The Secret Behind Technological Advancement

Introduction: Technology evolves spontaneously. No person, race, country, or social entity is responsible. Evolution of technology comes down to iterations that happen on their own. Random social trajectories interact, iterations happen, and technological evolution happens.

Technology progresses in two ways.

1. Iterations and repetition.
2. Paradigm shifts.

Paradigm shifts are very rare. Most technological progress is due to iterations and repetition.

Research facilities iterate and repeat. They take existing technology, vary the input and input conditions slightly and study the output. They do this over and over again using Trial & Error.

This trial and error process produces a lot of useless junk......and once in a while it produces something useful...i.e. technology has evolved.

Doesn't take much intelligence to iterate.

It is paradigm shifts in technology that are worth noticing. For example, the shift from mechanical calculators to digital calculators.

(The shift from windows95 to winXP is NOT a paradigm shift, for example.)

Evolution due to iterations is spontaneous and accidental...but...even paradigm shifts in technology are spontaneous and accidental.

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No conscious effort on the part of humans is responsible for paradigm shifts in technology. They did not ‘cause’ the paradigm shift. It happened through them, SPONTANEOUSLY and ACCIDENTALLY. Huge difference.

The feeling that our society, race, country, is intellectually superior to others because we progressed technologically and they could not is totally baseless.

Chaos Theory as applied to social organisation supports all that I have written above.

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Recapitulation:

• All progress is spontaneous and a result of complex interactions between diverse trajectories that transcend geography, culture, socio-economics, race.



• No social group can take credit for technological progress. The humans involved are just tools, just conduits; progress happens through them. Not because of them.



• Technological evolution is a product of the self-organisation principle in which various social trajectories (like banks, research labs. etc) interact and growth occurs. There is NO director, NO controller of the progress.

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Height of a Building

Imagine that you are on top of a building or a cliff and are wondering how tall it is.

Estimating this is very simple.

Drop a stone from where you are (i.e. top of the building/cliff etc.) and see how much time it takes to hit the ground below.

Make sure the stone is DROPPED, not thrown. And it should fall VERTICALLY.

Then calculate as follows.

Height = 5 X Time X Time (metres.)

Height = 16 X Time X Time (feet.)

The above calculations are fairly accurate.

Strength of a building

The strength of a building comes from BEAMS and COLUMNS. The walls provide secondary support. In any work done on a building, it is necessary to ensure that the beams and columns do not get damaged.

Beams are always horizontal.
Columns are always vertical.

(Refer attached image. Click to enlarge.)

There are many other elements in the building skeleton, but beams and columns are the most important.