#slac — Public Fediverse posts

“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…

Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…

In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…

… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.

Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.

I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…

[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]

We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.

Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.

The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.

There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”

Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.

Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.

And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.

Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.

For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).

We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…

… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.

In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).

There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.

My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.

On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz

* Robert Henry Thurston

###

As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.

source

“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…

Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…

In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…

… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.

Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.

I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…

[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]

We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.

Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.

The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.

There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”

Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.

Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.

And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.

Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.

For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).

We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…

… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.

In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).

There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.

My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.

On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz

* Robert Henry Thurston

###

As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.

source

“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…

Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…

In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…

… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.

Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.

I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…

[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]

We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.

Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.

The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.

There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”

Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.

Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.

And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.

Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.

For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).

We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…

… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.

In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).

There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.

My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.

On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz

* Robert Henry Thurston

###

As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.

source

“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…

Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…

In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…

… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.

Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.

I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…

[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]

We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.

Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.

The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.

There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”

Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.

Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.

And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.

Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.

For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).

We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…

… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.

In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).

There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.

My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.

On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz

* Robert Henry Thurston

###

As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.

source

“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…

Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…

In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…

… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.

Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.

I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…

[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]

We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.

Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.

The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.

There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”

Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.

Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.

And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.

Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.

For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).

We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…

… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.

In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).

There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.

My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.

On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz

* Robert Henry Thurston

###

As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.

source

Juten Tach, Berlin! Ich freue mich, heute die Secure Linux Administration Conference zu besuchen! Viele spannende Vorträge, alte und sicher neue Bekannte zu treffen. Ich habe auch einen kleinen Keycloak-Crashkurs für heute vormittag im Gepäck. #slac #slac2026 #Linux #freesoftware #freiesoftware #Keycloak

Juten Tach, Berlin! Ich freue mich, heute die Secure Linux Administration Conference zu besuchen! Viele spannende Vorträge, alte und sicher neue Bekannte zu treffen. Ich habe auch einen kleinen Keycloak-Crashkurs für heute vormittag im Gepäck. #slac #slac2026 #Linux #freesoftware #freiesoftware #Keycloak

Juten Tach, Berlin! Ich freue mich, heute die Secure Linux Administration Conference zu besuchen! Viele spannende Vorträge, alte und sicher neue Bekannte zu treffen. Ich habe auch einen kleinen Keycloak-Crashkurs für heute vormittag im Gepäck. #slac #slac2026 #Linux #freesoftware #freiesoftware #Keycloak

Juten Tach, Berlin! Ich freue mich, heute die Secure Linux Administration Conference zu besuchen! Viele spannende Vorträge, alte und sicher neue Bekannte zu treffen. Ich habe auch einen kleinen Keycloak-Crashkurs für heute vormittag im Gepäck. #slac #slac2026 #Linux #freesoftware #freiesoftware #Keycloak

Juten Tach, Berlin! Ich freue mich, heute die Secure Linux Administration Conference zu besuchen! Viele spannende Vorträge, alte und sicher neue Bekannte zu treffen. Ich habe auch einen kleinen Keycloak-Crashkurs für heute vormittag im Gepäck. #slac #slac2026 #Linux #freesoftware #freiesoftware #Keycloak

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Snowmass 2021 cross frontier report: Dark matter complementarity

Antonio Boveia et al.
SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 7 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCommRep.7

#OSU #LundUniversity #CU #Fermilab #UC #UK #UCSC #LANL #MIT #UCSB #SLAC #UNH #WashingtonUniversity #DESY #UIUC #GSFC #UCR #UTA #UO

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics Core

Snowmass2021 cosmic frontier white paper: Ultraheavy particle dark matter

Daniel Carney et al.
SciPost Phys. Core 6, 075 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCore.6.4.075

#LBNL
#IISc
#UW
#CSU
#UnivStockholm
#PrincetonUniversity
#PI
#Queen'sUniversity
#CarletonUniversity
#UMCP
#UC
#LANL
#UH
#Fermilab
#PurdueUniversity
#KavliInstituteforParticleAstrophysicsandCosmology
#SLAC
#UCSC
#RiceUniversity
#UCBL
#DESY
#CERN
#SKKU
#UU
#UCSD
#UniversityofAdelaide

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics Core

Snowmass2021 cosmic frontier white paper: Ultraheavy particle dark matter

Daniel Carney et al.
SciPost Phys. Core 6, 075 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCore.6.4.075

