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Shoulders of Giants
September 10, 2012
My
high school physics course had a big affect on my
scientific aspirations. Those were the days of
PSSC Physics, so-called because it was developed by the
Physical Sciences Study Committee in 1956.[1] I wrote about PSSC Physics in a
2006 article (Learning Physics, August 18, 2006).
The objective of this "New Physics" counterpart of the "
New Math" was to bring
science education into the
space age. The PSSC Physics course went against the normal mode of having students
memorize a lot of facts. It was an attempt to teach the concepts of physics. It was a great course for a
novice physicist, but many of the other students did not fare as well.
I especially enjoyed the
laboratory experiments, which used simple devices to teach fundamental concepts. One especially ingenious device, called a "
ripple tank," used water waves to teach
optics. One striking feature of the physics
classroom was a giant
portrait of
Isaac Newton, captioned with the "
standing on the shoulders of giants"
quotation that's often attributed to him.
The quotation, taken from a 1676 letter of Newton to
Robert Hooke, is "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants." We shouldn't be too surprised at seeing "shoulders" written as "sholders" in the same sentence as "ye." The phrase was apparently first used by
Bernard of Chartres, and it's rendered in
Latin as "...quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentes..." ("...like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants").
The original Giants
The Titans, as illustrated by Gustave Doré (1832 - 1883) in Dante's Inferno (Plate LXV: Canto XXXI).
(Via Wikimedia Commons))
In earlier articles (
George Heilmeier and the DARPA Questions, March 13, 2012 and
Full Genome Sequencing, June 7, 2012), I remarked how science depends critically on
instrumentation. Today, it's just as likely that we're doing our standing on the top of our
spectrometers. Without such devices to assist the experimental verification of
theory, science would not advance.
The trend seems to be towards very large, very expensive instruments.
Galileo's telescope and
Robert Hooke's microscope were not that expensive in their manufacture, but the
Large Hadron Collider cost
$9 billion, and
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope rings in at about the same amount. Of course, there's the recent counterexample of how
household adhesive tape was an essential part of the discovery of
graphene.
Technology has been the enabler of
sequencing of DNA. What was first a laborious
chemical problem has now been the topic of many innovations in
electronics and
nanotechnology. If we were to make a map of
technology areas in which their location is based on their
connectedness, the kingdom of DNA analysis is moving ever slightly away from chemical country towards the electronic realm.
Such a map was prepared by an
interdisciplinary team that posted its results at
http://www.interdisciplinaryscience.net,[2] as well as the
arXiv preprint server.[3] The map is a snapshot of the relatedness of patented technologies, as indexed in the
International Patent Classification (IPC), based on
citations from 2000-2006. This result, as shown in the figure below, is based on more than 760,000
patents in 400 IPC categories. A spreadsheet of the classifications can be found
here.[4]
Visual map of the interconnections of patented technologies, from the arXiv Preprint Server, figure 1, ref. 3.[3] (Click for larger image)
A cursory look at this map shows three large areas. There are materials to the right,
chemicals and
pharmaceuticals to the left, and
computing/
communication at the bottom. As the authors of this map write, such maps would reveal new relationships between disparate technologies.
I agree, but the fundamental problem is finding those outliers in such a mass of data. Now that a baseline is established, I think some simple computer code can give a month-to-month indicator of newly building relationships. The study included a snapshot of the patent portfolios of
Samsung and
Dupont, overlaid on this technology map.
References:
- The AAPT Celebrates PSSC's 50th Birthday, Compadre Net.
- Luciano Kay, Nils Newman, Jan Youtie, Alan L. Porter and Ismael Rafols, "Patent Overlay Mapping: Visualizing Technological Distance," Interdisciplinaryscience.net.
- Luciano Kay, Nils Newman, Jan Youtie, Alan L. Porter and Ismael Rafols, "Patent Overlay Mapping: Visualizing Technological Distance," arXiv Preprint Server, August 21, 2012.
- Supplementary file 1 for Ref. 3, Excel file containing the labels of IPC groupings, citation and similarity matrices, factor analysis of IPC groupings, University of Sussex Web Site.
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