality. If you’re having a hard time getting your head around that statement (and the fact that it’s held to be correct by the likes of Stephen Hawking), allow us to spell out some of the implications for you—but first, you may want to plug your ears to hold your brains in. 10 There Is A Multiverse, An Infinite Number Of Parallel Physical Realities You’re probably familiar with the concept of “alternate universes,” and if so, probably because you’ve seen it in fiction. After all, one of the very first instances of the concept appeared in DC comics, first touched upon in a couple of issues of Wonder Woman, but firmly established in a 1961 issue of The Flash. The fictional “Multiverse” concept established by DC, and taken further by Marvel, is simply the concept that there exists infinite alternate realities, each containing separate and unique versions of their characters, which exist outside one another and often cross over. This is the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics in a nutshell (without the crossing over, so far as we know). It states that since the wave function never collapses, every possible outcome of any event is realized in a separate and non-communicating physical reality, which actually exists alongside our own. It is interesting to note that this seemingly coincidental use of alternate realities, perfectly describing MWI, was put forth in a fictional medium just four years after Everett’s initial proposal of the interpretation. If MWI is correct, it is certainly not a coincidence—for fiction may be more than just made-up stories, as we’ll see later. At any rate, this means that there is a version of you whose car broke down this morning, forcing you to take the bus (or, if that happened this morning, then vice versa). There’s also a version of you who was attacked by a dive-bombing kamikaze bald eagle, for this doesn’t just apply to mundane stuff; as a necessary consequence of Many Worlds, it must hold that… 9 Highly Unusual, Unlikely Events Must Happen Let’s consider an NFL football game being played. Assume that every time the quarterback throws the ball, there is a gigantic invisible die being rolled, a die which contains an infinite amount of values. The most common, likely outcomes—receiver catches the ball and scores, catches the ball but gets tackled, ball is intercepted, and so on—are assigned to a very high number, perhaps billions, of values. Very unlikely outcomes—say, the ball bounces off of the sole of the sprinting receiver’s shoe as he is hit by a linebacker, is barely scooped up off the turf by a running back, who somehow eludes all the tacklers and scores—are assigned to a low number of values. But crucially, they are still assigned. MWI concludes that all values are rolled in some timeline somewhere, even the most unlikely ones—and inevitably, the timeline where the low-probability value gets rolled will be ours. As evidenced by the play described above, which totally happened and decided the outcome of a divisional playoff game. And there is no ceiling of improbability, other than physics—whatever could possibly occur. We have no way of knowing whether or not even those physical laws remain consistent across all possible world-lines, because we unfortunately can’t communicate with or visit them to ask. So even when confronted with circumstances that appear to be impossible, like a glowing ball of light that shoots fireballs at a police helicopter, or a missing woman unknowingly standing in the background of a photo being taken of her family for a newspaper story about her disappearance, it helps to remember that nothing is impossible on a large enough scale—indeed, given an infinite number of chances, literally anything you can imagine is not only possible, but inevitable. And just as inevitably, the impossible or unimaginable—given billions upon billions of chances—will happen here in our world-line. Which leads to a couple of interesting observations about human nature… 8 You Have Done And/Or Will Do Everything You Could Ever Conceive Of If you find it impossible to imagine a man inexplicably killing a bunch of people for no reason, or someone surviving injuries that would destroy a normal person five times over, or a pilot managing to land an airplane with all controls restricted or disabled without incurring any major injuries, you may be finding it a little less impossible now—considering what we know about how probability works in a Multiverse. But as soon as we begin to apply this to ourselves personally, the implications threaten to become overwhelming; for there are billions of versions of you—all of which are undeniably you—but many of which are very, very different from the “you” of this world-line. The differences between those versions are as staggering and vast as your imagination, and the reality of their existence forces us to examine human nature a bit differently. Of course, you would never kill anybody (we hope), but have you ever thought about it? There is a world-line where you did. In fact, there’s a world-line where you’re the worst mass murderer ever. Conversely, there’s another where your tireless efforts and dedication to the cause brought about world peace. Did you have a band in high school? That band is the dominant musical force on the planet, somewhere. Have you always kind of wondered what would have happened had you mustered the guts to ask out that one girl or guy that one