#LBNL
#IISc
#UW
#CSU
#UnivStockholm
#PrincetonUniversity
#PI
#Queen'sUniversity
#CarletonUniversity
#UMCP
#UC
#LANL
#UH
#Fermilab
#PurdueUniversity
#KavliInstituteforParticleAstrophysicsandCosmology
#SLAC
#UCSC
#RiceUniversity
#UCBL
#DESY
#CERN
#SKKU
#UU
#UCSD
#UniversityofAdelaide

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Machine learning and LHC event generation
Anja Butter et al.
SciPost Phys. 14, 079 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.14.4.079

#SorbonneUniversity #HITS #GAU #UNITO #RUN #NIKHEF #NYU #SapienzaUniversityofRome #WeizmannInstitute #UNIMI #UT #OSU #KIT #TUM #Fermilab #UCI #UC #UCL #DurhamUniversity #UniversityParisSaclay #SLAC #UH #DESY #CNRS #RU #TUDortmund #UCL #UNIBO #HU #LBNL #UCBL #VU #MIT #HU #TUD
#ANR #BMBF #DFG @ERC #FNRS #IN2P3 #NSF#DOE

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Machine learning and LHC event generation
Anja Butter et al.
SciPost Phys. 14, 079 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.14.4.079

#SorbonneUniversity #HITS #GAU #UNITO #RUN #NIKHEF #NYU #SapienzaUniversityofRome #WeizmannInstitute #UNIMI #UT #OSU #KIT #TUM #Fermilab #UCI #UC #UCL #DurhamUniversity #UniversityParisSaclay #SLAC #UH #DESY #CNRS #RU #TUDortmund #UCL #UNIBO #HU #LBNL #UCBL #VU #MIT #HU #TUD
#ANR #BMBF #DFG @ERC #FNRS #IN2P3 #NSF#DOE

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Snowmass 2021 cross frontier report: Dark matter complementarity

Antonio Boveia et al.
SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 7 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCommRep.7

#OSU #LundUniversity #CU #Fermilab #UC #UK #UCSC #LANL #MIT #UCSB #SLAC #UNH #WashingtonUniversity #DESY #UIUC #GSFC #UCR #UTA #UO

#MPG:
"
Erste Bilder des Vera C. Rubin Observatoriums
"
"Die ersten Bilder sind größer und tiefer als je zuvor, sie zeigen Ausschnitte der Milchstraße und des tiefen Universums. Astronominnen und Astronomen der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft berichten von ihrer geplanten Forschung"

https://www.mpg.de/24886437/vera-rubin-observatorium-erste-bilder

23.6.2025

#Astronomie #Astrophysik #Chile #Digitalkamera #DOE #Himmelsdurchmusterung #LSST #NOIRLAB #NSF #Observatorium #SimonyiSurveyTelescope #SLAC #Teleskop #VeraCRubinObservatorium

Während #Herta #BSC hier in #Elversberg bei der #SVE spielt, mache ich mich auf den Weg zur #SLAC #SLAC24 von @heinleinsupport in #Berlin. Freue mich auf spannende Vorträge zu #Dovecot, #Rspamd, Ceph, ... und natürlich den Austausch mit Kollegen z.B. bei @mailbox_org, #IKU-Systems, ...

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Machine learning and LHC event generation
Anja Butter et al.
SciPost Phys. 14, 079 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.14.4.079

#SorbonneUniversity #HITS #GAU #UNITO #RUN #NIKHEF #NYU #SapienzaUniversityofRome #WeizmannInstitute #UNIMI #UT #OSU #KIT #TUM #Fermilab #UCI #UC #UCL #DurhamUniversity #UniversityParisSaclay #SLAC #UH #DESY #CNRS #RU #TUDortmund #UCL #UNIBO #HU #LBNL #UCBL #VU #MIT #HU #TUD
#ANR #BMBF #DFG @ERC #FNRS #IN2P3 #NSF#DOE

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Machine learning and LHC event generation
Anja Butter et al.
SciPost Phys. 14, 079 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.14.4.079

#SorbonneUniversity #HITS #GAU #UNITO #RUN #NIKHEF #NYU #SapienzaUniversityofRome #WeizmannInstitute #UNIMI #UT #OSU #KIT #TUM #Fermilab #UCI #UC #UCL #DurhamUniversity #UniversityParisSaclay #SLAC #UH #DESY #CNRS #RU #TUDortmund #UCL #UNIBO #HU #LBNL #UCBL #VU #MIT #HU #TUD
#ANR #BMBF #DFG @ERC #FNRS #IN2P3 #NSF#DOE

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Machine learning and LHC event generation
Anja Butter et al.
SciPost Phys. 14, 079 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.14.4.079

