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WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN
THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS? The World Question Center was published on December 30th. On the same day The New York Times ran an article "In an Online Salon, Scientists Sit Back and Ponder" which featured a selection of the questions. Other press coverage can be found in EDGE In The News. The project was interesting, worthwhile....and fun. I am pleased to publish below* the more than one hundred responses
in order of receipt. I expect many more entries and, in the spirit of
The Reality Club, robust discussion and challenges among the contributors. Happy New Year!! JB p.s. I get the last word. (*Please note that the length of this document is 41,000 words which prints out to about 75 pages.) . 
For an open discussion of the Inventions question, visit a special EDGE forum hosted by FEED Magazine. RELATED PRESS January 7, 1999 Wired News Top-Level Think Tank Goes Public John Brockman's invitation-only salon for scientific thinkers opens a public forum on Feed. By Steve Silberman One of the Net's most prestigious, invitation-only free-trade zones for the exchange of potent ideas is opening its doors. A little. .....Starting Thursday, two or three selected dialogs a month at Edge -- founded in 1996 by author and literary agent John Brockman -- will be open for public reading and discussion in a special area on Feed. January 7, 1999 Die Zeit (German Text) Brainstorming In The Club Of Thinkers (Partial, rough English Translation) by Ulrich Schnabel und Urs Willmann Could one inspire German scientists for such a brainstorming? Hardly. In German it is already difficult to find a good translation for this neural activity, leading to fantasy an fun. Brainstorming: "procedure to find the best solution of a problem by collecting spontaneous incidents (of the coworkers)", torments itself the Duden, the leading German dictionary. You can imagine the result. January 7, 1999| ABCNEWS.COM What Changed the World? Suggestions for Top Inventions That question was presented on Thanksgiving Day to Nobel laureates and other heavy thinkers by New York author and literary agent John Brockman. Brockman, who presides over an eclectic gathering of scientists and science buffs, started publishing the answers this week on the group's Web site. More than 100 participants have taken the bait so far, and their answers are as varied, and in some cases as strange, as the participants themselves.....This is not a group that accepts limitations gladly. Some fudged on the dates. Some eschewed the notion of an invention as some sort of gadget, opting instead for such things as the development of the scientific method, mathematics or some religions. January 5, 1998 FEED The Mother of All Inventions January 5, 1998 Salon "What's the Mother of All Inventions" The list makes for an enjoyable read — if you can get over the participants' utter inability to remain within the question's 2000-year bounds. Suggesting that the most important invention of this era is the spirit of rebellion against arbitrary rules. January 4, 1998 World News Tonight — ABC News Comments by Peter Jennings January 4, 1998 Newsweek Magazine — Newsweek.com "The Power of Big Ideas" Was the light bulb more important than the pill? An online gathering
of scientists nominates the most important inventions of the past 2,000
years. Some of their choices might surprise you. Interview by David Alpern January 4, 1999 The Wall Street Journal — The Wall Street Journal Interactive (Subscription Required) "The Nominees for Best Invention Of the Last Two Millennia Are . .
." John Brockman is the premier literary agent of the digerati, so when
he asked 1,000 scientists and other techno-thinkers to suggest the most
important invention of the past 2,000 years, the responses sounded a
lot like proposals for yet another millennial book. January 4, 1999 The Daily Telegraph The Pill and the Birth of Invention: Nobel laureate Prof. Philip Anderson, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, biologist Prof Richard Dawkins and Sir John Maddox are among the 100 or so contributors who have nominated inventions randing from tha atomic bomb and board games to the Internet, Hindu-Arabic number system and anaethesia. January 4, 1999 DaveNet " Welcome to 1999!" by Dave Winer Congratulations to John Brockman and the people at edge.org. This is an incredible source of new thoughts. I highly recommend it to DaveNet readers.....Sites like www.edge.org show what can be done when there's moderation and thoughtfulness and a little bit of editing. We can learn from each other. The world is not filled with bullshit. There are interesting new ideas, and new perspectives on old ideas WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS? My choice for the most important invention? The contraceptive pill. Why? Well, there are, of course, the well-rehearsed answers to that question. The pill did indeed fertilize the sexual liberation of the sixties, did stimulate feminism and the consequent erosion of conventional family structure in Western society — perhaps the most significant modification in human behaviour since the invention of shamanism. It did help to change our concept of the division of labour, to foster the beginnings of an utterly different attitude to the social role of women. But, arguably the important sequel of the pill is the growing conception that our bodies are servants of our minds, rather than vice versa. This relatively low-tech invention has triggered a cultural and cognitive revolution in our self-perception. It has contributed to our ability to accept organ transplantation, the notion of machine intelligence, gene therapy and even, eventually, germ-line genetic manipulation. It has shifted the quest of human beings from controlling their physical environment to controlling themselves — their own bodies and hence their physical destinies. COLIN BLAKEMORE is Waynflete Professor of Physiology, University of
Oxford; Director, Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience; President
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1997-8; and
author of The Mind's Brain. Steven Rose: I don't need a page. The answer is clear: inventions are concepts, not just technologies, so the most important are the concepts of democracy, of social justice, and the belief in the possibility of creating a society free from the oppressions of clas, race, and gender. STEVEN ROSE, neurobiologist, is Professor of Biology and Director,
Brain and Behaviour Research Group, The Open University; author Lifelines;
The Making Of Memory; Not In Our Genes; From Brains To Consciousness
(Ed.) . See EDGE:
"THE TWO STEVES" Pinker vs. Rose - A Debate (Part I) and (Part
II)". My nomination is the invention of the scientific method. The Greeks believed we could understand the world rationally. But the scientific method requires that we ask questions of nature by experimentation. This has led to the science and technology that has transformed the world. JOSEPH
TRAUB is Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at
Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
He is the author of nine books, including the recently published Complexity
And Information.
See EDGE:
" The Unknown and The Unknowable: A Talk With Joseph Traub". I always liked Lynn White's story about how the stirrup revolutionized warfare and made feudal society and culture possible. Or Lefebre des Noettes' argument about how the invention of the rudder made extensive sailing and the consequent expansion of Europe and its colonization of the world possible. But it's sobering to realize that it took us over one thousand years to realize the impact of these artifacts. So I am not at all sure we have at this time a good grip on what the most important inventions of the past millennia have been. Certainly the contraceptive pill is a good candidate, and so is the scientific method. I am also intrigued by the effects of such inventions as the flag — a symbol of belonging that millions will follow to ruin or victory independently of biological connectedness; or the social security card that signifies that we are not alone and our welfare is a joint problem for the community; or the invention of civil rights which however abused and misused is pointing us towards a notion of universal human dignity that might yet eclipse in importance all the technological marvels of the millennium. MIHALY
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI is professor of psychology and education at the
University of Chicago. He is the author of Flow:
The Psychology of Optimal Experience,
The
Evolving Self: A Psychology For the Third Millennium,
Creativity, and Finding
Flow (A Master Minds Book). In his work on the foundations of chemistry, it occurred to Antoine Lavoisier (and also, I suppose to Joseph Priestly) that the smell of a chemical was not necessarily a 'property' of that chemical, but a property of some related chemical that had the form of a gas, which therefore could reach the nose of the observer. Thus solid sulfur itself has no smell, but its gaseous relatives, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide have plenty of it. Perhaps this tiny insight was the key to the transformation of chemistry from a formerly incoherent field into the great science of the 19th and 20th centuries. MARVIN
MINSKY is a mathematician and computer scientist; Toshiba Professor
of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
cofounder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is the author
of eight books, including The
Society of Mind. See EDGE:
" Consciousness is a Big Suitcase: A Talk with Marvin Minsky ";
The
Third Culture,
Chapter 8. The question is impossible to answer with one thing; one could for instance say with some justification "the germ theory of disease" but then that goes back to the microscope — otherwise no one would ever have seen a germ — and that to the lens, and eyeglasses may be as important as germs, ft as germs, and so on. But I will give you my entry; to the amazement of my colleagues who think of me as the ultimate antireductionist, I will suggest a very reductionist idea: the quantum theory, and I include emphatically quantum field theory. The quantum theory forces a revision of our mode of thinking which is far more profound than Newtonian mechanics or the Copernican revolution or relativity. In a sense it absolutely forces us not to be reductionist if we are to keep our sanity, since it tells us that we are made up of anonymous identical quanta of various quantum fields, so that only the whole has any identity or integrity. Yet it also tells us that we really completely know the rules of the game which all these particles and quanta are playing, so that if we are clever enough we can understand everything about ourselves and our world. Note that I said understand, not predict — the latter is really in principle impossible, for reasons which have little to do with the famous Uncertainty Principle and a lot to do with exponential explosions of computations. I would agree with whoever said "the scientific method" if I thought that was a single thing invented at some identifiable time, but I know too much history and see too much difference between different sociologies of fields. Why has no one mentioned the printing press yet? The other really profound discovery is the molecular basis of evolution, for which probably Oswald Avery deserves more credit than anyone. Evolution itself has, like the scientific method, much too complicated a history to class as a single invention. PHILIP
W. ANDERSON is a Nobel laureate physicist at Princeton and one of
the leading theorists on superconductivity. He is the author of A
Career in Theoretical Physics, and Economy
as a Complex Evolving System. The most important invention of all time was the interrogative sentence. i.e., the asking of questions. However, the original request was for the most important invention of the last 2,000 years, not of all time. To that I would say, space travel. Of course, it may be centuries before we know the full consequences of space travel. REUBEN HERSH is professor emeritus at the University of matics, Really?