time? Well, you get the idea. This could actually explain a lot: strong feelings of deja vu, feelings of a close connection with someone you’ve never met, morbid fascinations with things that should repulse us, or even instances of people acting strongly “out of character” in our own worldline. For as we will see, some may have a degree of “resonance” with other world-lines or versions of themselves, which can bring about the knowledge that: 7 You’re No Different From Anyone Hinduism, along with some other schools of religious and philosophical thought, teaches the concept of reincarnation—that we as human beings manifest physically on Earth multiple times, that we can learn from our past and future “lives,” and that such learning is in fact the purpose of our existence. This belief system can be seen as an intuitive understanding of the Multiverse; and given our previous assertion about you being a mass murderer, it can be comforting to know that the experience of all facets of human nature is an explicit part of our growth. Of course, this is not to say that anyone should kill people or engage in any other immoral behavior—after all, the purpose of this continued cycle of learning (according to Hindu belief) is to eventually learn all that there is to learn, and transcend our physical existence. Ideally, we learned many lifetimes (world-lines) ago all there was to learn from indulging the dark side of our nature. But the kicker here is that our experience is our experience (an idea we’ll get to in a little more detail shortly)—and that all of human experience must be realized by every one of us before we can move on to wherever it is we’re moving on to. While some believe that our destination is a type of eventual godhood, wherein we all get to preside over a universe of our own creation, others believe that the cycle simply repeats—that once everything runs down and heat death results in the destruction of all realities, our accumulated knowledge will be used to restart the cycle and create the next Multiverse. Which, of course, means that… 6 All Of This May Have Happened Before (And May Happen Again) If reality is a continuous cycle—along the lines of “Big Bang, expansion, contraction, collapse, Big Bang again”—then, given what we believe about the Multiverse and its infinite world-lines, you have existed before. In fact, all the infinite versions of you have existed before, and will exist again—and the same goes for all of us, along with every possible idea, creation and situation throughout all of our past and future, across all realities. In one fell swoop, this concept explains instances of both deja vu and strong feelings of predestination. Even if deja vu seems meaningless and random, and the premonition turns out to be incorrect, these things are only true of our particular world-line—and it appears that some people (or all people, just to varying degrees) are able to achieve some degree of “resonance” with alternate world-lines—another concept that first appeared in comic books. Indeed, one of the more common forms of deja vu involves experiencing an event which we recognize from having previously dreamed it. While seen by some as precognition, this really suggests resonance with alternate (or identical but previous) world-lines—especially when you consider that the “dream world” may be seen as an alternate world-line itself, and one just as real as the waking world. Of course, if everything that exists or will exist has already existed, this leads to the conclusion that… 5 There Are No New Stories, Songs, Events Or Anything Else Many writers of stories, songs and other artistic types describe a feeling of the pieces that they craft already existing, fully formed, waiting for the artist to come along and excavate them like fossils. In an infinite Multiverse, this makes perfect sense, for this is exactly what the pieces are. Art is a uniquely human endeavor, and one that strives to communicate aspects of the human experience that may be difficult or impossible to communicate by other means. While it is not possible to accurately describe in any language what love “feels like,” there are plenty of ways to communicate this in art—indeed, it is through artistic expressions that resonate with us (that word again) that many of us develop our first notions of the nature of love—and that’s only one example. How should it be possible for an artist to communicate effectively, through a story, song or painting, an emotion that the reader, listener or observer has never felt before? In our Multiverse, this is explained by the fact that these expressions of human emotion, thought, and perspective have essentially always existed, for as long as the impulses that spawned them have existed. This very piece of writing, which has been written before in order to guide another version of you to knowledge that you already have, can stand as a perfect example. For that matter, consider the possibility that stories aren’t just stories. The Marvel Comics Multiverse acknowledges the existence of our world-line, one where superheroes don’t exist but are merely stories in books and movies. It could very well be that—since physical laws may be very different in other world-lines—these are not stories at all, but actual people and events transcribed from other realities. This goes for anything ever “imagined” or “created”—there exist world-lines where Hogwarts School and Harry