#SorbonneUniversity #HITS #GAU #UNITO #RUN #NIKHEF #NYU #SapienzaUniversityofRome #WeizmannInstitute #UNIMI #UT #OSU #KIT #TUM #Fermilab #UCI #UC #UCL #DurhamUniversity #UniversityParisSaclay #SLAC #UH #DESY #CNRS #RU #TUDortmund #UCL #UNIBO #HU #LBNL #UCBL #VU #MIT #HU #TUD
#ANR #BMBF #DFG @ERC #FNRS #IN2P3 #NSF#DOE

Тимоти Джон Бернерс-Ли – человек, который почти создал интернет

Сегодня исполняется 69 лет со дня рождения человека, без которого интернет в виде привычной нам «всемирной паутины» мог бы и не родиться. Сегодня мы будем говорить про настоящего «живого классика» информационных технологий, про Тима Бернерса-Ли. Этот человек – настоящий фанат научного прогресса. Отдать то, что мы сейчас называем «интернетом», людям бесплатно — настоящий подвиг, ему не просто так был официально присвоен титул «Сэр». Как истинный рыцарь, он поднимал вопросы ответственности в сети. Вперёд, в историю «сети» и «паука», который её плёл.

https://habr.com/ru/companies/timeweb/articles/820317/

#timeweb_статьи #Тимоти_Джон_БернерсЛи #Интернет #INQUIRE #ЦЕРН #LEP #NeXT #HTML #FTP #Usenet #IRC #NeXTStep #WWW #HyperCard #SLAC #unix

Die Pinguin-Dichte nimmt in Berlin gerade stark zu: Auftakt zur #SLAC

https://www.heinlein-support.de/secure-linux-administration-conference

Noch jemand unterwegs zur #slac?

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Superconductivity enhancement and particle-hole asymmetry: Interplay with electron attraction in doped Hubbard model

Zhi Xu, Hong-Chen Jiang, Yi-Fan Jiang
SciPost Phys. 19, 137 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.19.5.137

#ShanghaiTech #SU #SLAC

@wdlindsy Steal, lie and cheat. #SLAC

Les 3 principaux centres de données pour traiter les données recueillies par l’Observatoire Vera C. Robin
https://rubinobservatory.org/
#Observatoire #Robin #données #relevés #informatique #ordinateurs #USA #UK #France #astronomie #astronomie #ciel #Chili #Univers #cosmos #espace #SLAC #UKDF #CNRS

Danke 🙏 liebe #SLAC-Community – schön war`s!

Drei tolle Tage in Berlin gehen zu Ende. Wir sagen Danke an alle, die dabei waren – an die Referenten, die Teilnehmenden, das Orga-Team, die Kolleg*innen von Heinlein Support, @mailbox_org @OpenTalkMeeting und @OpenCloud – ihr habt alle mit spannenden Gesprächen, Fragen, Diskussionen und mit jeder Menge Open-Source-Spirit die SLAC 2025 zu etwas ganz Besonderem gemacht!

Wir sehen uns auf der nächsten SLAC vom 11. – 13. Mai 2026 in Berlin. 😀

Im Sommer 2025 soll nach einem Jahr Weiterentwicklung die Version 1.x des #Stalwart Mail-Servers erscheinen – unsere Linux-Consultants Carsten Rosenberg und Manu Zurmühl sprechen auf unserer #SLAC 2025 u.a. über ihre Erfahrung mit dem Mail Delivery Agent und tauchen in die Architektur der HA Möglichkeiten und des Backend Storage ein. 

Jetzt zur Secure Linux Administration Conference vom 2. – 4. Juni 2025 anmelden und in Berlin live dabei sein!

👉 https://www.slac-2025.de

#slac2025 #Mailserver

Secure Linux Administration Conference 2025

IT-Experten treffen sich zum Erfahrungsaustausch und Wissens-Update auf der SLAC in Berlin. Im Mittelpunkt stehen der sichere und professionelle Linux-Server-Betrieb sowie die Herausforderungen im Admin-Alltag.

#Konferenz #SLAC #Heinlein #Linux

https://gnulinux.ch/secure-linux-administration-conference-2025

Mit #Proxmox lassen sich Workloads auf unterschiedlichen Plattformen virtualisieren. Unser Consultant Robert Sander zeigt in seinem #SLAC-Vortrag den aktuellen Funktionsumfang mit Schwerpunkt auf den Automatisierungsmöglichkeiten via API und CLI.

Robert ist als echter #Ceph-Profi mit einem weiteren Vortrag zum Thema „Der Ceph Orchestrator - Container für Storage“ Teil unserer Linux-Konferenz und zeigt darin u.a. die grundlegende Funktionsweise des Orchestrators.

