Over on LiveJournal, Johan Larson has a great discussion topic:
Our hero, the time traveling engineer, starts out in 1901, with the goal of
working on the coolest engineering projects of the twentieth century.
Assuming he knows well the history of technical development during that
time, but is not actually allowed to substantially alter history, where is
he working during each of the hundred years?
He’s reposted the consensus list of great engineering projects developed in a Usenet discussion of the question a few years back. It seems to me that it would be fun to do something similar for science, mapping out a tour through the great spots to be in order to see science being made.
For example, in the years around 1908-1914, the place to be would probably be Ernest Rutherford’s lab in Manchester. Not only would you get to be on hand for the Rutherford scattering experiment, but if you stuck around through 1913, you’d get to see Niels Bohr develop the first quantum atomic model.
In the late 1920’s, Copenhagen would be the place to be, at Bohr’s institute. That was the center of the entire quantum revolution, and everybody who was anybody either worked there or stopped by to visit.
The essential stop in the early 1940’s would be the Manhattan Project, which makes Johan’s list of engineering marvels, but there was some good science along the way, and the collection of brilliant minds they assembled is probably unmatched in recent history.
What else should be on the list? Bell Labs is almost certainly due a visit, for the transistor, BCS theory, or a host of other discoveries. At least one of the great accelerator labs should be there– SLAC, Fermilab, and CERN. Switzerland in 1905 is probably a pretty good spot, too…
We could even open this up to stamp collecting other sciences. Who wouldn’t want to be hanging around for Fleming’s discovery of penicillin? Or Watson and Crick swiping Franklin’s results on DNA?
If you had a time machine, and were going to drop by the greatest scientific feats of the twentieth century, where would you stop?
I think a quick visit to Tranquillity Base in 1969 wouldn’t go amiss.
^^(#1) agreed!
I also wouldn’t mind hanging out at Caltech with Feynman in the 60’s 🙂 On a more astronomical note, how about some observation time with Hubble in 1922-1923 and, in between spending time in Copenhagen, keeping up with the development of his Redshift-distance Law which was published in 1929? Also, more recently, I think an exciting place would be with the High-z Supernova Search Team/Supernova Cosmology Project who discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe in 1998.
A few high points:
The Human Genome Project, in the 90’s.
Discovery of the K-T boundary, in 1980.
Discovery of nuclear winter, based on studies of dust storms on Mars.
The invention of public-key cryptography in the early seventies.
I also think global warming deserves a nod, but I’m not sure who to credit for the discovery.
(BTW, the link to my LJ post has a typo.)
How does this work? You make the list and then your memory is wiped before you start? Otherwise it would either be impossible not to break the rule that you can’t alter history, or incredibly frustrating to go through the all the blind alleys while knowing the right answer.
I believe Bardeen was already at UIUC when BCS theory was discovered.
I’d like to be in Kamerlingh-Onnes’ lab in Leiden when helium was first liquified and superconductivity discovered. I’ve read it was the first “industrial-scale” physics lab, and supposedly quite a sight.
Millikan’s oil drop experiment.
Then you could form a consistent closed causal loop, safely, by telling what the answer ought to be so he can drop the “wrong” ones.
That would be an awesome experiment.
Unless of course the paradox annihilates the universe or something.
Some great suggestions above. Here are a couple more:
Iowa, 1958, with Van Allen’s group, looking at the first American satellite data and discovering the radiation belts.
Circa 1986 I would want to be in that lab in Zurich that was playing around with cuprates and finding that some of them became superconducting at surprisingly high temperatures.
I’m more interested in the great mathematical discoveries, myself. Unfortunately they aren’t so entertaining to watch.
Achimedes’ “eureka” moment
(note to self, bring a spare towel)
Bletchley Park for the maths/computer science behind the breaking of German codes during WW2?
JILA, 1995, in Cornell and Wieman’s lab for the first observation of BEC.
Go watch the first images come back from the Hubble Space Telescope.
(note to self, bring Kleenex)
Many of the above, of course. I think hanging out with Faraday for several of his discoveries would have been interesting.
In the stamp-collecting mode, I’d like to have been with the Leakey group at Olduvai and Johanason in the Afar triangle for their discoveries.
I’d want to ride along on the ALVIN (I think it was still called ALVIN back then) mission in the 70s that discovered the ecosystem around the hydrothermal vent.
And I’d really like to be a fly on the wall during some of the discussions that led up to the proposal of the theory of plate tectonics.
Would have loved to be at SLAC in the mid to late 60’s through the early 70’s from when hard scattering showed proton structure to the J/PSI “October revolution”.
Principe, May 29, 1919. My birthday, no less. I mean, really, any eclipse is awesome to see, but I think that one would be worth going back in time for.
I would stop Riemann’s housekeeper from burning his notes, then bring them to the modern day. But I think we all would.
That done, I’d want to talk to Chomsky while he developed generative grammars. And possibly see the foundation of modern linguistics in Switzerland.
Working with Sapir and Whorf would be fun, saving Native American languages and realizing that language can affect how we think.
Okay, we know how popular and lucrative Ecotourism is. But why should the soft sciences have all the fun? Hard Science Tourism is a recreation whose time has come. Imaginary time, if you visit Lorentz, Minkowski, Poincare, Einstein, or Hawking at certain crucial points of space-time.
Re #2: “hanging out at Caltech with Feynman in the 60’s” — probably my most important mentor-mentoree experience. But it was vey hard to keep up with him at partying, never mind Physics.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering who the Scientist of greatest interest to visit would be in each decade, and (further back) in each century. My “Timeline” million words or so on my web domain is a useful tour guide, if you can freely travel through space and time. I mix in Mathematicians, Writers, Philosophers, and the like, to keep the parties a good mix.
But, as Dr. Stanley Schmidt points out, if you go back to hang out with Isaac Newton, do NOT show him your pocket computer. You could be burned as a witch, and stop him from initiating modern Physics.