Potter, Camp Crystal Lake and Jason Voorhees, Gotham City and Batman, all exist in physical reality. And if you’re thinking that this line of reasoning—everything exists, nothing is ever created—implies that nothing is ever destroyed, well: 4 You Are Technically Immortal That is exactly what it implies. The fact of our immortality in a Multiverse can be illustrated in various ways. For one thing, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy (such as the electrical charges generated by your brain, or the heat your body produces) cannot be created or destroyed, but simply changes form—implying that the energy that powers your body must go somewhere when it leaves, and that consciousness cannot be destroyed, but is infinite. For another, consider the thought experiment known as Quantum Immortality. In this experiment (preceded by “thought” for a reason; for crying out loud, don’t try this), an experimenter sits in front of a device which is programmed, with 50/50 probability, to either discharge a device which kills the experimenter, or produce a click (in which case, of course, the experimenter survives). In the second case, the experimenter and all observers experience the same outcome- a click, and nothing else. But in the first—since (assuming MWI is correct) it is not possible for the experimenter to experience termination of consciousness (because consciousness is infinite)—while any observers will see the experimenter killed, the experimenter himself will experience the first outcome, the harmless click, on another world-line. Said experimenter can never experience a different outcome, and thus—no matter how unlikely it becomes after repeated attempts—will always survive the experiment, from his point of view. This means that while we will all experience dying, we will never experience death—the termination of our consciousness. How can this be? It calls into question the very nature of consciousness, which leads us to the very real possibility that… 3 We Are A Projection Of Ourselves In the late 1970s, physicist David Bohm formulated a theory describing what he called the Implicate and Explicate orders of existence. This theory, which is consistent with MWI, states that there is an enfolded or “Implicate” order of existence which encapsulates all of consciousness, and that there is a corresponding “Explicate” order of existence which comprises all that we physically see and experience, and is the projection of the enfolded “Implicate” order. Bohm arrived at the controversial conclusion (along with physicist Karl Pribram, who arrived at the same conclusion independently) that the entirety of observable existence is basically the mother of all holograms. Just as a laser filtered through an encoded film produces a hologram, our collective energy of the implicate order (the laser) filtered through our human consciousness (the film) produces the explicate, physical reality (hologram). Michael Talbot’s excellent book The Holographic Universe examines this and many other aspects of Bohm and Pribram’s theories in detail, but the overarching and inescapable conclusion—which you have likely already drawn yourself—is that: 2 We Collectively Create Physical Reality If the Explicate is but a “projection” of the Implicate, then we—our physical selves, and indeed all of physical reality—are a “projection” of our true, unfiltered consciousness. One that we all play a hand in creating, whether we know it or not, all the time. This one notion explains practically everything that “can’t be explained” about the world we see. Supernatural phenomena, meaningful coincidences, psychic activity—literally anything and everything makes sense when one realizes that this reality is essentially a dream, dreamed by the most powerful consciousness imaginable. If this is the true nature of physical reality—as suggested for centuries by Hindu scholars, intuited by generations of artists and philosophers, and articulated as well as possible by our most brilliant scientific minds—then there is only one statement left to be made. Probably not coincidentally, one that was made previously as a seemingly throwaway lyric in a 1967 song, by one of our greatest artists… 1 Nothing Is Real Throughout the history of artistic and philosophical expression, one concept rises to the surface, especially in works that are particularly influential or have a great deal of longevity. From “Strawberry Fields Forever” to Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, to Descartes’ assertion that “I think, therefore I am” to Bill Hicks’ great “Life Is A Ride” speech, and even in children’s nursery rhymes—life is but a dream. A powerful dream, and one containing an infinite number of lessons for us—but a dream nonetheless. After all, if everything—Atlantis, Luke Skywalker, your neighbor Bill—is as real as everything else, then what is reality but what we perceive? And what is our perception, if not our creation? I know that we have to process a lot here, but do keep in mind that there are almost certainly billions of versions of you mulling over the answer to this question; and that given billions of chances to find the answer, one of your versions eventually will—as will we all. You might as well visit Floorwalker’s blog and follow him on Twitter, since multiple versions of you are doing those things already. The post 10 Mind-Bending Implications of the Many Worlds Theory appeared first on Listverse.

