this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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This all seems as exotic or esoteric to us now as these invisible electromagnetic waves were to Heinrich Hertz, who reportedly regarded them as mere scientific curiosities with no practical applications.

Unable to foresee radio, television, telephones, remote controls, microwave ovens, Wifi, Bluetooth... you get the point, that "thing with no practical applications" is now a staple of daily life, and all around us. We have fully tamed Electromagnetism.

Now with things like Quantum Computing and Bose-Einstein Condensates, we are starting to tame a new esoteric scientific curiosity - the probability wave function, the Uncertainty Principle.

Heinrich Hertz did not foresee things like satellite television and Spotify while looking for a spark flying across two metal tips from his dark room in the 1880s, but surely we have a better grasp of what potential benefits the newest technologies have in store for humanity?
Or are we for the most part still in the Hertz-like naive fiddling process?

Either way, there is going to be some incredible magic inside that quantum box!

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