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by oblio
1281 days ago
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Nuclear fusion is stuck into an "early MASER/LASER phase". Laser was cool, but nobody knew what to do with it. These days we're at the stage where we're thinking: what can't we do with it??? But for about 3 decades (before CDs, basically) laser was a pop science laughing stock, more or less. And fusion is much harder plus has been talked about and hyped for at least as long. |
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Yup:
In college English classes I took, they wanted the students to write term papers. Ah, sure, they expected some review of some case of belles lettres, maybe Medieval French romantic poetry!!!!
Instead, in one case, I picked the transistor and another, the laser.
For the laser, I had no idea of the applications. For the transistor, all I knew was, what it seemed was all Bell Labs had in mind -- replace their usage of vacuum tubes, that is, analog amplifiers and not digital, Nyquist sampling, etc., even though Shannon was at Bell Labs, etc.
The idea of a few billion transistors on a sheet of silicon about the size of a large postage stamp, 16 cores, 64 bit addressing, 4.0 GHz clock, etc. -- beyond all expectation or belief. The graphics processors -- still less belief! Lasers sending trillions of bits per second per hair-thin glass fiber -- not even ready for science fiction!
No doubt I picked the transistor and the laser out of media hype. So at least some people in the media expected something from those two. Here the media was not wrong, and in the long term the hype was way below the reality.