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Listverse: 10 Lessons We Can Learn from the Nazis

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10 Lessons We Can Learn from the Nazis Feb 22nd 2013, 08:00 Decades after it lost all relevance on the world stage, the Third Reich continues to fascinate us. Adolf Hitler remains a exhaustively studied and caricatured figure. Historians still pick over every detail of the Nazis’ greatest crimes. And while it might seem morbid, pointless, and just plain stuck-in-the-past, there are some useful lessons that can be learned from both their failures and their unfortunate successes. 10 If You’re Going to Try and Conquer the World, Commit to It! It has long become normal to think of the Third Reich as an empire either fanatically loyal to the will of a single man and ideal, or cowed through fear into letting him have his way. But the fact is that through a key portion of the war, Germany’s military-industrial complex was ridiculously inefficient and still overwhelmingly devoted to civilian interests. In fact, even before America and the Soviet Union entered the war in 1941, Britain on its own had better adjusted its economy for wartime expenditures and produced more war material than the Third Reich’s economy. It was only in 1942 when Albert Speer began reorganizing the economy that it became something we today might consider a wartime economy—and by that stage too many enemies had aligned against Germany for it to hope of success. 9 A Weak Friend When You Are Strong is Better Than A Weak Enemy When You Are Vulnerable History has shown that the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union was, if anything, an even greater blunder than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but it should be stated that the Wehrmacht came within ten miles of capturing Moscow, which would have devestated morale and communications. The problem was that the Wehrmacht spread itself extremely thin by invading such a vast country, and an even bigger problem was their nonsensical sense of racial superiority meant that many, many people that could have become part of an anti-Soviet army (inspired by the numerous atrocities the USSR committed in the 1930s that killed millions) were instead starved or imprisoned just when a large troop surge was needed to knock the enemy out of the war. So instead of recruiting fresh soldiers from these oppressed civilians, the Nazis came to face a resistance movement that would grow to hundreds of thousands operating in the rear of the Eastern Front. 8 Resources Come Before Ideology Historians agree that a war between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich was inevitable (tellingly, when the invasion started on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht was outnumbered even though they were launching a surprise attack) But two points about it stand out, one of which was a huge missed opportunity and the other a waste of time and energy. First, consider that throughout the war, the Reich had a huge problem finding enough oil and gas to keep its industry and military going, at some points even relying on experimental alternatives. When the invasion of the Soviet Union began, in fact, the Middle East with its vast oil supplies lay wide open. Had Germany captured the Midle East, it would have meant that vast oil supplies vital to the USSR in the Caucasus Mountains would have been in a position to be conquered quickly as well. But that didn’t really shape up with what had been written in [i]Mein Kampf[/i], which focused more on conquering the Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe—so the idea was not pursued. 7 Today’s Ridiculous Malcontent Could Be Tomorrow’s Dictator While Hitler’s rise to power is generally viewed as an inevitable result of the times in which he lived, it was a very near-run thing, and during much of his rise he seemed absurd. Before sound recording was widely adopted for film, Hitler looked like a comedian. It was only when sound film came in, and well into his rise to power, that he seemed credible. During his absurdly undersized revolution attempt in November 9, 1923—the Munich Beer Hall Putsch—one hundred soldiers stopped his group of thousands. So his ability to rise from humiliated failed revolutionary to chancellor was about on par with a leader of one of America’s controversial, much-derided militia groups rising to power. 