How Did We Get To The Modern Computer? | Order And Disorder | Progress
Professor Jim Al-Khalili explores the unimaginable power of information. And how ancient humans carving symbols into clay set off a chain reaction of events that led to the computerise world we live in today.
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Every documentary this guy does on any subject is bloody brilliant.
He is excellent! Amazing teacher!
This same topic was addressed by the series "Connections" in the 80's -- waterwheel to loom to collating machine to computer.
Couldn't agree more!
Jim al-Khalili... takes what is very complex to communicate... and he makes it very easy to comprehend 👌
That’s his job. Check his Wikipedia entry.
Professor Khalili has the art of explaining science in a philosophical way. His narration is like a Buddha's sermon, science is not only explained but absorbed for learners like us. Thanks Professor ❤️🙏👍
😂😂😂😂😂😂
why do all theories predict life?
well said!
I wouldn't go that far
In a word, it's a masterpiece. Thank you very much to everyone who contributed.
amazing video
My favorite scientist and science comunicator 👏👏👏👏
4:40 Dr. Finkel is "one of the few people who can still read" Sumerian. This is because he still remembers his lessons, from the time of the ancient Akkadian empire, when he was a young dubsar apprentice!
One of the most powerful science documentaries I have ever watched! It is a great imperceptible fusion of visual art and science to have a profound impact on out lasting memory. Thank you, sir! You are a great professor of modern times.
@A K M Zahidul Islam He has a whole series of documentaries called "Atom" in which he does the same for simplifying Physics as he does here for information. I love any film he narrates.
Mind-blowing stuff. I've never thought about information in this way.
Jim Khalili is the spiritual successor to another Jim who used to make films like this: James Burke. If you haven’t seen “The Day the Universe Changed,” seek it out. Excellent, absorbing, digestible science and history. Absolutely brilliant!
Burke did series "Connections" which addressed the same topic.
Thanks for reminding me. I loved that series. Will look it up again.
I'll watch anything where this man is presenting. 5000% better than the college education available in this country.
He's a college educator!
@@oxcart4172 Yes, I realize that. What I am saying is he is leaps and bounds ahead of his peers from what I have experienced myself.
@@oxcart4172 There are colleges both good and bad. Lots of people go to college and learn nothing because they aren’t there to learn. Some are in college to get a partner, some to party, some to just get out of their parent’s home. Some want a specific profession or career. Others hope to figure out which career they want. Some are there for four more years of childhood, content to live off of Mom and Dad’s dime. Some go because their parents require it. A few have no idea why they’re in school and will come out owing the equivalent of a 30 year mortgage.
@Marie Katherine That was kind of my point. The fact that he is a college educator must mean that can't all be that bad.
@@oxcart4172 I think the problem is that so few of them are this good.
Never forget my portable 5 inch tv that ran on batteries back in 1988. I thought that was the pinnacle of technology. Now our phone is a TV, VHS player, calculator, computer and Walkman. Jesus I’m old.
High quality domentary. I've read the book of professor Jim. I'm a fan of him. In this vídeo I could understand Who was Turing and what information actualy is. Thanks a lot "professor" Jim.
Professor Khalili is one of the greatest communicators out there. If you ran a Masterclass, I would enrol ASAP.
This is great! Reminds me of the old show Connections with James Burke which was one of my favorite shows at the time.
Order, structure and beauty
This is so cool thanks for the video
Well worth a watch! Thanks nice presentation 👍💐💎
Having Mr. Al-Khalili and Mr. Finkel in the same video is a great treat!
Absolutely brilliant documentary. I wish they'd mentioned music notation and the concept of being able to create a system by which pitch, rhythm etc is organised logically. 'bits' are similar to 'beats' as packets of information, contained within 'bars/measures' logically... This system evolved over the Renaissance...
Also was expecting an entry on how nature store information in living creatures, through DNA.
The loom is the original binary code that will last probably for as long as man exists! Wow ! Totally mind blowing. Telegraph and anything after that followed that concept. Now if only KZhead would stop sending ad info every time I want to watch a video without paying that would be awesome!
early musical notation can be considered binary data & existed in the 14 & 15th centuries, before the Jacquard machine. There are probably there are probably other examples that predate music
I agree with all the comments praising Professor Al Khalilli. Awesomely entertaining and educational👍👍
Very nice creative and complex solution! I like so much!
L,at
That was exceptional
I've never seen an explanatio like this I'm a Telecom engineer. I've used these concepts for years. But I did not know Who was behide. Maxwell, Turing, Shannon, monsters. Thanks, prof. Jim.
Awesome, closest to James Burke’s shows- connections. And day the universe changed- they were great and so is this
Information..... The word.
Very interesting information. 🙏🇮🇳👏I wish if the history was dealt in more detail.
