Archimedes Mirror

Lot's of people have thought that the great Syricusian polymath Archimedes made a weapon capable of setting the sails of ships on fire from a distance.  There is no historical evidence of this--the story seems to come from the middle ages.   The Mythbusters, several times tried to repeat this stunt, and failed every time.   While I can see problems with the individual experiments, I think they got it right--for several practical reasons, Archimedes probably did not try to set sails on fire by using individual flat mirrors focused by hand.  He may have experimented with it, but like the mythbusters, failed at every attempt.

That said, it is definitely possible to set things afire with a large mirror focusing the suns rays.  You can buy a hand held cigarette lighter that works this way, and a larger mirror can generate a fire at a distance of a few feet.    An accurately enough focused mirror could definitely start a fire at a distance, but it needs to be pretty accurate.  It's remotely possible that the mechanics of Syracuse could have made such a mirror, but I'm certain that had Archimedes seen such a mirror under production, he would have noticed the optical magnification it would have provided, and he'd have invented a reflecting telescope within days. This obviously did not happen, so I don't think Syracuse made such a mirror.   

Crick, Watson, Franklin and Szillard

James Watson died yesterday.  He was the last of the people responsible for discovering the Double Helix structure.  Watson and Francis Crick won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their discovery, which is one of the most important of all time.

There are two other people who deserve mention.  Most people are aware of the previous work done by Rosalind Franklin, who unfortunately died 1958 but would have certainly deserved a share of the prize. 

The other important contributor was Leo Szilard.  Szilard's most famous achievement was realizing that nuclear decay is caused by a neutron chain reaction, and that by manipulating the density of neutron emitters, you could control the rate of nuclear fission, right up to, and including a runaway explosion, which became known as the Atom Bomb.  Fermi's experiments a few years later led to the first Nuclear Pile in 1938, and in 1945, the first Atom Bomb.  Szilard intentionally kept his idea for the bomb secret because he was terrified of the Nazis getting the A-Bomb first, but he and his friend Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, which motivated the creation of the Manhattan Project.  Szilard and Einstein were specifically kept out of it to try to keep the Nazis from pursuing the idea.  Turned out Hitler regarded this stuff as "Jewish Science" and had effectively blocked progress in his country (Szilard and Einstein, along with Openheimer, Fermi's wife, and many of the others involved were Jewish), but he had no way of knowing that, having fled to England in 1933 and America in 1938.

 Szilard's contribution to the discovery of DNA were severalfold.  He invented the electron microscope in 1928, which made it possible to see some detail in chromosomes for the first time.   And it was he that devised the XRay diffraction technique which Franklin and others would use to work out the physical structure of DNA.

I regard Szilard, who died of a heart attack in 1964 at age 66, as perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century, in a league with only Einstein, Tesla, and Louis Alvarez.  

The Most Harmful Philosopher

I've read the works of quite a few philosophers and people who think of themselves as philosophers.  All, I think, mean well,  but quite a few had ideas which can be taken to justify people doing really harmful things, often flatly contradicting the intent of the philosopher themselves.

Socrates, Aristotle, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Kant and the other ontological philosophers really don't rate as harmful.  Socrates objection to elective democracy has been borne out by the corruption of the western countries in the last few decades.  His suggested improvement was benevolent dictators. A few dictators have been benevolent but mostly not.  Many of the others wrote about politics too, but their ideas have been predominantly used for good, with a few exceptions.

Locke and his heirs are responsible for the ideology that led to the American political system that worked so well for two centuries.

Descartes, Berkeley, Hegel, Sartre and the other epistemological philosophers are even less harmful.  They're interested in how we understand things.  Their direct effect on the world is pretty minor, although the consequences on how we think about things can be profound.  Newton, for example, figured out what we call the Scientific Method, which is an approach to proof and elimination of confirmation bias.  Heidegger was a big booster of the Nazis, but his own philosophical ideas were irrelevant to their project.

Finally we come to the political and religious philosophers.  There are surprisingly few important ones.   The Abrahamic arc includes Moses, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Mohammed, etc.  The modern political arc starts with Locke and includes many of his disciples, such as Jefferson, as well as other thinkers, such as Nietzsche.  The economic arc includes Smith, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Rand.

Moses and Jesus were very much men of their time, recognizing what was wrong and advocating ways to improve it.  Both stood against religious institutions being exploited for profit, and were wholly well intentioned and it's hard to find positions in their thought which were directly used for evil.  But their subsequent disciples incorporate some bad thinking...Paul's silliness with the afterlife, and Augustine's with universal conformity--by force if necessary--led to many of the worst atrocities of all time.  The inquisition, the crusades, and much more, including the Nazi horror to some extent, stem directly from Augustine.