6 The Military is a Bad Economic Stimulant It’s often said that part of the reason the Third Reich was able to rise to power was because an economic stimulus rose the standards of living for citizens. In fact, the economic policies had been a disaster before the war started. They left the Reich painfully reliant on exports, introduced enormous economic disparity, and generated enormous debt of a type that would likely have triggered more hyperinflation of the type that had already struck in the 1920s. If there had not been any of the early military success, then the Reich would have been in deep trouble financially and its awful economy would have soon caught up with it. 5 Don’t Condemn Individuals for the Groups They Join It was very big and exciting news when it was revealed that Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) was a member of the Hitler Youth. It feeds prejudices against the Catholic Church and implies a scandalous secret. Until you realize that at the time, being a member of the Hitler Youth was essentially compulsory. He was not an active member of the group and did not even attend meetings. And rather than reaping the short term benefits of membership, he was first drafted into manual labor during the war before being drafted into the armed services in 1943, which he deserted in April 1945. It serves to illustrate that we shouldn’t judge individuals based on labels. 4 Never Let One Man’s Whims Dictate National Policy When the Invasion of Poland was begun in September 1939, it was conducted by a military which seemed half-baked, and not yet ready for the undertaking. The German Command noted the economic troubles mentioned above, and thought that the Germany Navy and Air Force would be insufficient for a world war. In fact, Hitler and his command began the invasion under the impression that it would not escalate beyond war with Poland. Hitler’s reported statement on the matter was that “my time is short” (in reference to the fact that he was already fifty years old and was allegedly already suffering the ravages of syphilis). So the critical invasion of Poland—which began the war that destroyed the short-lived Third Reich—was carried out to accommodate one man’s self-projected lifespan. The same personal whims also resulted in decisions like the Nero Decree in March 1945, which saw Hitler order the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure. Fortunately for Germany, Albert Speer had by then learned the lesson well enough to disobey. 3 Sometimes, You Just Have to Rely on Luck There’s a prevailing notion that France was taken out of the war so quickly in 1940 because they stupidly sat in defenses called the Maginot Line while the Wehrmacht went around them via Belgium. In fact, the success of the Nazi invasion of France was actually due to the majority of the Allies being farther north in Belgium while the Germans’ main attack would be through an extremely dense forest called the Ardennes. This attack plan was the military equivalent of putting everything on one corner in roulette. If the Allies had moved even a token force against them, the Wehrmacht would have been stopped. Because moving through the Ardennes meant using such cramped, unreliable roads over such bad terrain “the worst traffic jam known to Europe at that date[/url]” would have happened. The Allied forces would have been able to pick them off easily as they slithered out of the Ardennes, and even retreating would have been ridiculously difficult. But then, the Germans had luck on their side when they needed it most. 2 Forced Labor is Terrible For Those In Power As Well People subject to forced labor often worked elaborately against the Nazis’ interests. Taking away people’s freedom will generally drain their will to live, and therefore their fear of death—so they’ll try to get revenge any way they can. The Jewish Virtual Library states that there are numerous examples of slaves deliberately making defective products. The punishment for this was hanging. Even the desperate 1944 V-2 missile bombardment of Great Britain was so badly assisted by its forced labor that this punishment was inflicted two hundred times out of every ten thousand works, and as many as a third of rockets[/url] that actually hit the targets did not explode due to sabotage. Obviously the evil dehumanization of slavery is the worst part, but anyone inclined to use or condone slavery (directly or otherwise) probably would be more concerned with the bottom lines than the ethics. 1 Even the Founder of the “Master Race” Concept Didn’t Really Believe It Of course the most significant act of the Third Reich was the mass murder of “undesirables” in the Final Solution. But there was always the issue of quantifying what exactly a “Jew” was in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that dictated Nazi racial policy. Ultimately it was decided that personal religion or parental religion wasn’t as important as your grandparents’ religion. So even Catholic priests and Protestant ministers were listed as “racially” Jews because they had at least three Jewish grandparents. It effectively could not have made less sense, but as Hitler said, if Jews had not existed, they would have needed to have been invented. So even back then, people were aware that these views were nonsense. Dustin Koski used all these lessons for his book Six Dances to End the World. The post 10 Lessons We Can Learn from the Nazis appeared first on Listverse.