And (with Philip J. Davis)The
Mathematical Experience, winner of the National Book Award in
1983. See EDGE;
"What Kind Of Thing Is A Number? A Talk With Reuben Hersh". Another good question! My perhaps eccentric but nonetheless heartfelt nomination is Western classical music, as epitomized in the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and above all Mozart. Music is a free invention of the human spirit, less dependent upon physical or physiological inventions than most other contrivances. Musical compositions in the Western tradition represent an incredible cerebral achievement, one that is not only appreciated but also imitated or elaborated upon wherever it travels. Most inventions — from nuclear energy to antibiotics - can be used for good or ill. Classical music has probably given more pleasure to more individuals, with less negative fallout, than any other human artifact. Finally, while no one can compose like Mozart and few can play like Heifetz or Casals, anyone who works at it can perform in a credible way — and, courtesy of software, even those of us unable to play an instrument or create a score can now add our own fragments to an ever expanding canon. HOWARD
GARDNER, is Professor of Education at Harvard University. His numerous
books include Leading
Minds, Frames
of Mind, Multiple
Intelligences, The
Mind's New
Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution, The
Unschooled Mind, To Open Minds, Creating
Minds, and Extraordinary
Minds (Master Minds Series). See
EDGE: "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness: Education for All Human Beings"
A Talk With Howard Gardner". Daniel C. Dennett: The battery, the first major portable energy packet in the last few billion years. When simple prokaryotes acquired mitochondria several billion years ago, these amazingly efficient portable energy devices opened up Design Space to multicellular life of dazzling variety. Many metazoa developed complex nervous systems, which gave the planet eyes and ears for the first time, expanding the epistemic horizons of life by many orders of magnitude. The modest battery (and its sophisticated fuel cell descendants), by providing energy for autonomous, free-ranging, unplugged artifacts of dazzling variety, is already beginning to provide a similarly revolutionary cascade of developments. Politically, the transistor radio and cell phone are proving to be the most potent weapons against totalitarianism ever invented, since they destroy all hope of centralized control of information. By giving every individual autonomous prosthetic extensions of their senses (think of how camcorders are revolutionizing scientific data-gathering possibilities, for instance), batteries enable fundamental improvements in the epistemological architecture of our species. The explosion of science and technology that may eventually permit us to colonize space (or save our planet from a fatal collision) depends on our ability to store and extract electrical power ubiquitously. Our batteries are still no match for the mitochondrial ATP system — a healthy person with a backpack can climb over mountains for a week without refueling, something no robot could come close to doing — but they open up a new and different cornucopia of competences. DANIEL C.
DENNETT, a philosopher, is Director of the Center
for Cognitive Studies, and Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor
at Tufts University. He is author of Darwin's
Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Consciousness
Explained, Brainstorms,
Kinds
of Minds (Science Masters Series), and coauthor with Douglas
Hofstadter of The
Mind's I. See The
Third Culture,
Chapter 10. This is a good question. My suggestion is not original. I don't remember who gave me the idea, but it was probably Lynn White, with Murray Gell-Mann as intermediary. The most important invention of the last two thousand years was hay. In the classical world of Greece and Rome and in all earlier times, there was no hay. Civilization could exist only in warm climates where horses could stay alive through the winter by grazing. Without grass in winter you could not have horses, and without horses you could not have urban civilization. Some time during the so-called dark ages, some unknown genius invented hay, forests were turned into meadows, hay was reaped and stored, and civilization moved north over the Alps. So hay gave birth to Vienna and Paris and London and Berlin, and later to Moscow and New York. FREEMAN DYSON
is Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his
many books are Disturbing the Universe, From
Eros to Gaia, and Imagined
Worlds. Computers, not for current reasons but because they're essential to prevent a collapse of civilization in the future. Computers may allow us to understand the earth's fickle climate and how it is affected by detours of the great ocean currents. These detours cause abrupt coolings within a decade that last for centuries, sure to set off massive warfare as the population downsizes to match the crop failures. "Natural" though these worldwide coolings have been in the past, with their forest fires and population crashes, they're not any more inevitable than local floods — if we learn enough about the nonlinear mechanisms in order to stabilize climate. Computer simulations are the key to a "preventative medicine" of climate, what may allow human scientific ingenuity to keep civilization from unraveling in another episode of cool, crash, and burn. WILLIAM
H. CALVIN is a theoretical neurophysiologist on the faculty of the
University of Washington School of Medicine who writes about the brain
and evolution; author of The River That Flows Uphill, The
Throwing Madonna, The
Cerebral Symphony, Conversations
with Neil's Brain (with George A. Ojemann), The
Cerebral Code, and How
Brains Think (Science Masters Series). See EDGE:
" Competing for Consciousness: A Talk with William Calvin". I know it would probably be more helpful to add something new to the list, but I found Joe Traub's nomination so compelling that I'd feel dishonest doing anything but seconding it. It's hard to imagine how different our lives would be today without the steady accrual of both knowledge and technology that has accompanied the rigorous application of the scientific method over a surprisingly small number of human generations. While the notion of formulating well explicated, testable conjectures and subjecting them to potential refutation through controlled experimentation (and, where appropriate, statistical analysis) is now second nature to those of us who work in the sciences, it's easy to forget that we weren't born with an intuitive understanding of this approach, and had we lived two thousand years ago, we would never have been taught to use it. Although the apparatus of formal logic would probably rate a close second in my book, I join Joe in casting my vote for the scientific method. DAVID
