1822 superscience

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by maximara

Except you can find the position or the energy state of an electron but never both. That 'never submit to the unknowable' mentality was why Einstein denied Quantum Mechanics to his dying day - because it expressly stated there were things you could never certainly know (the Uncertainty Principle)

Chaos Theory is why predicting the exact action of some systems is so impossible - the uncertainty in your measurements accumulate over time and cause the predictions to go pear shaped if you go far enough into the future.

Yes, and because of Chaos Theory, even if the Uncertainty Principle could be solved by finally unifying Quantum and Relativety, we could still not be able to know it all; there will always be so degree of unknowable.

Originally Posted by maximara

The world of 1822 would have called such things "magic" because they didn't fit into a Newtonian view of the world vey well. FTL is totally valid under Newtonian physics as there is no "speed limit" and would not have been considered "superscience". More over the world of 1822 also excepted that supernatural forces and energies, ghosts, weird transmissions, and spooky phenomena were real. They were supposedly testable and understandable and therefore not "magic".

I never thought of that! Indeed "FTL" wouldnt be superscience! (It wouldnt even be called that) So Gurps 1822 could confidently say "TL 9: Space Colonization - Humans build "super fast" rockets capable of reaching the stars" and have the stats for "Super Speed Verne-Vessels" in their "Gurps 1822 Ultra Tech" book!

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

Y

I never thought of that! Indeed "FTL" wouldnt be superscience! (It wouldnt even be called that) So Gurps 1822 could confidently say "TL 9: Space Colonization - Humans build "super fast" rockets capable of reaching the stars" and have the stats for "Super Speed Verne-Vessels" in their "Gurps 1822 Ultra Tech" book!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne

Jules Verne wasn't even born until 1828 and apprently not pubiished until 1864.

1822 is really very early for _many_ things.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne

Jules Verne wasn't even born until 1828 and apprently not pubiished until 1864.

1822 is really very early for _many_ things.

Taking Steampunk's timeline as inspiration and wikipedia to fill-in additional information the GURPSwiki has this:
==Before 1800==
3400 BCE?/1500 BCE: Opium as a medical drug
Ancient history : Early Bactericide (alcohol)
Between 1000 and 1010: Prototype Glider
1600 BC: Earliest natural Plastic
Ancient Greece: Camera Obscura
1570s in Europe: Quinine as medical drug
1620: Cornelis Drebbel's Submarine
1739: Anas Mechanica Arcana
1745/1746: Condenser
c 1750: Barrel organ; precurser to Player Piano
c 1775: Clipper Ship
1779: Voder
1794: Observation Balloon
18th century: Arsenic as a medical drug
Before 1800: Charcoal Pills, Compressed Gas Tank, and Racing and Pleasure Yacht
1799: First motorized air compression system invented
1804: Punched Cards
==Where the timeline in the book starts==
*1815: Mount Tambora erupts setting off events that resulted in "the year without a summer" (1816)
*1816: Limelight
*1817: Construction of the Erie Canal begins
Simón Bolívar liberates Venezuela and sets off revolutions in South America.[note 1]
Safety Lamp?
first verified Bicycle
*1818: Frankenstein published
*1819: The sailing ship/sidewheel steamer SS Savannah crosses the Atlantic.
Singapore is founded as a trading post of the British East India Company.
==1820s==
*1820: George IV becomes king of the United Kingdom.
Missouri Compromise signed.
*1821: Catholic Church's ban on teaching Copernicus is lifted.
Greece declares independence from the Ottoman Empire finally achieving it in 1832.
First Mechanics' Institute established.
*1822: Rosetta Stone is translated by Jean-François Champollion
Charles Babbage's Difference Engine 0 is built.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

What 2022 RL technology would be superscience from the viewpoint of an 1822 GURPS, if GURPS existed two hundred years ago?

Just about all of it, if you include the second-order influences. Even the stuff that would be fully comprehensible in a mechanical sense (i.c. engines, steam turbines, submarine diving) are strongly affected by tech that does involve things that violate the basic rules of the universe (as understood in 1822).

For ex, an internal combustion engine, in itself, would be fully comprehensible in principle in 1822. But the computer workstation the designer used to design it uses processor chips that involves physics that blatantly violate what science thought it knew in 1822.

The rudiments of electrical tech and radio were one the edge of conceivable in 1822. But the quantum mechanics that underlie these phenomena would seem like the ravings of madness.

One thing that most scientists would have taken for granted in 1822 as self-evident, a rock solid foundational axiom, was the constancy of time. A year is a year is a year is a year. The idea that a man travelling at .99c relative to a second man would completely disagree on how long a year was, and that both would be equally right, would seem like the sheerest fantasy, the stuff of Faerie stories.

Yet modern devices like GPS systems hinge on the effects of relatively for their accuracy.

A chemist in 1822 would be familiar with cobalt. Now imagine a modern person sets a large chunk of cobalt down and tells him, "This is magic cobalt. It's cursed. If you stand close to it for long, you will sicken and die as some of it turns spontaneously into nickel. But until it turns into nickel the magic cobalt will behave just like ordinary cobalt if you test it in your lab."

Of course it's cobalt-60 rather than cobalt-59, but to explain what makes this cobalt dangerous to be near would require explaining that atoms are divisible, and what they divide into. It would require explaining the nature of isotopes, which were IIRC unsuspected in 1822. You'd have to explain protons, neutrons, and electrons. You'd need to go into beta decay.

