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I watched a special on the science channel last night and acient inventors including Da vinci were featured along with there inventions I was amazed at how far ahead of there time these geniuses were this is one of them and some of his inventions.
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/HeronAlexandria.htm
Russell I watch that channel alot it is amazing all the things that they already had,Heron and DaVinci were both genisus,Davinci had tanks,helocopters etc. Good stuff the Romans also designed the coalisum so that all people were able to exit it in under 15 min and it worked! I think the greeks or romans had a complete sewage system that they built a major city over and we are still using that model in the modern world.
That Heron fella was pretty darn smart.
I love shows about guys like that. Where are guys like that now? It seems we don't have too many that are way ahead of their time. At least not like Heron and Da Vinci. Would be cool to see what they thing of the modern world and what they might come up with now.
Some of the new ideas that are being experimented with are anti gravity,inertia canceling and warp speed the idea of wormholes was first put forth by Einstein a early as 1939 he proved that the fabric of space can be shaped by objects with a strong gravitational force like our sun and bend light its mind boggling stuff it seems the speed of light is not the ultimate speed limit and the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line much like bending a sheet of paper and connecting the edges to shorten the distance and if we can find a way to live in peace and not destroy each other there are many other wonders to be discovered.
Neat. I never heard of the guy. Amazing how smart some people are.
i also love all the science and natural history programmes.
zguitar mentions that there seems to be no one around today to match what da vinci and heron and a great host of others designed and invented. nobel is one that is over looked unjustly i feel, dynamite is not just used for blowing people up!
what about babbage and his computers?
everyone gives microsoft a hard time, where would we be without them?
one of the greatest inventors of modern times must be LES PAUL, without him would we have the electric guitar?
i also have heard that john lennon came up with the idea for the flanger!
Quote: "one of the greatest inventors of modern times must be LES PAUL, without him would we have the electric guitar?"
Didn't George Beauchamp invent the electric guitar pick-up?
DE
Some of the best ideas of our time were actually "invented" by science fiction writers years ago. Here is a small list of inventions:
Robert H. Heinlein
waterbed
waldo devices (remote "hands")
Arthur C. Clarke:
mono-molecular blade (never needs sharpening. still in development. Based upon the single-strand carbon monotube)
single strand carbon monotube
Recently there has been talk of a "space elevator" using single strand carbon monotubes. Clarke "invented" this one too.
There are many other devices "invented" by SF writers including laptop computers, tablet computers, cell phones (think of the Star Trek flip communicators), flat screen TV's, etc...
The electric guitar was around early in late 1939 or so a guitarist playing in a big band modified his semi hollow useing a mic pickup and a small amp at least this is what I kind of remember this might be a good research idea 
Quote: "one of the greatest inventors of modern times must be LES PAUL, without him would we have the electric guitar?"
Didn't George Beauchamp invent the electric guitar pick-up?
DE
Now I'm thinking of "Mr. Beauchamp" the dime store book writer in Unforgiven.
Some of the best ideas of our time were actually "invented" by science fiction writers years ago. Here is a small list of inventions:
Robert H. Heinlein
waterbed
waldo devices (remote "hands")Arthur C. Clarke:
mono-molecular blade (never needs sharpening. still in development. Based upon the single-strand carbon monotube)
single strand carbon monotube
Recently there has been talk of a "space elevator" using single strand carbon monotubes. Clarke "invented" this one too.There are many other devices "invented" by SF writers including laptop computers, tablet computers, cell phones (think of the Star Trek flip communicators), flat screen TV's, etc...
Genuine science fiction (not fantasy) is speculative fiction. It's supposed to deal with future technology, so it would make sense that they would predict a lot of things we find in the modern world.
In the mean time, I'm still waiting for my atomic powered flying car so I can go live on the moon.
I don't think we're comparing apples to apples here. Yes there have been many great inventors in recent history that have made the modern world what it is today. But Heron was thousands of years ahead his time. Da Vinci was hundreds of years ahead. These kind of guys don't exist anymore. It might be because people today are so smart that a stand out genius is hard to find. Mostly things are invented in groups. NASA has done major things. (Glad they are there but don't agree with their mission)
As for inventors of our time, I love Nikola Tesla. If you don't know about him check out his story. Modern Marvels on the History Channel does a great job depicting him.
Russell is right,I did see something on tv or in writing about someone who had an electric guitar before Les Paul. Maybe les brought it to the publics attenion.
I dug this information up with a little research.
In 1924 an inventive engineer working for the Gibson guitar company named Lloyd Loar, designed the first magnetic pickup. Using a magnet, he converted guitar string vibrations into electrical signals, which then were amplified through a speaker system. This first pickup was crude, but it was a great beginning.
The First Electric Guitar
In 1931 the Electro String Company was founded by Paul Barth, George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker, and developed the first electric guitars marketed to the general public. They made their guitars from cast aluminum and were played on a person’s lap using a steel slide much like today's steel guitar. Because of their unusual material, they were affectionately called “Frying Pans.â€
The early success of the frying pans prompted the Gibson guitar company to build their first electric guitar, the ES-150 which is a legend today.
The First Solid-Body Electric Guitar
Electric guitars were quickly becoming popular, even though there was a major problem with their construction. Their bodies would vibrate due to the amplified sounds coming through the speakers they were played into, causing what we know as feed-back. The obvious remedy was to build a guitar made with a solid body which wouldn’t vibrate so easily.
As with most innovations, there is controversy over who invented the first solid –body electric guitar. Guitar legend Les Paul in the 1940’s developed his affectionately called “The Log†solid-body guitar by attaching a Gibson neck to a solid piece of wood…a railroad tie, hence the name “Log.â€
Around this same time, guitarist Merle Travis and engineer Paul Bigsby developed a solid-body electric guitar that resembled the solid-body guitars that we’re so familiar with today.