E. SHAW is the chairman of D.
E. Shaw & Co., a global investment bank whose activities center
on various aspects of the intersection between technology and finance,
and of Juno Online Services, the world's second largest Internet access
provider. He also serves as a member of President Clinton's Committee
of Advisors on Science and Technology, and previously served on the
faculty of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. We are using it now. The internet. Of course the internet relies on numerous other inventions (chips, networking, CRTs, telephones, electricity etc). The reason why the internet isn't an obvious choice at first glance (besides the fact that is so present in our lives we can fail to notice it) is that its power has not yet begun to fully manifest itself. We still have schools, offices, the post office, telephone companies, places of entertainment, shopping malls and such, but we won't for long. Information delivery methods affect every aspect of how we live. If we don't have to walk to town to find out what's going on, or to shop, or to learn, or to work, why will we go to town? Schools (which have not been able to change) will completely transform themselves when better course can be built on the internet than could possibly be delivered in a university. Of course, we haven't seen that yet, but when the best physicists in the world combine to deliver a learn by doing simulation that allows students to try things out and discuss what they have done with every important (virtual) physicist who has something to say about what they have done, the only thing universities will have to offer will be football. Shopping malls aren't gone yet but they will be. Why go to a store to buy music CDs any more? You can listen to samples of whatever you want and click a button for delivery while seated at home. Any object that needn't be felt and perused to be purchased will find no better delivery method than the internet. Newspapers? Not dead yet, but they will be. Pick an aspect of the way we live today and it will change radically in the coming years because of the internet. Life (and human interaction) in fifty years will be so different we will hardly recognize the social structures that will evolve. I don't know if we will be happier, but we will be better informed. ROGER
C. SCHANK, computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, is director
of The Institute
for Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where he is John
Evans Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well
as Professor of Psychology and of Education and Social Policy; author
of The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions,
Tell
Me A Story, and Engines
for Education . See The
Third Culture, Chapter 9. There is an inherent bias in all such surveys, because everyone strives to be original and surprising and so shuns the obvious but probably more correct answers — such as steel, or moveable type, or antibiotics, to name but three obvious things that have utterly transformed not only how people live but the way they experience life. The only way I can think of being surprising is to violate John's terms and go back 6,000 years. But if I will be permitted to do so, I would argue that the single invention that has changed human life more than any other is the horse — by which I mean the domestication of the horse as a mount. The horse was well on its way to extinction when it was domesticated on the steppes of Ukraine 6,000 years ago, but from the moment it entered the company of man the horse repopulated Europe with a swiftness that announced the arrival of a new tempo of life and cultural change. Trade over thousands of miles suddenly sprang up, communication with a rapidity never before experienced became routine, exploration of once forbidding zones became possible, and warfare achieved a violence and degree of surprise that spurred the establishment and growth of fortified permanent settlements, the seeds of the great cities of Europe and Asia. For want of the horse, civilization would have been lost. STEPHEN BUDIANSKY, Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly,
is the author of
If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness
and The
Nature of Horses: Exploring Equine Evolution, Intelligence, and Behavior. ELECTRICITY CONTAINS THE WORD CITY — WHICH CERTAINLY IS OUR MOST COMPLEX INVENTION & FROM THE DENSITY OF HUMAN INTERACTION ALL ELSE FLOWS. RICHARD SAUL WURMAN
is the chairman and creative director of the TED
conferences. He is also an architect, a cartographer, the creator of
the Access
Travel Guide Series, and the author and designer of more than
sixty books, including Information
Architects, Follow the Yellow Brick Road and Information
Anxiety. The question does most of the answering: "What Is The Most Important
Invention In The Past Two Thousand Years?" "Most important" would suggest looking for inventions near the beginning of the period, since they would have had the most time for accumulative impact. Where did that number "Two Thousand" come from? From the approaching Year 2000, which is a Christian Era date — now referred to as "Common Era": 2000 CE. That's quite a clue. The most important cultural — hence all-embracing — invention is a religion. Only two major religions have been invented in the last two millennia, Christianity and Islam. Try to imagine the last two millennia, or the present, without them. STEWART BRAND
is founder of The
Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The
Well, cofounder of Global
Business Network, president of The
Long Now Foundation, and author of The
Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT and How
Buildings Learn.
See EDGE:
"The Clock of the Long Now"; Digerati,
Chapter 3. The Universal Turing Machine. Because it is universal. Not only as the theoretical archetype for digital computing as we practice it today, but as a least common denominator — translating between sequence in time and pattern in space — that lies at the foundations of mathematics and suggests the possibilities of a communications medium we have only just begun to explore. Life and intelligence that achieves widespread distribution across the cosmos (and over time) may be expected to assume a digital representation, at least in some phases of the life cycle, to facilitate electromagnetic transmission, cross-platform compatibility, and long-term storage. This requires a local substrate. And we are doing our best, thanks to the proliferation of our current instantiation of the UTM (known as the PC) to help. When we establish contact with such an intelligence, will we receive instructions for building a machine to upload Jodie Foster? Probably not. The download will proceed the other way. To paraphrase Marvin Minsky: "Instead of sending a picture of a cat, there is one area in which they can send the cat itself." GEORGE DYSON is the leading authority in the field of Russian Aleut kayaks, he has been a subject of the PBS television show Scientific American Frontiers. He is the author of Baidarka, and Darwin Among The Machines:The Evolution Of Global Intelligence. See EDGE: "Darwin Among the Machines; or, The Origins of Artificial Life"; See EDGE: "CODE - George Dyson & John Brockman: A Dialogue" . (Well John, you did say most important invention, not the one we should be most proud of). The invention (and detonation) of the atomic bomb has changed the world more profoundly than any other human development in the last 2000 years. In seconds, nearly 200,000 people were dead or dying in Hiroshima, and consciousness was forever changed on our planet. Although the arms race fueled our economy for a few more decades, the bomb set into motion a 'warfare stalemate'. With the ability to destroy our planet within the realm of possibility, we were forced to examine our rules of war, and seek new means of engagement to work out our differences. And although hundreds of wars are going on at any time on our planet, there are checks and balances, underscored by the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Please note that if you were to have phrased the question to include time prior to 2000 years ago, then I would have suggested that our most powerful invention would be song. MARNEY MORRIS, is president of Animatrix,
which is publishing Sprocketworks,
a next generation learning program, early in 1999. She teaches interaction
design at Stanford. My personal favourite is the place value notation system combined with the use of a symbol 0 for Zero to denote a nonexistent number marks the birth of modern mathematics. I think this is the greatest invention but I am being a little jingoistic — it was invented in India in the 4th or 5th century BC , systematised by Aryabhatta in the 4th Century AD by the Indian Astronomer and then transmitted to the west via the Arabs. And Maths of course is essential for all science. V.S.