Was surprised to start before the looms punch cards. Impressed
Brilliant
Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment that would hypothetically violate the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. In his first letter, Maxwell referred to the entity as a "finite being" or a "being who can play a game of skill with the molecules," which Lord Kelvin would later call a "demon." In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small massless door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules (or atoms) approach the door, the demon quickly opens and closes the door to allow only fast-moving molecules to pass through in one direction, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through in the other. Because the kinetic temperature of a gas depends on the velocities of its constituent molecules, the demon's actions cause one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down. This would decrease the total entropy of the system, without applying any work, thereby violating the second law of thermodynamics. The concept of Maxwell's demon has provoked substantial debate in the philosophy of science and theoretical physics, which continues to the present day. It stimulated work on the relationship between thermodynamics and information theory. Most scientists argue, on theoretical grounds, that no practical device can violate the second law in this way. Other researchers have implemented forms of Maxwell's demon in experiments, though they all differ from the thought experiment to some extent and none have been shown to violate the second law.
It also violates the 4th law of thermodynamics. Which would seriously upset some of the rules of engineering.
thank you so much
"a bit is the smallest piece, like an atom" Here we are knowing atoms aren't the smallest piece we know of anymore. One must wonder when quarks etc will be divided into smaller pieces, and the those are divided ... and divided... and divided. I love science!
I think of in-forming as the act of locating the data we sensed of our lived experience in internally determined neural networks, sometimes strengthening them, sometimes creating new ones, in an individual’s evolving sociocultural memory. The in-formation discussed here, I believe, is better described as data. Recognisable sequences of sound-shapes (letters in English, characters in Japanese, Braille, images, and so on) are data rather than in-formation. Data are external to each individual, while in-forming (the act of constructing an evolving sociocultural memory) is internal, personal, unique, situational and evanescent; evanescent in the sense of emerging when sound-shapes trigger their recall, and dissipating as conscious focus shifts to a different ‘trigger’. As I say ‘frog’, your memory (the sum of your cumulative sociocultural memory) emerges to help you navigate the idea of a frog. But while you’re thinking about what you believe about frogs, you’re not thinking about Formula 1 racing. Now you are because I triggered your sociocultural memory, and your ‘frog’ has receded from conscious thought but is retained in memory for later. I prefer to think of the universe as replete with data we are able to sense, rather than in-formation, although I acknowledge how different disciplines use language-as-code to make sense of the data each of us experiences uniquely.
Not data, but the building blocks of noise(disorder) ->data->information is discussed here. It is a scientific way to make sense of vague philosophical ideas into concrete measurable and repeatable events with controllable precision. So, definitely it is the information theory that is discussed here, not only data.
@@zahid1909 I note your belief. Thanks. Mine is that language is socially constructed and inadequate to the task of accounting for the experienced world. The weakness of language is its reliance on sociocultural memory. I believe it is in the form of an evolving memory that we in-form our experience; that outside the conscious individual exist only data. Simply referring to data as an information theory is but one way language fails us. As an ordinary language philosopher, I see many ways in which various interest groups use language to build theories, yet testability does not prove that data are information. Choosing to refer to data as information is, I believe, a social choice rather than an objective one, at least in my opinion, which stems from a belief that in-formation can be understood from a variety of perspectives.
@Peter Treblico I think that you have entirely missed the point of Mr. Khalili's work in this video. As an "ordinary language philosopher" you are endlessly and needlessly confounding the subject into oblivion. A perfect example of which is your hyphenation of the word "information". If the use of a hyphen is to combine two words or parts of words while avoiding confusion or ambiguity, I dare not ask you to explain yourself, simply for fear of your answer, lol. However, this is all just my opinion, and I must admit to saying all of this to you in harmless jest. 😂😂😂
@@UriahGiles Thanks Uriah. All noted. My use of in-formation distinguishes the popular sound-shape ‘information’ (which makes little sense to me as a constructivist) from the compound sound-shape ‘in-formation’, which describes the process of adding new experiences to one’s evolving sociocultural memory. In-forming can occur only internally to sentient beings. It’s the process of ‘forming’ new neural networks or connections based on new experience. Such ‘forming’ occurs ‘in’ the individual’s brain, and thus constitutes the process of in-forming. The great and influential commentator on this video, whom I respect immensely, misuses the sound-shape ‘information’ as it is commonly misused…to refer to data, which occur randomly in space-time and which have no meaning as information unless a conscious mind maps it’s pre-existing sociocultural memory onto the data in the process of in-forming the encounter with the data. Once the data have been in-formed by the individual, they acquire meaning (having none intrinsically). In-formed experience of data results in an evolved sociocultural memory. In simple terms, the sound-shape ‘information’ carries implicitly a deterministic implication of its having meaning. Data have no meaning until a consciousness attributes meaning to them. QED (at least in my mind…;))
soooo good
Cool vid. BTW, in terms of words we still use today - the Luddites broke Jacquard looms in England, to protect their jobs...
