If you think about it, almost all computer-technology is radio. Wifi, bluetooth, GPS, radar, and cellular are literally radio. Meanwhile everything else runs on transistor tech developed and refined… for radios.
Our modern economy couldn’t exist if people like Hertz and Maxwell didn’t get to toy with their useless hobbies. But we can’t rely on the curiosity of the leisure class anymore. Basic research is expensive, necessary, and a public good. I’m afraid that the Trump regime has already spoiled the secret sauce that makes America the technology leader of the world.
artifex@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
He probably would have figured it out had he had time to evolve into Megahertz.
niktemadur@lemmy.world 5 days ago
He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior, and much too young, wasn’t he in his late-30s or early-40s?
In fact, I believe that had Hertz remained alive and won his prize, the Nobel Committee would not have felt obliged to give it to Marconi a few years later.
Marconi was a back-stabbing asshole who became one of the wealthiest men in the world by abusing the gentlemanly trust of others, and coasting on someone else’s technology - particularly the way crystals oscillate, and some of them serve nicely as a sort of “translation point” between electromagnetic waves and the physical apparatus that transmits and/or receives the signal.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
Basically the same thing happened twenty years later with Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who made a discovery that’s essential to figuring distances in space. She noticed something while working as a computer at Harvard College Observatory that eventually became known as Leavitt’s Law. Her Nobel nomination was halted because she passed away and the award is not given posthumously. Hubble’s work heavily relied on hers.