RAMACHANDRAN, M.D., PH.D., is professor of neurosciences and psychology
and Director of the Brain Perception Laboratory at the University of
California in San Diego. He is author of Phantoms
In The Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
(with Sandra Blakeslee). Some of your jump-start friends and colleagues seem to have ignored your (arbitrary?) cutoff date, so I will too. I think you'd have to go a long way to find a more important invention than the basket. Without something to gather into, you cannot have a gathering society of any complexity, no home and hearth, no division of labour, no humanity. This is not an original insight. I ascribe it to Glyn Isaac, a sorely-missed palaeoanthropologist. The basket ranks right up there with hay, the stirrup, printing and what have you. While we're about it, though, I'd like to take issue with Dan Dennett's choice of the battery. Granted it has enabled all the things he says it has (and I seriously considered nominating the Walkman — a bizarre idea, the tape recorder that doesn't record — as the invention with most impact on our lives) but at what cost? All extant batteries (though not fuel cells) are inherently polluting and wasteful. It takes something like six times more energy to make a Zinc-alkaline battery as the battery can store. I can't help but think that if a small portion of the effort that has gone into inventing "better" batteries had gone into, say, solar panels, our world and culture would be even more different. Thanks for a stimulating time. JEREMY CHERFAS, biologist and BBC Radio Four broadcaster, is author
of The Seed Savers Handbook. Most important invention: CALCULUS The world today would be very different if the Greeks and not Newton/Leibniz had invented or "discovered" calculus. The world today might have occurred a millennium or two earlier. Calculus was the real fruit of the renaissance. It began by taking a fresh look at infinity — at the infinitely small rather than the infinitely large. And it led in one stroke to two great advances: It showed how to model change (the differential equation) and it showed how to find the best or worst solution to a well-defined problem (optimization). The first advance freed math from static descriptions of the world to dynamic descriptions that allowed things to change or evolve in time. This is literally where "rocket science" becomes a science. The second advance had more practical payoff because it showed how to minimize cost or maximize profit. Thomas Jefferson claimed to have used the calculus this way to design a more efficient plow. Someday we may use it to at least partially design our offspring to minimize bad health effects or (God forbid) maximize good behavior. Calculus lies at the heart of our modern world. Its equations led to the prediction of black holes. We built the first computers to run other calculus equations to predict where bombs would land. The recent evolution of calculus itself to the random version called "stochastic calculus" has led to how we price the mysterious financial "derivatives" contracts that underlie the global economy. Calculus has led us from seeing the world as what Democritus called mere "atoms and void" to seeing the world as atoms that move in a void that moves. BART KOSKO is professor of electrical engineering at the University
of Southern California; he is author of Fuzzy
Thinking and Nanotime. The most important invention in the past two thousand years is anesthesia. Have you ever had surgery? If so, either a) part of your body was temporarily "deadened" by "local" anesthesia, or b) you "went to sleep" with general anesthesia. Can you imagine having surgery, or needing surgery, or even possibly needing surgery without the prospect of anesthesia? And beyond the agony-sparing factor is an extra added feature — understanding the mechanism of anesthesia is our best path to understanding consciousness. Anesthesia grew from humble beginnings. Inca shamans performing trephinations (drilling holes in patients' skulls to let out evil humors) chewed coca leaves and spat into the wound, effecting local anesthesia. The systemic effects of cocaine were studied by Sigmund Freud, but cocaine's use as a local anesthetic in surgery is credited to Austrian ophthalmologist Karl Koller who in 1884 used liquid cocaine to temporarily numb the eye. Since then dozens of local anesthetic compounds have been developed and utilized in liquid solution to temporarily block nerve conduction from peripheral nerves and/or spinal cord. The local anesthetic molecules bind specifically on sodium channel proteins in axonal membranes of neurons near the injection site, with essentially no effects on the brain. On the other hand general anesthetic molecules are gases which do act on the brain in a remarkable fashion — the phenomenon of consciousness is erased completely while other brain activities continue. General anesthesia by inhalation developed in the 1840's, involving two gases used previously as intoxicants. Soporific effects of diethyl ether ("sweet vitriol") had been known since the 14th century, and nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") was synthesized by Joseph Priestley in 1772. In 1842 Crawford Long, a Georgia physician with apparent personal knowledge of "ether frolics" successfully administered diethyl ether to James W. Venable for removal of a neck tumor. However Long's success was not widely recognized, and it fell to dentist Horace Wells to publicly demonstrate the use of inhaled nitrous oxide for tooth extraction at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1844. Although Wells had apparently used the technique previously with complete success, during the public demonstration the gas-containing bag was removed too soon and the patient cried out in pain. Wells was denounced as a fake, however two years later in 1846 another dentist William T.G. Morton returned to the "Mass General" and successfully used diethyl ether on patient William Abbott. Morton used the term "letheon" for his then-secret gas, but was persuaded by Boston physician/anatomist Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of the Supreme Court Justice) to use the term anesthesia. Although its use became increasingly popular, general anesthesia remained an inexact art with frequent deaths due to overdose and effects on breathing until after World War II. Hard lessons were learned following the attack on Pearl Harbor — anesthetic doses easily tolerated by healthy patients had tragic consequences on those in shock due to blood loss. Advent of the endotracheal tube (allowing easy inhalation/exhalation and protection of the lungs from stomach contents), anesthesia gas machines, safer anesthetic drugs and direct monitoring of heart, lungs, kidneys and other organ systems have made modern anesthesia extremely safe. However one mystery remains. Exactly how do anesthetic gases work? The answer may well illuminate the grand mystery of consciousness. Inhaled anesthetic gas molecules travel through the lungs and blood to the brain. Barely soluble in water/blood, anesthetics are highly soluble in a particular lipid-like environment akin to olive oil. It turns out the brain is loaded with such stuff, both in lipid membranes and tiny water-free ("hydrophobic") lipid-like pockets within certain brain proteins. To make a long story short, Nicholas Franks and William Lieb at Imperial College in London showed in a series of articles in the 1980's that anesthetics act primarily in these tiny hydrophobic pockets in several types of brain proteins. The anesthetic binding is extremely weak and the pockets are only 1 /50 of each protein's volume, so it's unclear why such seemingly minimal interactions should have significant effects. Franks and Lieb suggested the mere presence of one anesthetic molecule per pocket per protein prevents the protein from changing shape to do its job. However subsequent evidence showed that certain other gas molecules could occupy the same pockets and not cause anesthesia (and in fact cause excitation or convulsions). Anesthetic molecules just "being there" can't account for anesthesia. Some natural process critical to consciousness and perturbed by anesthetics must be happening in the pockets. What could that be? Anesthetic gases dissolve in hydrophobic pockets by extremely weak quantum mechanical forces known as London dispersion forces. The weak binding accounts for easy reversibility - as the anesthetic gas flow is turned off, concentrations drop in the breathing circuit and blood, anesthetic molecules are gently sucked out of the pockets and the patient wakes up. Weak but influential quantum London forces also occur in the hydrophobic pockets in the absence of anesthetics and govern normal protein movement and shape. A logical conclusion is that anesthetics perturb normally occurring quantum effects in hydrophobic pockets of brain proteins. The quantum nature of the critical effects of anesthesia may be a significant clue. Several current consciousness theories propose systemic quantum states in the brain, and as consciousness has historically been perceived as the contemporary vanguard of information processing (J.B.'s "technology = new perception") the advent of quantum computers will inevitably cast the mind as a quantum process. The mechanism of anesthesia suggests such a comparison will be more than mere metaphor. STUART
HAMEROFF, M.D. is Professor, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology,
University of Arizonan 1996. He is coeditor of Toward
a Science of Consciousness : The First Tucson Discussions and Debates
and Toward
a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates. After reading the various answers to the question, I'm going to sneak through the door opened by Philip Anderson and nominate a discovery instead of an invention. And it is the Copernican Theory. Generally it was a counter-intuitive idea, and it ran opposite to the interpretation of senses (not to mention the Church) I mean, one could "see" the sun going across the sky. What could be more obvious than that? A nice move. It took a lot of intellectual courage, and taught us more than just what it said. MICHAEL
NESMITH is an artist, writer, and business man; former cast member
of "The Monkees". Clifford Pickover: As usual you are a font of important, stimulating ideas and have gathered together an awesome collection of minds for your latest survey. Here is my response. In 105 AD, Ts'ai Lun reported the invention of paper to the Chinese Emperor. Ts'ai Lun was an official to the Chinese Imperial court, and I consider his early form of paper to be humanity's most important invention and progenitor of the Internet. Although recent archaeological evidence places the actual invention of papermaking 200 years earlier, Ts'ai Lun played an important role in developing a material that revolutionized his country. From China, papermaking moved to Korea and Japan. Chinese papermakers also spread their handiwork into Central Asia and Persia, from which traders introduced paper to India. This is why Ts'ai Lun is one of the most influential people in history. Today's Internet evolved from the tiny seed planted by Ts'ai Lun. Both paper and the Internet break the barriers of time and distance, and permit unprecedented growth and opportunity. In the next decade, communities formed by ideas will be as strong as those formed by geography. The Internet will dissolve away nations as we know them today. Humanity becomes a single hive mind, with a group intelligence, as geography becomes putty in the hands of the Internet sculptor. Chaos theory teaches us that even our smallest actions have amplified effects. Now more than ever before this is apparent. Whenever I am lonely at night, I look at a large map depicting 61,000 Internet routers spread throughout the world. I imagine sending out a spark, an idea, and a colleague from another country echoing that idea to his colleges, over and over again, until the electronic chatter resembles the chanting of monks. I agree with author Jane Roberts who once wrote, "You are so part of the world that your slightest action contributes to its reality. Your breath changes the atmosphere. Your encounters with others alter the fabrics of their lives, and the lives of those who come in contact with them." CLIFFORD
A. PICKOVER is a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research
Center. He is the author of over 20
books translated in 10 languages on a broad range of topics in science
and art. His internet web site has attracted nearly 200,000 visitors.
