On the other hand, the only inventions of any significance made between between 1930 and 2012 were personal computers, antibiotics, and nuclear weapons.
Just taking ‘invention’ in terms of physically existent technology (where algorithms etc or new processes don’t count) that people experience in their everyday life—The laser, the transistor, MRI scanners, genetic engineering, the jet engine, the mobile phone, nylon, video recording, electrical amplification of musical instruments, electronic instruments, artificial pacemakers...
Add in vast improvements to previously existing technologies (I think getting people on the moon may have been mildly significant), and scientific breakthroughs that have made whole areas of technology more efficient (information theory, the Turing machine, cybernetics) and those 82 years have been some of the most inventive in human history.
Of the ones you listed, I might grant you the jet engine, which I suppose one could argue was as big an advance in transportation as the railroad, since it let people travel at 700 miles an hour instead of 70 miles an hour.
(Genetic engineering has a lot of potential, but it hasn’t had much of an influence yet. We’ll need another century to really figure out how to take advantage of it—we don’t even know how to make a tree grow into the shape of a house!)
On the other hand, the only inventions of any significance made between between 1930 and 2012 were personal computers, antibiotics, and nuclear weapons.
Just taking ‘invention’ in terms of physically existent technology (where algorithms etc or new processes don’t count) that people experience in their everyday life—The laser, the transistor, MRI scanners, genetic engineering, the jet engine, the mobile phone, nylon, video recording, electrical amplification of musical instruments, electronic instruments, artificial pacemakers...
Add in vast improvements to previously existing technologies (I think getting people on the moon may have been mildly significant), and scientific breakthroughs that have made whole areas of technology more efficient (information theory, the Turing machine, cybernetics) and those 82 years have been some of the most inventive in human history.
Of the ones you listed, I might grant you the jet engine, which I suppose one could argue was as big an advance in transportation as the railroad, since it let people travel at 700 miles an hour instead of 70 miles an hour.
Most of what you mentioned wasn’t even as important as the electric washing machine.
(Genetic engineering has a lot of potential, but it hasn’t had much of an influence yet. We’ll need another century to really figure out how to take advantage of it—we don’t even know how to make a tree grow into the shape of a house!)