🎟️ https://www.slac-2025.de

SLAC-Referent Martin Schulte findet, es gibt jede Menge gute Gründe, sich als Admin mit dem Thema #Shell-Programmierung zu beschäftigen. Das finden wir auch – deshalb ist Martin mit Vortrag und Workshop zum Thema Shell Teil unseres #SLAC-Programms 2025.

Er gibt technische & organisatorische Hinweise für den sinnvollen und professionellen Einsatz von Shell-Scripten und geht auf bash- und POSIX-Scripte ein.

Am Workshop-Tag betrachtet er einige Shell-Features genauer.

👉 https://www.slac-2025.de

Mit dem Open-Source-Tool #badkeys kannst Du öffentliche kryptographische Schlüssel auf bekannte Schwachstellen untersuchen. Auf unserer Secure #Linux Administration Conference 2025 zeigt Dir Hanno Böck, der das Tool selbst entwickelt hat, wie man badkeys nutzen kann, um Sicherheitslücken in der eigenen IT-Infrastruktur zu vermeiden.

👉 Jetzt ein Ticket für unsere #SLAC vom 2.-4. Juni 2025 in Berlin sichern und mehr erfahren:

https://www.slac-2025.de

#slac2025 #OpenSource #CyberSecurity

Du möchtest mehr über #Nauthilus, den intelligenten Authentifizierungs- und Autorisierungsserver erfahren? Dann besuche unsere #SLAC vom 2.-4.6.25 in Berlin.

Im Workshop mit Christian Rößner von Rößner-Network-Solutions tauchst du an Tag drei unserer #Linux-Konferenz extra tief ins Thema ein und lernst an Hand von konkreten Beispielen alle Details über den Service, seine Einrichtung und Verwendung.

An SLAC-Tag drei erwarten Dich übrigens weitere spannende Workshops:

https://www.slac-2025.de

🚀 The world's largest digital camera, built by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has been successfully installed at the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. This 3,200-megapixel marvel will capture unprecedented images of the night sky, aiding in the exploration of dark matter, dark energy, and more. A huge step forward for astronomy!

@goodnews

#GoodNews #Astronomy #SLAC #RubinObservatory #LSSTCamera
https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2025/03/12/slac-national-accelerator-laboratory-installs-giant-camera-in-chile/

New publication and team effort on understanding electron dynamics: imaging with attosecond short X-ray flashes https://uhh.de/msjr3 @unihh @SLAClab #SLAC, #Xray #lasers
https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/01/21/a-new-frontier-in-understanding-electron-dynamics-imaging-with-attosecond-short-x-ray-flashes

DOE plans for a new data streaming pipeline for energy research
https://www.admin-magazine.com/News/DOE-Plans-New-Data-Streaming-Pipeline-for-Energy-Research
#energy #supercomputing #HPC #DOE #SLACNationalAcceleratorLaboratory #data #ILLUMINE #SLAC

Scientists Discovered a Way to Make Your Batteries Survive Way Longer https://petapixel.com/2024/08/30/scientists-discovered-a-way-to-make-your-batteries-survive-way-longer/ #Technology #lithiumion #research #battery #science #News #slac

📣 An alle Linux- & Open Source-Fans: Der Termin für die nächste Secure #Linux Administration Conference in Berlin steht. Zückt eure Kalender und blockt euch für uns den 2.-4. Juni 2025!

Wir freuen uns schon jetzt auf das große Wissens-Update für Linux-Admins & packen das Konferenz-Programm voll mit Fachwissen & Best Practices.

An alle potentiellen Referent*innen: Wir freuen uns, wenn ihr in den kommenden Monaten Ideen für Vorträge & Workshops für die #SLAC sammelt.

https://www.heinlein-support.de/news/slac-2025-save-the-date

🎉 Noch wenige Tage bis zur #SLAC - für Kurzentschlossene ein Vortrags- & Workshop-Tipp:

👉 Unser #Security-Consultant Torsten Lange zeigt, wie kleine & mittlere Organisationen ihre Maßnahmen zur IT-Sicherheit strukturieren, um Angriffe rechtzeitig zu erkennen & mit Gegenmaßnahmen reagieren zu können.