Good question! My immediate response (without even thinking) was the contraceptive pill. My mother had six children in five and a half years and it was only the invention of the pill that saved our family from becoming a mini-nation-state in its own right. But since Colin Blakemore has already described so well its immense importance, let me suggest another "invention" — electrification. Why electrification? For a start, one of my most vivid childhood memories is of my mother seemingly spending endless hours washing nappies and clothes by hand. The electric washing machine and other electric home gadgets (vacuum cleaners, fridges, food processors et cetera) have freed billions of women from the endless drudgery of heavy-duty housework. By bringing us light and heat and power on tap, electricity has truly transformed life — not just in the home, but in almost every industry. Modern manufacturing would be impossible without electricity. Ditto the modern office. The ability to literally transport power is, I think, the most revolutionary technology to come out of modern science. And of course, it is the ability to transport electric power at the micro level that has made possible silicon chips, and the attendant computer and information revolution. Far more than Einstein and Bohr, Faraday and Maxwell are the true "heroes" of the modern technological world. MARGARET WERTHEIM is a science writer, and a research associate of
the American Museum of Natural History. She is the author of Pythagoras
Trousers a history of physics and religion. THE SPECTROSCOPE The telescope resolves light from very far away. The spectroscope analyses and diagnoses it. It is through spectroscopy that we know what the stars are made of. The spectroscope shows us that the universe is expanding and the galaxies receding; that time had a beginning, and when; that other stars are like the sun in having planets where life might evolve. In 1835, Auguste Comte, the French philosopher and founder of sociology, said of the stars: "We shall never be able to study, by any method, their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure . . . Our positive knowledge of stars is necessarily limited to their geometric and mechanical phenomena." Even as he wrote, the Fraunhofer lines had been discovered: those exquisitely fine barcodes precisely positioned across the spectrum; those telltale fingerprints of the elements. The spectroscopic barcodes enable us to do a chemical analysis of a distant star when, paradoxically (because it is so much closer), we cannot do the same for the moon — its light is all reflected sunlight and its barcodes those of the sun. The Hubble red shift, majestic signature of the expanding universe and the hot birth of time, is calibrated by the same Fraunhofer barcodes. Rhythmic recedings and approachings by stars, which betray the presence of planets, are detected by the spectroscope as oscillating red and blue shifts. The spectroscopic discovery that other stars have planets makes it much more likely that there is life elsewhere in the universe. For me, the spectroscope has a poetic significance. Romantic poets saw the rainbow as a symbol of pure beauty, which could only be spoiled by scientific understanding. This thought famously prompted Keats in 1817 to toast "Newton's health and confusion to mathematics", and in 1820 inspired his well known lines: "Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Humanity's eyes have now been widened to see that the rainbow of visible light is only an infinitesimal slice of the full electromagnetic spectrum. Spectroscopy is unweaving the rainbow on a grand scale. If Keats had known what Newton's unweaving would lead to — the expansion of our human vision, inspired by the expanding universe — he could not have drunk that toast. RICHARD
DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor
For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New
College; author of The
Selfish Gene, The
Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River
out of Eden (Science Masters Series), Climbing
Mount Improbable,
and the recently published Unweaving
the Rainbow. See EDGE:
"Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder: A Talk by Richard
Dawkins"; The
Third Culture:
Chapter 3. My suggestion for the most important invention of the last two millennia is the computer because of the way it extends the capacities of the human mind for accurately performing large numbers of calculations and for keeping track of and accessing vast bodies of data. As with any great invention, these enhanced abilities have a light and a dark side. As a scientist I am now able to answer questions that could not be answered prior to the computer. On the dark side is the loss of privacy and the enhanced potential for social control made possible by the ability to manipulate large databases of personal information. As another candidate, my mother has said that her all time favorite invention is the telephone because of how it allows her to stay in intimate and immediate contact with distant friends. DAVID HAIG is an evolutionary biologist and a member of the Department
of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. Christopher G. Langton: Like others who have responded, I think the choice is obvious. The remarkable thing is that "the obvious choice" is different for everyone! To my mind, the most important inventions are those which have forced the largest changes in our world-view. On the basis of this criterion, I pick two (for reasons listed below): The telescope, and the theory of evolution by natural selection. I pick two because it seems to me that there are two major categories of important inventions: a) complexity increasing, and b) complexity decreasing. By complexity increasing, I mean those inventions that open up vast new realms of data, which can not be accounted for on the existing world view, making the universe less understandable, and therefore seemingly more complex. By complexity decreasing, I mean those inventions that identify a pattern or algorithm in vast realms of data, ridding that data of a good deal of its apparent complication. These inventions force alterations to our world view to account for previously unaccountable data, or to account for it more directly and simply, making the universe more understandable, and therefore seemingly less complex. The former tend to take the form of instruments or devices — physical constructs — while the latter tend to take the form of concepts, theories, or hypotheses — mental constructs. Both qualify as inventions.* (*To be careful, the former also involves a mental construct — a device alone is useless without the mental construct that points it in the right direction.) In the former category, nothing rivals the telescope. No other device has initiated such a massive reconstruction of our world view. It forced us to accept the Earth, and ourselves, as "merely" a part of a larger cosmos. Of course, numerous theories besides the earth-centered universe existed before its invention, but the telescope opened the doors to the flood of data that would resolve what were previously largely philosophical disputes. The microscope — a relative of the telescope — also opened the door to a previously unimagined universe, and runs a close second to the telescope on the world-view shaking Richter scale. In the latter category, there are many brilliant candidates, but I think that Darwin's invention of the theory of evolution by natural selection outshines them all. It is perhaps the only truly general theory in Biology, a field much more complex than physics. If we discover life elsewhere in the universe it is likely to be the only biological theory that will carry over from our terrestrial biology. Darwin's theory reduced tremendously the complication of zoological data. Critically, as with the telescope, it has put tremendous pressure on the previous world-view to accommodate man as "merely" a part of a much larger nature. This pressure is still largely being resisted, but the outcome is clear. A close second would be the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Although the Second Law has not, perhaps, posed such a profound challenge to our collective world view, it has tremendously reduced the complexity of a great body of data (and it profoundly affects the world view of anyone who studies it in detail!) I would have nominated the computer, but I think that, although it has profoundly affected our daily routines, it has not yet profoundly affected our world view. The computer is a kind of mathematical telescope, revealing to us a vast new realm of data about what kinds of dynamics follow from what sorts of rules — we are constantly discovering new galaxies of mathematical reality with computers. However, it will be a while before these empirical discoveries force a profound alteration of our world view. CHRISTOPHER G.