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Listverse: 10 Forgotten And Unrecognized Inventors

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10 Forgotten And Unrecognized Inventors Feb 22nd 2013, 08:00 Spend some time researching the history of technology and it soon becomes clear why scholars don’t like the term “inventor.” For everyone credited with inventing something, you’ll always find someone else who beat them to it. Sometimes it has simply been a matter of publicity. Thomas Edison claimed he was the inventor of several items—the motion picture, the incandescent light bulb—all the while knowing that others got there first. The Wright brothers probably weren’t the first to fly a powered air machine—but at least they had the photos to prove they got airborne. The people in this list deserve credit for their inventions—but maybe it would be better if we just dropped the idea of the “lone genius” altogether, and learned to spread the credit around. 10 Choe Yun-ui Metal Type Printing Press – 1234-1240 Almost exactly two hundred years before Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press, Koreans started producing books using moveable metal type. Credit for this is generally given to Choe Yun-ui, a civil servant with the responsibility for printing the Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun, a massive collection of historical documents and legal codes. So why did Gutenberg get the recognition, and not Choe or his team? One problem was that the type being used was Chinese script and amounted to thousands of characters. Although moveable type cut down on the work the process was still arduous. It wasn’t until the 1440s and the introduction of the Hangul alphabet that the country had a writing system that would work efficiently with the printing press. But more than that: hemmed in by China on one side and Japan on the other, Korea was isolated from the West. The first Westerners to stay in the country and report on it were Portuguese missionaries at the end of the sixteenth century—but it wasn’t until the nineteenth that there was anything like regular contact. By then Europeans took it for granted that they ruled the planet, and weren’t too impressed by what an Oriental country had invented six hundred years ago. 9 Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi Intercontinental Flight – 1630 Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi probably flew from Europe to Asia in 1630. In Istanbul, the width of the Bosphorus Strait that separates the Asian from the European side is less than a mile in parts—so no, we are not talking about a flight from Paris to Beijing. Still, this was 1630 and in Western Europe the science of aeronautics, such as it was, had basically started and finished with Leonardo da Vinci a century earlier. Unfortunately, the flight doesn’t get a very detailed description in the Ottoman records and we can only guess what the glider looked like, but if Çelebi had knowledge of some basic principles, aeronautic engineers see no reason why he couldn’t have done it. What happened to Çelebi after his flight is a bit of mystery—but from what we do know, it doesn’t sound good. He was apparently a respected mathematician and scientist in Ottoman Constantinople—but whether because of the flight or some other matter, he was banished shortly afterwards to Algeria, which in terms of the Ottoman Empire was as far away as possible. But wait, there’s more: 8 Lagâri Hasan Çelebi Rocket Flight – 1630s Yes, Ahmed had a brother, Hasan, and if there is any substance to the story of what he achieved then Ahmed’s story is actually a bit of a squib. A year or two after Ahmed made his flight, Hasan took off for the heavens in a rocket. As part of the celebrations for the birth of the Sultan’s daughter, Hasan built a rocket and took off from the shore below the Topkapi Palace. Before we dismiss this as fanciful, there are a couple of points to consider. Firstly, gunpowder, which was apparently used to launch the rocket, was available and had been used by the Chinese in rocket fireworks for several centuries. While it might have provided enough charge to get the craft skywards, something else would have to kick in to keep it up there. The other issue is how he got down. Given that both brothers were scientists working from a library of Islamic science, he could have easily figured out that some form of parachute was necessary. Alternatively, the rocket was described as having seven wings, so it is conceivable that he was able to guide the craft down. In other words, the point might not have been to reach the stratosphere and beyond, but show off some development in rocketry. Like his brother, Hasan fell foul of the Sultan—but he was merely exiled to the Ukrainian coast, where he may have continued his research into rocket power. 