Of course it was pretty much solidly known in 1822 that the chemical elements were fundamental, they didn't spontaneously turn into other elements, that kind of thinking is alchemical fantasy magic.

You'd need months to explain why it's a bad idea to stand near the magic cobalt for long, and the explanation would violate a lot of well-tested science as it was understood in 1822.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

The rudiments of electrical tech and radio were one the edge of conceivable in 1822. But the quantum mechanics that underlie these phenomena would seem like the ravings of madness.

Well, strictly speaking, not radio. Maxwell had not yet added an extra term to one of the electromagnetic equations, out of a desire for mathematical symmetry, that implied that a changing electric field in free space could produce a magnetic field; and without that you didn't have a model for electromagnetic radiation. Nor the discovery that the velocity of that radiation could be calculated from the permittivity and permeability of the vacuum, and was equal to the measured velocity of light. All that may not have been "superscience" in the sense of actually contradicting known physics, but was certainly a speculation that went beyond it—and turned out, surprisingly, to be true.

Before that, you could have near field electric and magnetic effects (which could give you wireless signals at modest range, say across a room) but not far field ones.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

It would require explaining the nature of isotopes, which were IIRC unsuspected in 1822. You'd have to explain protons, neutrons, and electrons. You'd need to go into beta decay.

Isotopes were first suggested in 1913, when it became clear that there were more distinct sequences of radioactive decay going on than there were unstable elements. The same year, a way was discovered to measure atomic number fairly directly. This was only 17 years after the discovery of radioactivity: nuclear physics developed fairly quickly.

[Anthony]

The problem with defining superscience is that superscience is really "people have talked about doing X, but we're pretty sure it's impossible" and an awful lot of modern tech wasn't even on anyone's mental horizons (and I'm sure there's stuff in the future that no-one has conceived of today).

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The problem with defining superscience is that superscience is really "people have talked about doing X, but we're pretty sure it's impossible" and an awful lot of modern tech wasn't even on anyone's mental horizons (and I'm sure there's stuff in the future that no-one has conceived of today).

This question inverts it into “people today have done X, but people back then were pretty sure it’d be impossible, if it was even thinkable”. That divides into (a) people back then had sort of thought about it, but could see huge problems, and (b) people back then couldn’t even conceive of it.

The problems with (a) are then, first, that science fiction was a new invention, so not many crazypants ideas had been thrown out for consideration, and second, modern science was new enough that the limits of the supposedly possible were still kind of hazy. (So, for example, Frankenstein had been written, and people knew that nobody had done what Frankenstein did in the novel, but could it be done? Who could say?) The problem with (b) are that it’s kind of dull. (Yes, we have microchips, and explaining them to someone in 1822 would be a big job — but so what?)

[Inky]

Yeah, if "superscience" is defined as "there are theoretical reasons that it can't be done", it would be difficult to think of examples, because in 1822 they didn't have much idea what theoretically could or couldn't be done.
In fact, as well as having less theoretical knowledge than people some time later, they also had less theoretical knowledge than people some time earlier.
In 1522, say, a lot of things might have been considered "definitely impossible" because they went against the Bible, or against the theories of Aristotle and other classical philosophers. By 1822, it had become common knowledge that a lot of those things were not true, but they didn't have a lot of idea what was true. A lot of things were up in the air. Scientific theory had a lot of blank areas in it in which a fiction writer could write "Here be dragons" and nobody could prove it wasn't true.

So far, we've got a few possibilities.
* Nuclear fission and fusion - one element couldn't be transmuted into another and matter couldn't be converted into energy or vice versa. (Funny twist of history, that - no sooner had they got done proving that there were separate elements and chemical processes didn't convert one into another than it turned out that elements could turn into different elements, but not in the way the alchemists thought!)
* Quantum processes and anything that relies on them, which includes transistors and therefore most of modern electronics.
* Radio as far as the theoretical basis goes. They were aware that the light spectrum went some way below and some way above what could be seen with the naked eye, but hadn't much idea what any of that was made of. It'd just been discovered that electric fields existed, and could interact in some way with magnetic fields, but at that point your listener would ask what on earth that had to do with invisible colours of light. There possibly wouldn't be any theoretical reason for them to think there couldn't be an invisible colour of light some way below infra-red that had the properties that radio waves have. But there might not be any reason for them to think there could - it might be Anthony's 4th or 5th level of superscience:

Originally Posted by Anthony

I think there's really degrees of superscience. From lowest to highest:

1. That's actually been done.
2. That's almost certainly possible, but there's unresolved engineering issues.
3. That might be possible, but the engineering problems look pretty intractable.
4. That would be possible if X were true (or existed, or whatever). As far as we know X isn't true, but if someone published research saying it was true, I wouldn't be overly shocked.
5. That would be possible if X were true, but I would be very surprised if it is.
6. That's only possible if our understanding of reality is fundamentally broken.

You could subdivide them, but I don't think a lot drops below a 4 in 1822.

And even then, it might seem unlikely to someone who didn't know about the connection between light and electromagnetism that any kind of light would interact with an electrical machine.
* Possibly others that I don't remember.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Inky

* Nuclear fission and fusion - one element couldn't be transmuted into another and matter couldn't be converted into energy or vice versa.

1822 predates thermodynamics as a field; you need concepts such as conservation of energy before that discussion even makes sense (once they had the concept, it became quickly obvious that there was a problem with the energy source for the sun).