When technology is the product of generations of scientific breakthroughs, shouldn't we all profit from it?
How did you celebrate this summer's centennial of Werner Heisenberg's "magical paper," which eventually brought us computers and smartphones?
You say your social calendar doesn't revolve around physics? Fair enough. Heisenberg's magical paper helped to show that electrons don't revolve around atomic nuclei, either, but the story of how the paper came about may inspire us to claim money we're due and to celebrate an equally important bicentennial next year -- one with Albany at its center.
In the summer of 1925, Heisenberg had just completed several months of working for the great Danish physicist Neils Bohr, who had come up with a famous model of atoms, in which electrons orbited the nuclei, much as planets orbit the sun, making our world on very small scales almost as easy to understand as the large-scale structure of our solar system. This was a beautiful idea that accounted for some aspects of atomic behavior but not all of them, making the idea either incomplete or wrong.
Meanwhile, Heisenberg was suffering from hay fever. To escape the pollen, he went on vacation to Heligoland, which is pretty much what it sounds like, a remote archipelago in the North Sea.
That's the story. Really. Heisenberg was just escaping pollen and not the lingering influence of the eminent scientist who had recently been his boss and whose signature work Heisenberg would soon overthrow.
Long story short, Heisenberg stayed up late one night, found that his math worked out, and, as he later recounted, walked slowly, "agitated" and "profoundly shaken," to climb "on a rock overlooking the sea at the tip of the island, and [wait] for the sun to come up." Heisenberg had sussed out the beginnings of a framework for quantum mechanics: that instead of orbiting the nucleus, electrons can't be said to do anything, exactly, in between our attempts to see what they're up to, and even then, part of what we might want to know can never be determined.
Having engaged in theoretical physics myself, I suspect that Heisenberg went on vacation to clear his mind more than his sinuses. At any rate, Heisenberg provides a salutary example of why doing your own thing is important, despite the effort it requires or even the disfavor it can bring.
On much larger scales, the folly of World War I had helped break through major intellectual barriers. The League of Nations was founded to end war. Disarmament was ongoing. Women's suffrage was finally won in many Western nations. Berlin was becoming "the queer capital of the world." Revolution of various kinds was widespread, and revolution begets revolution.
Heisenberg's breakthrough was a product of the suffering and toil of vast numbers of people, and our technological civilization wouldn't exist without that breakthrough and many others. The techniques created by the giants in the field have been used by thousands of physicists in the ongoing, century-long slog to control electrons in increasingly complex devices.
Some people imagine that Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. Others think it was hundreds of engineers he organized at Apple. Tech cognoscenti might mention the inventors of preexisting components. Physics underpins all of that.
Among its greatest leaders was Albany's own Joseph Henry, who embarked on his scientific career 199 years ago by taking a job teaching at Albany Academy.
Henry had been born near Albany and orphaned early. His groundbreaking work at Albany Academy led him to discover how electric currents can affect themselves by producing magnetic fields, which is part of our technological civilization's foundation, and to invent the first electromagnetic machine, among other things. Albany will, I hope, mark his bicentennial somehow next year.
Keep zooming out. Everyone participates in humanity's advancement. So how can we justify ownership by the few of the lucrative products we create together? Today, much of what you do with technology is being used to train artificial intelligence to take your job. Demand your royalties in the form of universal basic income.
If that seems wrong, maybe follow Heisenberg's example: Take some time away to think it over.