Locke, I think, was wholly well intentioned and most of his disciples were too.  American political theory almost entirely stems from his thought, and while there has been lots of corruption, I think it is the opposite of stemming from his or his disciples thought.

Nietzsche is interesting.  Like Socrates, he's an elitist.  Like Socrates, he's deeply interested in the welfare of society, even to the cost of some of its members, including eugenics and a number of other controversial ideas.  Hitler used the germ of his thinking to rationalize his eugenic programs, but he didn't really understand Nietzsche, and Hitler's elites were what Nietzsche would have regarded as lowbrow thugs. An imaginary version of Nietzsche played a role in the Nazi origin fantasy, no more real than Siegfried or the Valkyries or other heroic Germanic fantasies.

Smith and Keynes were scientists, and with Marx and Newton, the only ones on this list.  They figured out how a lot of the economy works and came up with the beginnings of a system to make it work better. Smith was opposed to laissez faire--he understood that a too-free market will promptly be corrupted.  Something similar is the case with Marx: he was primarily a sociologist but he came to a new understanding of the social dynamics of the forces at work in the economy.  One of his lesser ideas has been taken to be the mainstream of his thought and many societies have purportedly been based on it.  It's not really fair to tar Marx with the harm that the ideology derived from this has caused, but Augustine didn't mean ill either.

Friedrich von Hayek was considered an economist by a lot of people, including many bankers and political conservatives.  He was a pretty bad one though...in the face of lots of empirical data, his theories have pretty much flunked.  He wrote an influential book called "The Road to Serfdom" which suggests that political liberalism will lead inevitably to government control of everything and ultimately the enserfment of almost everybody, and that the unregulated free market is the only solution.  As Smith pointed out, the unregulated free market leads only to corruption and monopoly--a much more direct path to serfdom than via liberalism. 

Hayek's contemporary Ayn Rand wrote a series of fantasy novels which have been taken as economic gospel by an amazing number of people, especially on the far right.  Their appeal is mainly to teenagers, desperate to break from parental and societal control. Alan Greenspan was a particularly devoted admirer and through dishonesty, corruption and a great deal of schmoozing, was one of the major causes of the economic crisis of 2008.  Rand's world has no particular bearing on reality and the characters are totally unrealistic.  In particular, in her world, Gresham's Law does not hold and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis does--the opposite of reality.

My ranking:

Nietzsche's ideas were a tiny part of the Fascist horror that killed tens of millions--but being incredibly generous I can only give him 5% credit or so, so he ranks in a distant 4th place.

Ayn Rand and Hayek have killed tens of millions so far and have ruined the lives of hundreds of millions and will kill lots more before they are done.   I give them a solid third place with a real chance to move up.   It's important to recognize that their followers are applying their ideas as they were intended, which is wholly different than what's going on with Nietzsche and Marx.

Marx was only a small part of the communist ideology that's killed about 100 million, and more appropriately applied in Sweden and Cuba and other places, those same ideas have saved millions.  But places like North Korea, and Cuba to a lesser extent are still misapplying his ideas and will kill plenty more before they are through.

St Augustine's ideas have been behind over half of the religious wars that have occurred since his lifetime, 1600 years ago.  He's in effect killed hundreds of millions, in the hands people following a fairly literal version of his ideology.  Lots of others--Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist fanatics, have behaved in ways that fit his ideas.  The Augustinian Heresy: that you must believe as some authority demands or die, is easily the most harmful idea. Augustine himself would have been horrified, and I'm sure would have reversed course had he comprehended.

Jonathan Edwards

The first Jonathan Edwards was a philosopher and theologian, and one of the earliest great American intellectuals.  Born in 1703 in Connecticut, he became interested in the works of John Locke, Isaac Newton, and many others.  He is most famous for shaping the First Great Awakening, which had a very profound legacy in American Evangelism, although not of the intellectual sort he would have hoped for.  He died in 1758 of smallpox.

The second Jonathan Edwards was a popular musician, born 1946.    He had a really big hit in 1971: "Sunshine (Go Away Today)".  It was a protest song--against the Vietnam war and the draft, but it's a catchy tune.  He's still out there, writing songs, recording and performing, but hasn't had another hit so big.

The third Jonathan Edwards (born 1966) is the greatest triple jumper ever.  He's held the world record for almost 19 years and has 4 of the best 6 jumps ever, including two Olympic medals, silver in 1996, gold in 2000.   Today, he's a TV presenter for the BBC, mostly on track and field subjects. He was born to a very religious family and for a time, refused to compete on sunday.  After retiring as an athlete, he did a lot of preaching.  However, in recent years, he says he has lost his faith completely.  He refuses to talk very specifically about it.

