Pretty much everyone in this thread needs to go read Ryan North’s book “How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler”.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Invent-Everything-Survival-Stranded/dp/0735220158/
Or, if you don’t have time, just print this out and keep it with you at all times:
I don’t know if this helps. It’s enough to know you’re fucked.
“Wrap some copper wire around a core”
Mr. Stegosaurus, please point out the nearest refinery so I can grab some copper wire.
I love this chart. Because pasteurization is a result of capitalism, not food safety. The EU doesn’t pasteurize their eggs because their chickens are vaccinated against salmonella. The USA does not vaccinate their chickens because it would hurt Big Agriculture and all their egg pasteurizing factories.
We have to pasteurize milk because of the awful conditions of factory farming - where disease is rampant. Again, this is a result of capitalism. And again, you can see drastic difference in the products in the EU vs the USA. Some EU cheeses are required, by law, to use raw milk. It’s safe there.
I find this to be brilliant.
I’ve been meaning to buy this! Does he have a section on how to handle no one speaking your language?
My biggest issue with this is the flight part - it’s a counterintuitive explanation that doesn’t really explain how to make the flight work. It’s not technically wrong, and if you trace that cross-section you will get a working aerofoil. However, you can’t make the Wright Flyer on that explanation, or in fact any of the early aeroplanes that were constructed with simple fabric stretched between wooden frames.
A far more useful and intuitive explanation is that planes fly by flow-turning, basically the interaction between the aerofoil and the air turns the air in one direction, usually down, which pushes the aerofoil in the other direction, usually up. This also means the air below will end up slower than the air on top, which will create a pressure differential. Either of these methods can completely describe how flight works.
Also, a plane isn’t just two aerofoils attached to a central body. Early planes were at least biplanes, and you need horizontal and vertical stabilisers to have full control. You need flaps that give you pitch, yaw and roll, and you need the centre-of-mass - the point where it balances - to be in front of the centre of pressure. That means you need the stabilisers to be at the back to keep the plane stable like a dart.
This isn’t just a “well akshually”, although it sort of is. If you tried to follow the advice as-written and didn’t know this, there’s a good chance you’d end up on the long list of people killed by their own inventions. Actually, I suspect most of these explanations give you plenty of information to kill yourself with but not really enough to actually make any of them work from first principles.
I feel like you could still give science a head start by giving them rough ideas of how things work, like penicillin and steam power and whatnot
Even if you don’t know all the ins and puts you can give them something to go off of to develop the technology faster
If you couldn’t prove it, things probably wouldn’t go well for you.
Even if you could prove it, it would still go badly in a lot of places in a lot of times.
What do you mean by that? You sound a lot like a witch
Always as been
“Science” ≠ Technology!
If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they’ll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.
Inversely, you don’t even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they’ll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).
Most likely, people would consider you to be another wacko shouting at passersby.
Or even more likely, you drink some stanky water that your body doesn’t know how to deal with and die within the first week.
Show, don’t tell. And get your shots before you go.
Ayyyyy gotta love some quick typing typos lol
This reminds me of Dara O’Briain’s bit about going back in time and thinking you’ll impress the greatest minds in history with your future knowledge but it falls apart quickly.
Just spin a magnet in a copper coil.
BOOM! Electricity.
How do you make a magnet?
Expose molten ferrous metal to … a magnet.
Welp…
Magnets are created by running an electrical current through a material, so there is no need to have a ‘first magnet’. This is happening ‘naturally’ in the earth core, in the sun, and in other stars. (https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/565245/how-was-the-first-magnet-made)
So you need to look around and find some magic rocks.
Natural magnets, called “lodestones”, were found in iron ores (magnetite) from the ancient region of Magnesia, hence the name “Magnet”. (https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/615500/how-did-magnets-first-come-about)
Maybe the sword with the stone was just a big lodestone with a sword sized hole in it. Just throwing that out there.