The First Mass Produced Electric Guitar
Leo Fender in 1950 was the first to mass produce an electric guitar which was originally called the Fender Broadcaster. This guitar was quickly re-named to the infamous Telecaster because the name “Broadcaster†was already being used by another company. Leo followed this up in 1954 with the most renowned guitar of all time…the Stratocaster.
Leo’s success led other guitar manufacturers into developing their own mass-produced electric guitars. Most notable was the teaming-up of the Gibson guitar company with Les Paul to create the famous Gibson Les Paul electric guitar.
I have a snipped photo of the Gibson ES-150 also
I don't think we're comparing apples to apples here. Yes there have been many great inventors in recent history that have made the modern world what it is today. But Heron was thousands of years ahead his time. Da Vinci was hundreds of years ahead. These kind of guys don't exist anymore. It might be because people today are so smart that a stand out genius is hard to find. Mostly things are invented in groups. NASA has done major things. (Glad they are there but don't agree with their mission)
As for inventors of our time, I love Nikola Tesla. If you don't know about him check out his story. Modern Marvels on the History Channel does a great job depicting him.
I don't know if it's fair to say that guys like da Vinci don't exist any more. We only know that he was hundreds of years ahead of his time because we live hundreds of years in his future. Present day views of our modern smart people lack the 20/20 hindsight that we have with the renaissance folk. Who knows what we will be saying about Penrose, Hawking, Arkani-Hamed, or Dimopoulos in four centuries?
hey russ, that's interesting about the fender broadcaster as i used to know a guy who had one. did they start making them again later?
talking of steven hawking, i watched one of his programmes the other day in which he (more or less) proved there was no god!
i dare say someone else will come along and prove there is...what bothers me about religion is that we have to accept the word of people like the pope, the arch bishop of canterbury, mullah's, rabbi's etc. i wonder if we'd accept god's word if he actually turned up? would we be as hostile as they were 2000 years ago when they crucified jesus?
One cannot prove or disprove God with the physical sciences. At least not the Judeo-Christian incarnation. Why? Because if the Jews and Christians are right and God made Creation, and if we accept that (for sake of argument) then when one thinks about the process of science being to understand that which exists, we might get insight to the Creator but what we cannot do is prove the Creator any more or less than we can by applying the soft science of theology. That's a circle. Wish I were more eloquent today.
The point is that through the physical sciences, we can learn a great deal about the universe (in this case used informally to mean 'all of creation'). But if there is a creator of the universe, then that creator is not PART of the universe. Just as we can learn about an artist from their art, we might be able to learn about the creator from creation, but I do not think we will be able to use the scientific method of testing and observation to prove or disprove a creator simply because we cannot test or observe that which is not part of creation.
As someone who believes in God, I always found it silly when people of purported faith attempted to "prove" God's existence at all. My God demands my faith. If I demand proof, then I have no faith at all.
Thomas Paine once wrote, "The true words of the Creator are written into the creation." Science should bring us closer to understanding, not farther from it.
Science should bring us closer to understanding, not farther from it.
Therein lies the rub: How often has man's progress been hampered by religion? Not by God but religion? Algebra and writing evolved in the Middle East. The Fertile Crescent of Iraq (between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to be specific) was the "Cradle of Civilization" and brought us the aforementioned sciences and others too! Yet how many great minds have come out of that region in the past 100 years or even longer?
I cannot think of any myself. The "Brain Drain" there coincides with the rise of Islam.
Now, before any of you accuse me of being against Islam bear with me first: The Islamic religion, as it was seen by Mohammed, supported sciences and discovery. The problem was that as the church became more powerful the religious leaders became afraid of their power being nullified by information that may contradict their "truth". Thus they suppressed it.
the Islamic countries are still recovering, and dealing with, that mindset.
it is the same mindset that the Catholic Church took about sciences: Anything that went against what the Bible said, or even suggested otherwise, was suppressed. Often harshly. Galileo was lucky that the church did not burn him at the stake for heresy.
It is always difficult to have what we think we know about something challenged. If one puts his/her faith in the Bible, for example, and has taken their own personal understanding and presumption of the meaning of a passage as the Earth is at the center of all things and that is challenged, it's difficult for some (especially middle-ages Popes) to think, "Hmmmm. Well if the Bible is right, and if the science is right, maybe my understanding is wrong." The so-called battle between science and faith is in truth a personal battle against ego. The humble have no difficulty with admitting the possibility that they made an error.
Someday science will discover what faith has known all along we will spend eternity discovering things about our universe both without and within from the most massive to the most minute particles and there is one truth all things have a lifespan which coincidentally is pointed out in the book of Ecclesiastes and made into a popular song by the Byrds 'Turn,Turn,Turn" and I recall a verse 'to every thing there is a season".
Wow!!! This thread took a turn didn't it?
I like what Zurf and Jerome said.
It certainly did, but in a good way I think. It's so nice to see people able to have a conversation like this one without insulting one another. I love all you chordie peeps.
The problem with proving the existance of God is a bit like Catch 22. God cannot prove He exists because the whole basis of any religious belief is free will. He asks you to obey certain commands and if you chose to do so you will be rewarded. If God was proved to exist then, by default, so would Hell. People would then not follow God's commands because He asks them to but because they don't want to go to Hell. In effect, the word of God becomes a very real threat.
God as The Creator must therefore remove any possibility of His existance being proven.
The upshot of this is that if God exists we will never be able to prove it and if he doesn't well, we won't either.