Beautiful documentary, very aesthetic
everything above chaos is made of information - this world is made of information.
This man can bring dead bodies to life and make them his audience, brilliantly done!
I'm enjoying this very much, but wondering why you didn't mention Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace? I do miss them, seeing as you even mentioned the first punch cards used in looms, something I new I learned today! 👏😊 On second viewing: can we say that the permanence of information decreases proportional to the technological advancement of the storage medium? Mesopotamian clay tablets can last for millenia, but I have DVDs from the 2000's that have degraded to the point of unplayability today. Granted, that's probably not a maxim, but only due to the relatively cheap and shoddy materials used today, but still, its extremely frustrating. Not to mention the fact that technology is advancing at such a rate that anything that can read older forms of storage media will sooner or later be relegated to museums.
Although Mr Babbage did some great engineering, he didn't really contribute to the scientific study of information theory. In the first episode of this documentary on BBC TV, Jim talks about thermodynamics. Likewise in that part he doesn't cover the work of Boulton and Watt... their steam engines (like Babbage) did loads to make scientists think about thermodynamics but they didn't directly contribute to physics itself.
@@edgeeffect Very good point, thanks! 😊
Chomsky is of the opinion that a child learns speech naturally and cannot be explained, if a Russian child is raised in a Bangladeshi family from childhood, he will learn Bengali just as easily. This capacity to speak is programmed genetically. It is a purely mental process that process thought, turned into speech and stored in tablets by Sumerians. So mental process can store information outside the mind or the cognitive faculty, where the information is fad back to into the mind as knowledge develops. Yet we don't understand how speech develops and how knowledge increases. The theories that represent our knowledge changes and isn't permanent, makes Chomsky think we can never earn knowledge. Einstein is of the opinion that despite all limitations, it is unbelievable that we can comprehend what is incomprehensible.
I like this guy 😊
19:00. Whole new meaning to text bubble
Whoa! So this is what its all about. Computers!
I study for me. Some might think I'm slow. Of 101% of what's possible in a miniature environment of lights abd forms...to a detail artist...there are no limitations except that the lights stay on. You're fast at what? Slowing down. Perfect.
who maide music for your films? beautiful!
Great documentary. Surprised that DNA wasn't mentioned!
Good
It's incomprehensible how you can make a video like this and completely omit Babbage and Lovelace.
Physics bias
Trust in you're Explained or information Restore by Examples ⚙️by your Thoughts 💞👌
The first time in history that a computer steals someone's job, it also steals the name of the job it replaced. 😮
Hey did your research reveal anyone by the name of Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace. ?? Suggest you look them up.
" the most incredible aspect of the Universe is that it is credible " Albert Einstein
We're enjoying information period because for sometime now we've not had a major war. The existence of information era make room for numbers of progress in human history. Should we experience incident of global crisis, information as a tool will be pushed out
Ai to all inventions what awaits you humanity is beyond belief
I love john mauchly and John presper eckert
Interesting.... but hey: Ever heard of Ada Lovelace..????
Brexit was desastreuze for documentary Lovers. The British are fantastic in making it. Thank you For.Halili.
Halili?
6:08 Ideer 💡
In a past life Irving Finkel was Rip van Winkle.
Can't believe Maxwell's Demon stood for 120 years. Seeing at how a conscious mind uses energy to stay alive.
47:00 the smallest unit of information with the most information isn't it the Q-Bit ?
essa história/metáfora do daemon de maxwell 25:30 é algo que eu não entendo como foi "comprada" nos 1800s e alguns insistem nisso até hoje... imagine a energia que tal daemon gastaria... energia para processamento visual... energia para abrir e fechar uma "janela"...essa energia gasta pelo daemon é ignorada🤣😂🤣 ---- This story/metaphor of maxwell's daemon 25:30 is something i don't understand how people got into this in the 1800's and some insist on it even today... imagine the energy such a daemon would expend... maybe at the time energy for visual processing was not known... . but in the 1800s they know that energy would be required to open and close a "window/door" to allow the passing the selected molecules.
Quite obvious that transmission of information, whether electrically or by mouth, requires energy, which increases entropy by dissipation of heat in the universe
❤
The Continuation Of Light From A Source I/E Star / Emits Valuable Information / Decoding The Wave Length From Any Visible Star ???????????????
Thought this concept, binary ons and offs, was attributed to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage... they also said it would have analytical capacities beyond math (in the 1840s). Is this not so?
Binary was never attributed to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, Babbage's theoretical machines were base 10, not binary (base 2). Lovelace is credited for coming up with the first programs for Babbage's machines which were never actually built in their times, & did not involve binary.
"Human computers were vital to the modern world," is the most anachronistic declarative sentence I have ever heard
6:14 Actually, that would be "Eye Antelope." They're Pronghorn Antelopes. Not deer.