7 Ada Lovelace Computer Program – 1843 You’d think, wouldn’t you, that these days students would have some idea about the history of computers—but it’s surprising how many assume everything started with Bill Gates. Watch their expressions of disbelief when you tell them the person who wrote the first computer program was a woman—and that she wrote it in 1843. And by the way, she was Lord Byron’s daughter. The year before, Ada Lovelace’s friend Charles Babbage had given a lecture on his “analytical engine,” a machine intended to calculate logarithms and trigonometric equations. An Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, took notes in French and later published an article. Babbage asked Lovelace to translate that into French. During the process, she wrote up a series of algorithms of her own, including one that calculated Bernoulli numbers, which she realized would give the engine functionality. It was the algorithm using the Bernoulli numbers in particular that would be considered the first computer program. Here the story becomes tragic. Babbage was a notorious misanthrope who refused to get along with just about everyone else. As the result of an argument with his engineer and the denial by several organizations of necessary funding, the Analytical Engine was never completed. Lovelace meanwhile contracted cancer and died in 1852, aged just 36. It wasn’t until the 1950s that her writings were republished, and many scientists became aware of just how astonishingly advanced her thinking on computers was. 6 Giovanni Caselli Fax Machine – 1860 What happened on a Lyons railway platform during the week before Christmas 1874 would have made a steampunk novelist proud of himself. An unnamed clerk had run away from a Paris business with a wad of cash. No doubt thinking he had time on his hands, he disembarked at Lyon and was promptly surrounded by detectives. One of them waved a portrait of him they’d received from Paris, transmitted by telegraph probably while the train was still on the outskirts of the capital. Giovanni Caselli’s pantelegraph worked like this: Two styli, the sender and the receiver, were regulated by electric clockwork so that when the sender inscribed part of the image the receiver—potentially located in a different city—was able to simultaneously trace it on a disc. The pantelegraph was in operation in France until 1870. Why it fell from use might have had something to do with the invasion by Prussia that year and the subsequent siege of Paris. Still, that was sorted within a year and why it was never revived is perhaps the strangest element of the whole story. When you think of all the other technologies that emerged at that time and where they were taken, the fact that nobody saw the real potential of being able to transmit facsimiles electronically is utterly mysterious. 5 Clément Ader Successful flight – 1890 Thirteen years before Orville took off in the Wright Flyer I, Clément Ader pulled off the same feat—a successful flight in a manned, heavier-than-air, powered aircraft—in the Éole. There were hundreds of inventors working on aircraft at the time, but Ader was one of a handful who were taken seriously. He had already designed and patented devices useful in acoustics and electronics, and in the spirit of the age branching out into aeronautics was logical. On October 9, 1890, he took off in a field and flew approximately 165 feet (50m). But there were problems: Firstly, it appears there was only one witness. Secondly, the plane reached an altitude of a mere eight inches (20cm); and thirdly, during another attempt a few years later in front of representatives from the Ministry of Defence, Ader’s plane hit a wind gust, reportedly flew about 1000 feet but crashed and the various representatives grumbled and walked away. Had a photographer been present on that first attempt, history might have been written differently. As for the altitude? Well, eight inches is still technically airborne. It is generally accepted among historians of flight that Ader did fly that day in 1890. He appears to have lost interest in designing his own plane after the debacle with the bureaucrats, but carried on championing the cause. In 1910 he published a book, L’Aviation Militaire, wherein among other things he foresaw a time when aircraft would be housed on ships from which they’d take off on short-range raids. 4 Henry Heyl Cinema – 1870 Regardless of what Thomas Edison claimed, no one invented the cinema. A sequence of innovations introduced around the world paved the way for the final outcome. If one of the many inventors who had a part in the creation of cinema deserves an accolade, it’s Henry Heyl. The story usually goes something like this: In 1873, Muybridge photographed the racehorse Occident in a sequence of photographs. By 1879 he was exhibiting his sequences of animals in motion through a device he called the zoopraxiscope. The problem was that because the zoopraxiscope projected images from a rotating disc, Muybridge had to distort the images so they’d appear on the screen naturally. For that reason he couldn’t project photographs—and this was the problem others tried to overcome during the next ten years. Go back three years before Muybridge photographs Occident, and on the night of February 5, 1870, Henry Heyl puts on an exhibition for an estimated 1600 people at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. The show is brief—a sequence of photographs of a couple dancing for just a few seconds is projected repeatedly on a screen—but it is enough to enthrall journalists throughout the US, and is reported in several newspapers. Heyl called his device the Phasmatrope. It appears that he only exhibited it once, and then disappeared. Well, not entirely. A few years later he came up with another invention—the stapler. 