Well i actually know how to produce eletricity so…wait- i don’t know how to get magnets and copper
I will be taking no followup questions. Thank you for your time
Submitted 1 day ago by db2@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ea455305-ca47-476f-a42c-bbaac1a66c4e.jpeg
Comments
General_Effort@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Huh. At first, I thought that was about rubbing the kitty with some amber.
“Thales of Miletus, writing at around 600 BC, noted that rubbing fur on various substances such as amber would cause them to attract specks of dust and other light objects.” (Yes, that Thales.) It is still, or again, a popular demonstration, though we use plastic instead of amber. Amber in Ancient Greek is “elektron”.
Atomic@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
Electricity works by moving electrons from point a to point b.
There are different ways of acomplishing this. Easiest is to have an electrolyte between zinc and copper. Kids use a potato for their science class. Volta used cloth soaked in saltwater.
Which is also why call it “Volt” and “Voltage”
Donkter@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Yeah, you can’t just lay down electricity, especially not practical electricity it requires a ton of diverse knowledge from many different studies. What I would do is give them the concept of using steam to power to spin wheels or create an engine. Then use gear ratios to show them how to scale it up. Idk if they had found neodymium magnets back then, but teach them how to use them to heat iron by spinning them on the end of a steam engine and you’re starting to cook with electricity.
Again, getting to electricity from there is still a whole fucking chore. But hopefully you could rely on science to advance way faster from your advances than if you weren’t there.
Actually, the most important thing you could give the greeks is the concept of the modern scientific method. That shit was invented so late and just skyrocketed science (literally) the moment it was refined.
Just write a book about everything you remember about a null hypothesis, randomized blind trials, control experiments, variable control etc. if you can squeeze any bit of statistics out of your brain, even if it’s just making a graph, you probably advance the world by thousands of years.
bobo1900@startrek.website 14 hours ago
They definitely didn’t have neodinium magnets, as neodinium being a lantanide metal was discovered only recently (1700s or 1800s) and requires extremely advanced (for the time) metallurgy and chemistry to extract from minerals.
Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Probably 2 of the biggest reasons the Greeks failed to become a technological civilization are that their various feuding city-states never united in cooperation, but primarily that they were super into slavery for all their labor. They didn’t want to make slaves work less, then they would have time and energy to rebel and slaughter their masters. No, scientific advancement was simply for curiosity’s sake, not practical applications.
frog@feddit.uk 23 hours ago
During a get together someone asked if you could go back in time, what one item would you take with you? My cousin said his cell phone so he could have unlimited knowledge with him. I was called an asshole for telling him it wouldn’t work unless he downloaded it all on his phone and asking how would he charge it.
rmuk@feddit.uk 22 hours ago
A phone would be a bit much, but an ereader with a solar charger loaded up with Wikipedia and a chunk of Project Gutenberg would probably last with a bit of care.
howrar@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
That’s two items. The second one costs extra.
Coopr8@kbin.earth 18 hours ago
This is a good reminder, I need to upload my Kiwix backup to my eReader. I keep a Wikipedia essentials download, survival and medical encyclopedias, and a bunch of "from the ground up" engineering resources backed up offline.
rmuk@feddit.uk 22 hours ago
That’s a joke-turned-plot element from one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. The protagonist, a human everyman stranded with a primitive culture on a distant world realises he has no idea how electricity, steam engines, medicine, etc works but he becomes a respected member of their community by making sandwiches.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Mostly Harmless. I didn’t like that one. It was somehow bleak and left me worrying that DNA was in a bad place when he wrote it. I’m going to be a heretic and say that I did like how Colfer continued the series.
In a Discworld novel, an off-hand remark mentions Ponder Stibbons wanting to build a Van-De-Graff-generator by tying cats to a wheel. I wish I could remember which book it was.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I have very few practical skills in the modern day.
But if you need to set up a society from scratch, I can get you electricity, steel, solid agriculture, and a handful of life saving medications depending on climate.
tetris11@feddit.uk 1 day ago
wait what, that’s incredible. Dibs on you when it comes to picking time travel buddies.
I offer: handy with a screwdriver and knows how to make good scary voices when telling ghost stories around a campfire.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
I will be burned as a witch within five minutes if im not burned for being such an insufferable bitch within as many seconds.
Coopr8@kbin.earth 18 hours ago
Have you actually smelted and alloyed useable steel from ores before?
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Not from ores, and not on my own, but if I spent a minute I could remember how to go from ‘chopped dowm this tree with a rock’ to that.
QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
imagine showing them the quadratic equation and they’re just like “why does this matter” and just being like “idk I barely passed”
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
I actually read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court recently. It’s one of those things where I knew the whole story going in because pop culture had remade it several times for both children and adults. I got Star Wars the exact same way. But I recently listened through the original on LibreVox.
Twain apparently wrote it to poke fun at a friend of his who wrote stories about noble knights errant, which is why he creates an ancient people who are perfectly ignorant and perfectly gullible, that stories of “rescuing maidens from a giant” were extremely embellished stories of buying pigs back.
Then there’s the entire aspect of a modern engineer teaching a historical people new technology. Twain makes a BIG deal of “Arkansas journalism” and convincing knights to carry advertising billboards with them which would have been very modern and American to a 19th century man. But also he manages to set up a printing press in a land that doesn’t understand pulp paper, a telephone network in a land that doesn’t understand electricity…in apparently a couple years?
Me? I think I’m an above average candidate for this scenario, I’d die in a boiler explosion attempting to build a steam engine.
LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Uhh… I’ll give it a try. Let’s first start by digging everywhere looking for this natural metal called “copper.” We’re gonna need that for conductivity. Then…um… I honestly don’t know what happens after that.
gnu@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
Electricity is a hard ask to even attempt to do in ancient times. Luckily there’s a variety of other simpler things to establish yourself as a genius inventor - strirrups, wheelbarrows, the idea of a crank handle, and how to use triangular bracing to make a strong truss would be good options.
general_kitten@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
i would say metallurgy was advanced enough for some very simple generators using a lodestone and copper wire, that could then at least used as a heater or establish electrolysis to advance chemistry quite a bit, but applications would likely stay niche or just a curiosity, carbon arc lamps would maybe be possible but hard.