LANGTON a computer scientist, is internationally recognized as the
"founder" of the field of Artificial Life. He is Chief Technology
Officer at The Swarm Corporation,
and editor of the Artificial
Life journal. See The
Third Culture,
Chapter 21. Quite a good question and some very interesting responses. However, I take a more pragmatic view. For me, the steam engine was the most important invention in the past two thousand years. The steam engine freed man and beast from physical labor. No other invention had so many different and versatile uses. Man could cut down entire forests to feed sawmills to build cities, quarry stone, propel trains and ships to make the world a smaller place, power factories, and generate electricity. Agrarian society was over and industrialism reigned. Most importantly, the steam engine created more leisure time for mankind. No longer was leisure a pastime for the idle rich. The pursuit of leisure and the changes it created in society far outstripped the first 18 centuries. Without the steam engine, our society would be radically different from today. ERIC J. HALL is President of The Archer Group, a consulting firm specializing
in emerging technology companies. He has helped found companies including
Yahoo!, Women.com, and The ImagiNation Network. Clay Shirkey: My vote for "The Most Important Invention In the Past Two Thousand Years" is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. This single piece of mathematical jujitsu, proving unprovability, formally ended the strain of Western thought begun by Socrates and first fully fleshed out by Aristotle. The ancillary effects of that theory — a rejection of master narrative, an understanding that we will never know all the answers, an acceptance of contradiction, and an embrace of complexity — are just now making themselves felt in the dawn of the post complete world. CLAY SHIRKEY is
Professor, New Media Department of Film & Media, Hunter College. Of course, "What is the single most important invention of the past two thousand years?" is one of those questions that does not really have an answer, like "What is the best novel/symphony/movie? But if I had to make a choice, it would be the Hindu-Arabic number system, which reached essentially its present form in the sixth century. Without it, Galileo would have been unable to begin the quantificational study of nature that we now call science. Today, there is scarcely any aspect of life that does not depend on our ability to handle numbers efficiently and accurately. True, we now use computers to do much of our number crunching, but without the Hindu-Arabic number system we would not have any computers. Because of its linguistic structure, the Hindu-Arabic number system allows humans who have an innate linguistic fluency but only a very primitive number sense to use their ability with language in order to handle numbers of virtually any useful magnitude with as much precision as required. In addition to its use in arithmetic and science, the Hindu-Arabic number system is the only genuinely universal language on Earth, apart perhaps for the Windows operating system, which has achieved the near universal adoption of a conceptually and technologically poor product by the sheer force of market dominance. (By contrast, the Hindu-Arabic number system gained worldwide acceptance because it is far better designed and much more efficient, for human usage, than any other number system.) KEITH DEVLIN, a mathematician, is the author of Goodbye,
Descartes : The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the
Mind; Life
by the Numbers; and The
Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible. I would have to vote for philosophical skepticism as the most important "invention" (if one thinks of invention as fabrication rather than discovery, as it is more archaically meant) of the past two thousand years. The notion that there is a "truth behind" things and a "bottom" to the matter has instilled in all of us, whether scientists, philosophers, theologians, or lay people, a maniacal obsession with improving our explanatory capabilities. As such skepticism can be seen as the driving force behind science and technology, modern conceptions of faith, the soul, and the other. Of course, one might argue that skepticism has been around for longer than two thousand years; but its characterization as a fundamental problem to be contended with before any constructive work can be done seems to me a peculiarly modern invention, a defining feature of our intensively self-conscious, post-Cartesian world. LUYEN CHOU is President and CEO of Learn Technologies Interactive in New York City, an interactive media developer and publisher. See EDGE: "Engineering Formalism and Artistry: The Yin and Yang of Multimedia: A Talk With Luyen Chou". I propose that the most important invention in the past two thousand years is: "Languages". If you take a look at the proposals you have received (or will) so far: the contraceptive pill, the scientific method (whatever that means), the quantum theory, and so on, they could not have even been thought out, let alone conveyed, without the aid of a language. I do not mean a language in particular, but all the languages, dead or alive. Of course one tends to think that live languages deserve the credit, but without the so-called "dead languages", such as Latin, the live ones simply would not exist. If one accepts that language is the most important invention in the past 2000 years, one has to concede that the "Human Brain" is the most important inventor during the same period. In my opinion, the printing press comes second to languages as the most important invention in the past 20 centuries; this puts Johann Gutenberg (c.1400-1468) as the second most important inventor of all, since one can easily pinpoint him as the Father of the printed letter. Without a (written) language, specially when it conveys concepts and feelings, all cultures — scientific, literary or otherwise — would be all but a conceptless matter. The Third Culture simply could not breathe. One can speculate ad nauseam about which language in the current state of world affairs, including the Internet, is the most important one of all. I have some ideas, to theorize about them, though, is beyond your original question. ANTONIO R. CABRAL, M.D. Is Associate Professor of Medicinem National
Autonomous University of Mexico. Philip Anderson asks the right question: "Why has no one mentioned the printing press yet?" I mean, doesn't it seem kind of obvious that printing — under which would be subsumed all forms of large-scale reproduction of the written word, from handmade wooden type to the computer and word-processing program I'm using to write this — was the most important invention of the past two thousand years? Printing led directly to mass literacy, democracy, the scientific revolution, cyberthis and cyberthat, and all those other good things. A more general observation. I notice that most of the responses you included in the email suggest that the most important invention of the past two thousand years, whatever it was, just happens to have happened in the past hundred years. Doesn't this reflect a bad case of chronocentrism, i.e., the irrational belief that one is lucky enough to be living in history's most important era? Given that people have been inventing things all along, isn't it unlikely that all the most important inventions would have happened in one little century out of twenty? Wouldn't it be more logical to expect them to be spaced out randomly over all twenty? Even if the twentieth is a particularly inventive century, isn't it a little myopic to imagine that the one we just happen to be living in is twenty times more inventive than any of the others? Maybe four or five times more inventive, but even that would be a stretch. HENDRIK HERTZBERG, executive editor of The
New Yorker since 1992, is the author of the book One Million
and, with Martin Kalb, of Candidates.
David Berreby: Interesting question. My candidate would be: The concept of information as a commodity, a thing that can be bought and sold. It's an ancient invention, dating back to the day of the fleet footed messenger, but its enormous consequences had to wait for the acceleration of information-carrying technologies like the telegraph and the Internet. We're only now witnessing the cumulative impact, as the buying and selling of information begins to outweigh the buying and selling of stuff. Why is this so important? Because humans who trade in information behave like our hunter gathering ancestors. They are alert and adaptable to an ever-changing environment. They work in small groups. They are independent thinkers who dislike taking orders and are fervently egalitarian. They place their faith in face to face relationships, not authority or a title. For as long as humanity got its living by agriculture or industry, such traits had to be suppressed in favor of those more amenable to centralization, authority, large-scale enterprises. This epoch is coming to an end. In the post-industrial west we no longer value stability, steadfastness and predictability over change, adaptability and flexibility. We are no longer awed by political power, instead seeing those who hold it as just like us. (When I was a kid people worried about the ``Imperial Presidency'' becoming too awesome for a democracy to support. But then, when I was a kid, an ex-wrestler could not get elected governor of Minnesota.) Corporate types often remark that their 20-something employees can't take orders and expect to be able to dress as they please and bring their parrot to work. All this is supposed to be a consequence of prosperity. But it seems to me the shift is far more profound. After a 7000-year detour through agriculture and industry, we are returning to the ways of our proud, individualistic, headstrong, small-group-dwelling forebears, and that will reshape the human community profoundly. And it's the move from a thing-economy to an information-economy that's making it happen. DAVID BERREBY'S writing about science and culture has appeared in The New York Times
Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, The Sciences and many other publications.