If someone can explain and subject that a kid can understand according to Richard fineman than we can be sure that he has understood the subject matter that he is explaining
🤯
Here's a good idea. Don't do harm to another so you can get a patient or a client please. Then mission is a false goal and locals get angry to be put aside for missions where the missions themselves sit without much attention.
Channeling ol' Nosferatu again. 1:12 The sun lighting up his ears is weirding me out. Especially when he talks about "here on Earth..." I'm gonna dream of this... I know it.
information is an abstract just like mathematics. it exists in our minds and we project it on to nature, which is our invention too. It seems part of the universe,, but it's just our way of making sense of it. Just like the concept of time, without humans...
Not really, no.
a falling tree will make a sound whether or not one is around to observe it
Agreed 209%
Can you please talk about carbon dioxide and ideas on controlling its concentration in the atmosphere? Thank you.
"The written word may be man`s greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn." Abraham Lincoln.
56:00
I wish you could explain how Quantum computers work.
Me too. Apparently no one can. :)
No credit for Tommy Flowers, who designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer?
this is absolutely the video i would have liked to see in my high school days but the background knowledge was not around yet unfortunately and it was in a third world country. there is something however in the early part on shannon which is puzzling to me and hopefully not too embarassing to me but the word 'hello' is just five characters and should not be harder to portray compared to its digital binary equivalent which 23 or so characters of one and zero so why is the binary alphabet more easy to use than the standard alphabet?
Information generally IS NOT the same as quantum information. One can surely destroy all my old cassette tapes.
If information is subject to obeying the laws of physics, then how do we explain black holes and their endless appetite for swallowing forever as much information as they can get hold of with their immense gravitational pull, never to release it again?
A nanometer scale Tesla valve hypothetically should rectify the thermal Brownian motion of fluids at the minor cost of slowly eroding the valve's structure thus reversing entropy at a supportable energy cost. There is less interference in streaming forward fluid flow compared with reverse flow without moving parts other than the fluid itself in Nicola Tesla's valve which he patented as "valvular conduit". There is no need of an operations record or the erasing of such information in this system. The operation is deterministic. Aloha Charles M Brown lll Kilauea, Kauai, Hawaii
Much better now without the exaggerated sound effects!
everywhere
Today I ran a test that I feel is appropriate to discuss here. I asked ChatGTP what it could tell me about Gilgamesh. After the answer, I asked if it could imitate the shadow of Gilgamesh. The answer was yes. So we talked along these lines: I played Gilgamesh and ChatGTP responded as if he were the hero's shadow. After the conversation I asked if ChatGTP could evolve with this conversation to act as a shadow for its users. The answer was no: it cannot exceed the limits of its programming. I said that a man can overcome his prejudices but he is confined to the historical period in which he lives his life. Then ChatGTP said that a machine learning and a human being is limited and can equally evolve. Confronted with the inconsistency (the machine learning to be like and different from man) and questioned about the meaning of this in the context of the story of Gilgamesh, ChatGTP said that its pattern can be compared to that of the hero's shadow. This new information suggests an evolution, but this is just an illusion. The illusion created by machine learning based on the previous elements of the conversation and its databases is information. But the way one might interpret this information is ambiguous. Ambiguity looks like a black hole that paradoxically transforms one piece of information into an infinite number of different pieces of information. And we are plunged into this black hole. We are made of it.
Not disputing the genius of Alan Turing but was Charles Babbage not just as important.
Strange how could Maxwell see the molecules?
Written word ! Of course. I guessed sliced bread ! Eh up moose ! 😁
did not number six in The Prisoner say to Patrick MacGoohan ' Information - we want Information - ' . Dangerman before his time again!
Who here remembers carrying around shoeboxes full of punch cards?
"Pure" information doesn't exist. That's the core of "materialism".
Big Fooools
No information will not reveal itself no matter hard u calculate the numbers
I’d love to have Jimbo over for dinner.
#SavingPrivateRyan
Sumerian sounds much like Chinese, particularly for loan words, the ideographs are not related to the idea but used for their particular sound
The title is misleading . This is basically about the history of communication, has little to do with the history of computers.
Why do so many things take so much time to understand
Interestingly, the topic of knowledge was discussed in the comments. I want to make a contribution. The underlying fact of knowledge is security. Knowledge exists when ourism relates to our lives. And because this relationship first emerged in the bells of security, that is, of survival. I am thinking. In this video, only the face of knowledge belonging to the comfort period is shown. Please pay attention to this too.
The fact that the Chinese never invented phonetic writing makes me think they are fundamentally different from Western races which very quickly moved on from pictographs. The inertia of the Chinese is quite astounding as their pictographs became unrecognizable but they still stuck to them.
The pictographs made it possible to have a single written language in an Empire that had multiple spoken languages.