Down The Road

In 1916, Albert Einstein wrote down an equation describing the "stimulated emission of light". It was a tiny bit of his work that attracted no attention at the time. It just lay there for decades in a pile of other bits and pieces of quantum physics stuff.

40 years later, it became the foundation for a technology that led to the invention of the laser.

Neither Einstein nor the many nerds who followed were thinking, "Y'know what, I think barcodes and inventory control is what we should be working towards - and a digital music format would be cool too..."

Today, right about ⅓ of the world's entire GDP depends on some aspect of information technology - creating, processing, storing, retrieving and transmitting information - but if you had asked those nerds 50 or 60 or 70 years ago, "OK, so how does this benefit me right here and right now?", they wouldn't have had answers. And if instant gratification is your only criterion for whether or not you fund their work, you'd cut their budgets and the work would either be wasted, or delayed to the point of being lost - potentially for generations.

Twenty years before Einstein, an English physicist name JJ Thomson proved the existence of the electron, overturning 2,000 years of humans' "understanding" of the structure of atoms.

Neither of these discoveries had any practical application at the time.

Can you tell me what part of your existence right now isn't either dependent upon or tied in some way to electronics?

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