He is currently at work on a book about the psychology of Us versus Them. In the spirit of completeness and risking chronocentrism big time, I nominate Public Key Cryptosystems as something invented during the last two thousand years and which will remain useful long after the printing press will exist only in the (electronic) history books next to the steam engine. PKC has three incredible properties: perfect privacy, perfect authentication, and a reliable carrier of value and contracts — like gold used to be. All this in the digital environment where information can be easily and perfectly stored and copied. At a single stroke PKC transformed our vision of the asymptotic result of information technology from the 1984-ish nightmare to a realistic and ultimately attractive cyberspace where identity and privacy are not lost, despite of our (and Orwell's) commonsense intuition to the contrary. CHARLES SIMONYI, Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation, focuses on
Intentional
Programming, an ecology for abstractions which strives for maximal
reuse of components by separating high level intentions from implementation
detail. See EDGE:
Intentional Programming: A Talk with Charles Simonyi" and EDGE:
" CODE II — Farmer & Simonyi: A Reality Club Dialogue". Building autonomous tools is my candidate for the most important invention. Artificial complex adaptive systems, from robots to any type of autonomous agent, will change our world view in a qualitative way, comparable to the change brought by the use of thing-like tools. Tinkering with tools has shaped our view of the world and of ourselves. For example, the invention of the pump enabled us to understand the mechanical role of the heart. Science was born when laboratory apparatus was used to select among mathematical theories of the physical world which one correspond most closely to reality. But all those tools have been lifeless and soulless things, and it is no wonder that our scientific world view has tended to objectify everything. Grasping the proper role of the subject pole of experience, through the invention of subject-like tools, may provide the key to a far wider world view. With the invention of perspective, in the late Middle Ages, we shifted our collective Western experience one-sidedly into the object pole, leaving the subject pole out of the picture. We started looking at the world from behind a window, and a couple centuries later, in science, we attempted to take a God's eye view of the world. By now, we are coming around full-circle, with our science and technology providing us the means of exploration of the role of the subject. We have only set the first steps towards building artificial subjects. Just as our current artificial objects are vastly more complex than the first wheel or bow and arrow, our artificial subjects will grow more complex, powerful, and interesting over the centuries. But already we can see a glimmer of what lies ahead: our first attempts to build autonomous agents has taught us new concepts. As a result, we are now beginning to explore self-organizing ecological, economic, or social systems; areas of study where thing-like metaphors hopelessly fail. PIET
HUT is professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study,
in Princeton. He is involved in the project of building GRAPEs,
the world's fastest special-purpose computers, at Tokyo University. Birth control (or if you need it to be more specific, the pill) Why? Because freedom from constant childbearing means that women can become meme-spreaders like men — working for their memes rather than their genes. This then means a change in the kinds of memes that propagate effectively, including all the memes of other inventions as well as the meme-spreading media, myths, science and the arts. In other words, it is important because it changes the whole of culture. Few single inventions have this effect on the whole meme pool. SUSAN BLACKMORE, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, columnist for the Independent, and author of Dying To Live: Near-Death Experiences, and In Search of the Light . James J. O'Donnell: If you read through this growing list, you will see that people tend to discover that the most important invention in the last 2000 years is something they just happen to know a lot about. Well, I know a lot about some important inventions — like the codex book (and the consequent idea that a book can be a manual for living — that leads us to the 19th century and its dead ends) and like the computer (which gives us a model for ignoring the manual and just living by experiment), but I think it is quite undeniable that there is something far more important going on: effectual health care. Not just antibiotics, not just birth control, not just anesthesia (to say things mentioned here), but the underlying fundamental fact that we have learned to cross the scientific method with care for human beings and save lives. A thought experiment I like to have people play is this: review your own life and imagine what it would have been like without late 20th century health care. Would you still be alive today? An astonishingly large number of people get serious looks on their faces and admit they wouldn't: I wouldn't, that's for sure. It's medical techniques, it's antibiotics, but it's also vitamin pills and — in some ways most wondrously cost-effective of all — soap, as in the soap doctors use to wash their hands. JAMES
J. O'DONNELL, Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost for
Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania,
is the author of Avatars
of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. The most important invention has been reading-glasses. They have effectively doubled the active life of everyone who reads or does fine work — and prevented the world being ruled by people under forty. NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a theoretical psychologist; professor at the New
School for Social Research, New York; author of Consciousness Regained,
The Inner Eye,
A History of the Mind, and Leaps
of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation
. See The
Third Culture, Chapter
11. Joe Traub already nabbed the invention I would have chosen; empirical method. So I'll stake out a different claim. For present purposes, I'll claim that the most significant invention of the last 2000 years was the human ego. The ego I'm talking about is the self-concerned human that Harold Bloom credits Shakespeare with having invented. It's the thing that William Manchester finds definitively missing in the Medieval mind. Jostein Gaarder, in his children's philosophy novel, Sophie's World, blames St. Augustine for inventing it. It's what the fuss is about in Nietzsche. It's what exists in existentialism. In truth, I'm not entirely convinced that I don't find good evidence of this creature in pre-Christian/Common-era texts. (Thomas Cahill thinks it was a gift from the Jews.) But it does seem that the sense of individual self, outfitted with moral responsibility, free will, consciousness, and — most importantly — neurotic self-obsession, at one time did not exist, and then did. That same sense of self is now being challenged by AI-ish members of the EDGE community. Perhaps it will disappear, just as it once appeared. So it is reasonable to think of the ego as a natural inhabitant of approximately the last 2000 years. One could argue that the ego had to precede empirical method. The shift from pure rationality to empiricism relied on an acknowledgement of differing perspectives of observation (while pure rationality was thought to be independent of personal perspective). So the self was needed in order to have a starting point from which to pose theories and to make measurements in order to test them. Only an ego can have imperfect enough knowledge to make mere guesses about what's going on in the universe, and the hubris to test and improve those guesses. I personally hope the ego survives the computer. JARON LANIER,
a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality,
and founder and former CEO of VPL. He is currently the lead scientist
for the National
Tele-Immersion Initiative. See Digerati,
Chapter 17. Technological advances in communication from clay tablets, to papyrus,to
moveable type, to postscript have had a shaping influence on society
and these are accelerating. Almost overnight, the accumulated knowledge
of the world is crystallizing into a distributed digital archive. In the next millennium this digital archive will continue to expand, in ways we cannot yet imagine, greatly enhancing what a single human can accomplish in a lifetime, and what our culture can collectively discover about the world and ourselves. TERRENCE
SEJNOWSKI, a pioneer in Computational Neurobiology, is regarded
by many as one of the world's most foremost theoretical brain scientists.
He is the director of the Computational
Neurobiology Lab at the Salk Institute and the coauthor of
The Computational Brain. Ron Cooper: I am surprised no one mentioned distillation, the great alchemical invention of transformation in the search to understand the essence of existence. Alchemy appears to have started in Ancient Egypt (al-khem means the art of Egypt in Arabic). Alchemy travelled with Islam as it spread across Northern Africa and into mainland Europe with the Moorish invasion of Andalucia in the tenth century. Alchemy tries to make sense of the world by, among other things, working with the elements to transform matter and attempt to strip away the extraneous and capture its purest essence. Some suggest Alchemy's founding father was the Egyptian god Thoth (in Greek Hermes). Both are symbols of mystical knowledge, rebirth and transformation. To find the first evidence of distillation of spirits, you have to go to fourth century China, where the alchemist Ko Hung wrote about the transformation of cinnabar in mercury as being: "like wine that has been fermented once. It cannot be compared with the pure clear wine that has been fermented nine time". Is he talking about distillation? It seems possible. How do you ferment a wine nine times unless you distill it? By that time, the Alexandrian Greeks had discovered that by boiling you could transform one object into another. Pliny writes about distillation being used to extract turpentine from resin, while Aristotle recounts how sea water could be turned into drinking water in 4 AD. Aside from being the basis of modern science and industry, the transformation of human beings brought on by the imbibing of distilled spirits is of great interest to me. RON COOPER, painter and sculptor who is known as "the King of Downtown,"
was one of the original artists in the Los Angeles downtown loft scene.
More recently, he is founder and president of Del Maguey, Single Village
Mezcal (TM). I agree that Science is the most important human development is the last 2000 years, but it doesn't quite qualify as an invention. I therefore propose the clock as the greatest invention, since it is an instrument that enables Science in both a practice and temperament. The clock is the embodiment of objectivity. It converted time from a personal experience into a reality independent of perception. It gave us a framework in which the laws of nature could be observed and quantified. The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began. W.