John Edwards (not quite the same name) was an American politician from North Carolina, who was a US Senator and came very close to becoming vice president in 2004 (it is known that there was a lot of election fraud in that election--it's entirely possible that he won).  A few years later, he managed to completely destroy his career with an extramarital affair, conducted while his wife was ill with cancer.  He's still alive, but his political career isn't.

Three of these four at one time purported to be very religious.  The fourth, the musician, played a preacher in a movie.  What he (and the politician) actually think about religion is unclear.  There are numerous other Jonathan Edwards (10 of them famous enough be in wikipedia's disambiguation page).  Wikipedia lists 20 politicians named John Edwards

The Greatest Engineers

I just read an article in EDN that listed the 5 greatest engineers of all time:
1: Nicola Tesla
2: The Wright Brothers
3: Achimedes
4: Leonardo da Vinci
5: Thomas Edison

Everyone on this list is certainly in the top dozen or so, but I disagree with the ranking a little.  Edison was less an engineer than an inventor.  His approach was far less systematic than his best contemporaries and relied heavily on brute force and large teams, and his rank certainly grows due to his gift for self-promotion.  But he was unquestionably a brilliant inventor.

The Wright Brothers also deserve a high ranking, and they are the contemporaries of Edison that show  how flawed Edison's methods were.  They were attacking a very hard problem and their highly systematic approach made their solutions remarkably effective: e.g.: the propellers of the original Wright Flyer were within a few % of the best that can be done with modern computational fluid dynamics.  They'd built wind tunnels and did lots of systematic experiments...and they got it right.  The materials they were working with: wood, fabric, primitive, very inefficient engines, made the problem very much harder than it would be today.

I'd rank Archimedes at the top of the list.  He was very much a mathematician and scientist as well as engineer.  His greatest achievement was not known until very recently: he'd worked out enough of the calculus to solve some problems that wouldn't be solvable again until the time of Leibniz and Newton. His solution was not quite complete, but he'd recognized the concept of the infinitesimal and infinite series.  Once he figured out a practical nomenclature for it (which he didn't) the rest would have been pretty obvious.   He'd worked out amazing geared mechanisms, probably including the Antikythera mechanism--again, ahead of any subsequent inventor until the time of Newton.  Had his discoveries been better understood by his Roman conquerors, world history would have taken a very different path.   He himself probably would not have gotten much farther than he did (he was 75 when he was murdered), but his students would probably have been able to do a real structural stress analysis.   Within a century or so, bridges and buildings would have been very different.

I'd add Isambard Kingdom Brunel to the list.  He's responsible for the adoption of the screw propeller, by devising a simple challenge that produced a result that was completely obvious to non-engineers.  He designed many of the railways and locomotives of England. Like Edison, he was a self-promoter, but also like Edison, he was a real genius.

Edwin Armstrong pretty much invented radio.  He wasn't first--Hertz and Marconi beat him--but their devices were crude and very inefficient and basically impractical.  Armstrong understood the necessary electronic circuits to make it work well, far in advance of anyone of his time.  Like Tesla, the Wrights, and Archimedes, he got his results by thinking hard and experimenting, and understanding what he was trying to do.  He had the bad luck to run afoul of RCA's David Sarnoff, who stole most of his life's work and drove him to suicide.

Like Brunel, James Watt didn't really invent anything, but he recognized what he'd seen and took it very much further.  His most important contribution was to make the steam engine practical, which was the transformative development that enabled the industrial revolution.  He also did important engineering of canals, especially canal locks, making it possible for boats to traverse elevation changes.

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile or the assembly line, but he figured out how to make them practical and economical.  Perhaps his most important recognition was that by paying his workers well, he improved their morale and thereby their effectiveness, and forced other employers to pay their workers well too.  This resulted in everybody, including Ford, having a better life.

The digital computer has a lot of inventors, but Alan Turing is probably the most important.  He was more a mathematician than engineer, but he definitely was an engineer.  He too was driven to suicide.

Robert Noyce didn't invent the transistor (he started out working for Bill Shockley, who did), but his team invented lithographed planar transistors, which took them from costing a hundreds of dollars each, to a few cents.  They also invented the integrated circuit, the microprocessor and a zillion other things along the way.   Noyce didn't do all of it, but he was very much the inspirational leader, and they give him credit for most of it.

Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Szilard and several other scientists contributed as much to technology as most of these guys, and were probably more brilliant than all but Tesla, Leonardo and Archimedes.  But they weren't engineers.

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update 4 July 2013
Doug Englebart died July 2 and he may deserve to be on this list.  In the early '60s, he understood that computer networking had the potential of radically changing the way we interact with each other and information, and spent the remainder his life making this better in every way he could think of  The computer mouse was merely his most famous invention.  The researchers at Xerox PARC (which invented the windowing user interface and the ethernet) were strongly inspired by his vision.