3 Nathan B. Stubblefield Radio – 1892 Nathan Stubblefield might just be the best known inventor on this list. Historians of radio and communication will admit the farmer from Kentucky did invent a form of radio a few years before Marconi and Tesla laid claim to it. Their uncertainty has to do with his process, which relied on induction rather than wireless transmission. Induction transmission worked by sending radio signals between metal rods. It worked—but only over short distances. What we know as wireless transmission, which was already close to being realized at the time, could send a signal over hundreds of miles. But so what if it wasn’t the breakthrough everyone wanted? The remarkable thing about Stubblefield is that it appears he had no formal background in electronics or physics. He did possess a remarkable ability to think through abstract problems and work out a process. To Stubblefield belonged the saddest end of anyone on this list. He went into partnership with a group of businessmen who were more interested in publicizing themselves than Stubblefield or his invention—and within a few years, he realized that he was being ripped off from all directions. Bitterly disappointed, he retired to a mountain shack where he lived in isolation. There he starved to death in 1928—the same year NBC went coast to coast. 2 Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow Television – 1880s The story goes that on the night of Christmas Eve, 1883, German physics student Paul Nipkow was alone at home and began thinking through a problem. How could he improve on the electronic transmission of images? In his mind’s eye he saw something we could think of as a cross between Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope and a vinyl LP; a single groove on the disc punctuated by a regular sequence of square holes could capture a whole image as a series of fragments. If that sounds like pixels, it isn’t far off. It made possible the sending of images from a transmitter with a Nipkow disc to a receiver containing one, a key element being selenium cells that could convert light into electric pulses. Unfortunately the images were small and poorly focused—but without the Nipkow disc, TV wouldn’t have been possible. By the 1890s Nipkow was working full-time designing electrical components and no longer interested in the potential of his invention, but he was invited to the first public exhibition of television in Berlin in 1928 and studied the weak images, aware of the role he’d played forty years earlier in getting them there. 1 Hercules Florence Photography – 1830s You might already know the official history of the invention of photography: In the 1820s, Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce created what is considered the world’s first photograph. The exposure time was ridiculously slow, at more than eight hours, and Niépce handed over his research to his friend Louis Daguerre, who claimed invention of the Daguerreotype in 1839. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, British scientists William Fox Talbot and John Herschel had been working on their own process involving paper negatives that could be reproduced as positive prints. Unofficially there were several others at the same time that claimed to have invented the medium—and most have some justification. By the late 1830s, all the information needed to create photographs was available. It was a matter of putting it in the right order. News travelled slowly in the 1830s, particularly if you lived in the small river port of São Carlos in the Brazilian jungle—so it was a while before French expatriate Hercules Florence heard what Daguerre and Fox Talbot had been up to. In 1832 he had begun working on a process to print photographic images using silver-nitrate, and to fix them with urine. The process was reportedly working by 1834 and that year he hit upon a name for his invention; photographie. He beat Herschel to that by a few years. Although he published some of his results in a local newspaper in 1839, he was more or less forgotten until the 1970s, one hundred years after his death in 1879. Only two of Florence’s photographs are known to exist, one of a certificate and the other a self-portrait. John Toohey is an author, photohistorian and the blogger behind One Man’s Treasure. The post 10 Forgotten And Unrecognized Inventors appeared first on Listverse.

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