DANIEL HILLIS is a physicist and computer scientist; Vice president
of research and development at the Walt
Disney Company and a Disney Fellow; cofounder and chief scientist
of Thinking Machines Corporation
where he built Connection
Machines; co-chair of The
Long Now Foundation. He is author of The
Connection Machine, The
Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work
(Science Masters Series), as well as numerous articles.See
The
Third Culture,
Chapter 23; Digerati, Chapter 11. Here is my reply to your fiendish question: How can we possibly pick the most important invention in the past two thousand years? The real biggies — language, fire, agriculture, art — came too soon. In the last two millennia our world has seen so many inventions that it's hard to think of one that stands above all the rest. The printing press? The computer? The A-bomb? After a bit of this, one is tempted to give a smart-aleck reply and back it up with the semblance of earnest reasoning: "Thousand Island dressing!" But even this is boring. Somehow we have to break out of the box! Well, if inventions are important, surely it's even more important to invent the social structures that will guarantee a steady flow of new inventions. I've heard it said that Edison was the first to turn invention into a business. Every day he would walk into his lab and say "Okay, what can we invent today?" But the groundwork was laid earlier. Perhaps the invention of a patent office was the key step? Or further back, Bacon's "New Atlantis", which envisioned the techno-paradise we are now all so busy trying to build? JOHN BAEZ is a mathematical physicist working on quantum gravity using the techniques of "higher-dimensional algebra". A professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside, he enjoys answering physics questions on the usenet newsgroup sci.physics.research, and also writes a regular column entitled "This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics". Why hasn't anyone mentioned television??!! Is it too obvious? I think it's the single most powerful and manipulative tool ever invented. It's today's most important source of information and serves as a tremendous behavior patterning device. Since it's inception, crime has risen, sex has increased and the attendance at live performances has died. VIVIANA GUZMAN is a flutist whose latest album is Planet Flute. My first association for the most (whatever that means) important invention was the unconscious mind, because, I thought to myself, the concept offers some explanation — and thus hopefully later remedies — for the behaviors coming from the darker sides of our nature. Armed with better understanding of the origins of such behavior, hopefully we could fashion ways out of the irrational clamp that fundamentalist religion, blind nationalism or deep ideology often puts on our conscious awareness. But, one thought later was that I believe the unconscious does indeed exist, so logically it is a discovery, not an invention. That (somewhat uneasily) suggests psychotherapy (again, whatever that means given all its incarnations — psychotherapy being but one of a basket of techniques to make the unconscious more conscious) as my invention. At least in principle — and often in practice too I believe — it does offer us the opportunity to become more conscious, therefore less inclined to absolute thinking and the subjugation and/or violence absolutism often engenders in the minds of those who don't harbor doubts. In discussing the causes and possible solutions to global environmental problems (e.g., global warming in particular), I note in dialogues with junior high school students — right on down to senate committees — that we can't easily fix problems we can't see. Thus, solutions to long-term, global-scale systems threats require — in a democracy at least — overcoming any collective denial that our "puny" individual impacts can cause a major disruption at a planetary scale or over timeframes longer than our lifetime. Admittedly, I'm not going to seriously claim psychoanalysis is as "important" an invention as the scientific method over the past 2000 years (as I recall one of your respondents proposed). What I see as a key invention for the year 2000+, though, is an expanded systems analysis that includes methods to build in an understanding of the role of the unconscious of individuals which leads to lifestyles and behaviors which "scale up" to create unanticipated collective consequences. Although not directly responsive to your question, the invention I really like — think we will really need — is a fusion of systems analysis with psychotherapy. But the new field of "systems therapy" is yet to be invented!, leaving me dangling uneasily between systems — and psycho-analysis. Perhaps, if armed with insights from tools that integrated physical, biological, social and psychological drivers of our behaviors across a range of scales, rather than always chugging merrily along in business as usual mode, we'd be more aware of the range of consequences of our unconsciousness. Then, if we continued to damage the collective or put the future at risk, at least that would be more of a choice and less of a surprise. With best wishes to all for the holiday season. STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER is a Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Stanford University, and the Former Department Director and Head of Advanced Study Project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder; author of The Genesis Strategy; The Coevolution Of Climate And Life; Global Warming: Are We Entering The Greenhouse Century?; and Laboratory Earth (Science Masters Series). Philip Campbell: Thanks for the reminder. Here's my shot. Perhaps the most challengingly important inventions are those that open up new moral dilemmas, and thus make some people question whether the invention should have been allowed (or precursor discovery sought) in the first place. This even applies to Howard Gardner's suggestion of classical music: I would add Adorno's (I think) statement that, in contrast to some composers, it is impossible to find evil that could have been reinforced by any note written by Mozart. On the other hand, I believe Wagner is still banned in Israel. But my own suggestion is closer to my professional interests. As delightfully examined in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, writing was at least one of the most important inventions of all time, but Sumerian cuneiform is too old for me to offer it, by 3000 years. So, in agreement with Philip Anderson's nudge, the printing press is my response to the question. After all, even the World Wide Web is just a printing press with electronic and photonic elaborations. But I can't resist looking forward at an editorial fantasy, ignoring all sober estimations of the difficulties involved: a cumulative invention which, if fulfilled, would certainly have a capacity for good and evil. To quote William Gibson's Neuromancer:
No keyboard, mouse or screen, just neural connections and a many-dimensional space of, at least, information, to explore, organise and communicate at will — perhaps, dare I presumptuously suggest, with occasional help from an editor. I fear it's too much for me to expect, but my grandchildren could love it. PHILIP CAMPBELL (whose oldest offspring is 13) was founding editor of Physics World, and has been Editor of Nature since 1995. John Horgan: Okay, I'll bite. Has anyone nominated free will yet? The concept is more than 2,000 years old, but surely it deserves consideration as one of our most important inventions ever. Almost as soon as philosophers conceived of free will, they struggled to reconcile it with the materialistic, deterministic views of nature advanced by science. Epicurus insisted that there must be an element of randomness within nature that allows free will to exist. Lucretius called this randomness "the swerve." Modern free-willers find the swerve within chaos theory or quantum mechanics. None of these arguments are very convincing. Science has made it increasingly clear — to me, anyway — that free will is an illusion. But more even than God, it is a glorious, absolutely necessary illusion. JOHN HORGAN, science writer; author of The End of Science : Facing the Limits of Knowledge In The Twilight of the Scientific Age, has also written freelance articles for The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, The London Times, Discover, The Sciences and other publications. See EDGE: " Why I Think Science Is Ending: A Talk With John Horgan" and EDGE: " The End of Horgan?" [thread unavalable]. My immediate reaction to the question was to choose between the printing press and any of a set of public health-related inventions (antibiotics, sewage treatment, ...). And since it seems as though we might never have had the public health advances without the printing press, but did, in fact, have the printing press without the public health advances, I'd have to choose the printing press. Why? Because it opened the possibility that knowledge (information, wisdom) could be disseminated beyond a small number of privileged individuals, thus permitting larger numbers to share or debate world-views and to build upon past and present ideas. Thus far, at least, new electronic technologies (radio, movies, television, computers) have been employed as extensions of this broadening of access to knowledge, altering the medium of exchange but not the concept. At some time in the future they may lead to more fundamental changes in the human condition, but not yet, I'm afraid. RAPHAEL KASPER, a physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at Columbia University and was Associate Director of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory. My candidate would be the idea of the unconscious, the notion that what we say and do and feel can spring from sources of which we are not aware, that our choices and the qualities of our relationships are deeply motivated by our histories. In recent years, the Freudian contribution has tended be seen as historical...something we have passed beyond...but I think that in large part this is because the most fundamental ideas of psychodynamics have passed into popular culture as a given. These ideas animate out understandings of who we are with our families, with our friends and work. They add a dimensi | ||||||||||||||||