👉 Im Workshop Threat Detection geht es darum, wie u.a. mit Hilfe der Software Suricata Bedrohungen erkannt, Angriffe verhindert oder Auswirkungen begrenzt werden können.

https://www.slac-2024.de

Up Close With the Completed 3.2-Gigapixel #LSST #Camera

Engineers at the #SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have completed work on the Legacy Survey of #Space and Time camera. The device is the world's largest digital camera and will be the centerpiece of a 10-year mission to map the night sky from the Vera C. Rubin #Observatory in #Chile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8We0FtSJ6D4

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics Core

Precise predictions for boosted Higgs production

Kathrin Becker, et al.
SciPost Phys. Core 7, 001 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCore.7.1.001

#WarwickUniversity #RudolfPeierlsCentre #INFNMilanoBicocca #SLAC #CERN #ShandongUniversity #ZurichUniversity #INFNGenova #DurhamUniversity #UCL #KIT #INFNMilano #UNIMI #UniversitySussex #MPP #UNIMIB #LAPTh #AllSoulsCollege #ManchesterUniversity #TUM

#ERC #STFC

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics Core

Snowmass2021 cosmic frontier white paper: Ultraheavy particle dark matter

Daniel Carney et al.
SciPost Phys. Core 6, 075 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCore.6.4.075

#LBNL
#IISc
#UW
#CSU
#UnivStockholm
#PrincetonUniversity
#PI
#Queen'sUniversity
#CarletonUniversity
#UMCP
#UC
#LANL
#UH
#Fermilab
#PurdueUniversity
#KavliInstituteforParticleAstrophysicsandCosmology
#SLAC
#UCSC
#RiceUniversity
#UCBL
#DESY
#CERN
#SKKU
#UU
#UCSD
#UniversityofAdelaide

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics Core

Snowmass2021 cosmic frontier white paper: Ultraheavy particle dark matter

Daniel Carney et al.
SciPost Phys. Core 6, 075 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCore.6.4.075

#LBNL
#IISc
#UW
#CSU
#UnivStockholm
#PrincetonUniversity
#PI
#Queen'sUniversity
#CarletonUniversity
#UMCP
#UC
#LANL
#UH
#Fermilab
#PurdueUniversity
#KavliInstituteforParticleAstrophysicsandCosmology
#SLAC
#UCSC
#RiceUniversity
#UCBL
#DESY
#CERN
#SKKU
#UU
#UCSD
#UniversityofAdelaide

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics Core

Snowmass2021 cosmic frontier white paper: Ultraheavy particle dark matter

Daniel Carney et al.
SciPost Phys. Core 6, 075 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCore.6.4.075

#LBNL
#IISc
#UW
#CSU
#UnivStockholm
#PrincetonUniversity
#PI
#Queen'sUniversity
#CarletonUniversity
#UMCP
#UC
#LANL
#UH
#Fermilab
#PurdueUniversity
#KavliInstituteforParticleAstrophysicsandCosmology
#SLAC
#UCSC
#RiceUniversity
#UCBL
#DESY
#CERN
#SKKU
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#UniversityofAdelaide

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Snowmass 2021 cross frontier report: Dark matter complementarity

Antonio Boveia et al.
SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 7 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCommRep.7

#OSU #LundUniversity #CU #Fermilab #UC #UK #UCSC #LANL #MIT #UCSB #SLAC #UNH #WashingtonUniversity #DESY #UIUC #GSFC #UCR #UTA #UO

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Snowmass 2021 cross frontier report: Dark matter complementarity

Antonio Boveia et al.
SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 7 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCommRep.7

#OSU #LundUniversity #CU #Fermilab #UC #UK #UCSC #LANL #MIT #UCSB #SLAC #UNH #WashingtonUniversity #DESY #UIUC #GSFC #UCR #UTA #UO

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Snowmass 2021 cross frontier report: Dark matter complementarity

Antonio Boveia et al.
SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 7 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCommRep.7

#OSU #LundUniversity #CU #Fermilab #UC #UK #UCSC #LANL #MIT #UCSB #SLAC #UNH #WashingtonUniversity #DESY #UIUC #GSFC #UCR #UTA #UO

#introduction Hello scientists, I am a physicist that has worked on #ligo (hello LHO people!), #lhcb (happy to see beams still circulating), and (briefly) at #slac on #mec and #cxi (x-ray lasers are cool as heck). These days I work in tech at Waymo (trucking) and before that I worked on stratospheric balloon powered internet at the now defunct Loon project. Nice to meet you and reconnect with some old friends. 😁

Während #Herta #BSC hier in #Elversberg bei der #SVE spielt, mache ich mich auf den Weg zur #SLAC #SLAC24 von @heinleinsupport in #Berlin. Freue mich auf spannende Vorträge zu #Dovecot, #Rspamd, Ceph, ... und natürlich den Austausch mit Kollegen z.B. bei @mailbox_org, #IKU-Systems, ...