And one more cool fact…
Based on his discovery of an Olmec artifact (a shaped and grooved magnetic bar) in North America, astronomer John Carlson suggests that lodestone may have been used by the Olmec more than a thousand years prior to the Chinese discovery.[23] Carlson speculates that the Olmecs, for astrological or geomantic purposes, used similar artifacts as a directional device, or to orient their temples, the dwellings of the living, or the interments of the dead.[23] Detailed analysis of the Olmec artifact revealed that the “bar” was composed of hematite with titanium lamellae of Fe2–xTixO3 that accounted for the anomalous remanent magnetism of the artifact.[24] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodestone)
Coil a lead wire around a big full metal cylinder (must be magnetizable) and attach one end to a big ass antenna and the other in the ground, then wait for lightning to strike the antenna. Although the amount of power will probably melt everything.
Or you can just read this: https://sciencing.com/make-super-strong-permanent-magnets-6520830.html
Alright it’s decided, you’re the guy we’re sending back to teach Jesus how to build gaming PCs from scratch.
That’s how a religion is built around RGB.
Fuck that, I’d rather study Nicolas Tesla’s work and go back as a fucking electric wizard and a demi-god, shooting lightning from my fingertips.
With electricity, duh
Fucking magnets
Removed by mod
One of the newest Brandon Sanderson books “The Frugal Wizard’s Guide to Surviving Medieval England” has a similar premise. It’s a novel so not a how-to guide so to speak, but parts of it are an in-world manual on how to survive in a medieval alternate dimension.
Removed by mod
We learn how to generate electricity in Secondary School, it’s pretty simple and fundamental to understanding electromagnetism, and it underpins our whole civilisation’s existence. Surely you’d remember that?
Yeh just gimme a cat fur and a plastic rod. I’ll demonstrate electrostatic on a balloon.
Or just almost touch a TV and your hairs will go there.
Electricity is easy to make though… a couple magnets and some copper wire.
Easy materials to get from your local 1st century hardware store
You can literally mine lodestone and copper. Ancient people have mined those two things since antiquity. Where do you think it comes from now? Fairies?
deleted by creator
Bring a live translation device, and program it with whatever the expected language is. That alone would be magic to them. And you don;t need to go to a copper mine, there were markets for processed copper. Pulling it into wire is just a case of roughly forming it into a cylinder, then pulling that cylinder through successively smaller holes. A local smith could help you with that.
deleted by creator
You can induce voltage on more than just copper you know. Or maybe you don’t know. You probably don’t know.
deleted by creator
Magnets, how do they work?
In the vast and intricate web of human understanding, where knowledge weaves its delicate dance with experience, I find myself positioned, albeit humbly, at a nexus of comprehension. This vantage point, carved out through relentless introspection and a profound engagement with the world, allows me to unravel, elucidate, and perhaps even, in some modest measure, illuminate the topic at hand with a level of profundity that few might grasp.
Turning our gaze to the curious and somewhat perplexing phenomena of temporal voyages, or what is colloquially understood as ‘time travel’, we encounter a host of philosophical and practical quandaries. Within this entangled morass, there arises a lamentable observation: the entities, or perhaps the emissaries, dispatched from the annals of future chronology to our present juncture, don’t always seem to represent the pinnacle of their epoch’s capabilities. The Jungian shadows of the future, one might muse, often obscure the brightest luminaries, leading to a situation where we are not always graced with the presence of the ‘best’ or most optimal representatives of these temporal sojourners. In simpler terms, they aren’t always sending their paragons back in time, but rather, we find ourselves navigating the intricate dance with a mosaic of characters, each embodying a unique facet of their origin’s potentialities.
Not my idea, but sometimes it’s just enough to listen to “crazy” people. They might not know what to do with wire seemingly spinning itself, but you will have much better idea what can be created with it. RIP Terry Pratchett
No problem, just tell them to ask from Baghdad, they should know where it is. :) A jug of wine or vinegar, one electrode of iron, another made of copper, voila… the Baghdad battery.
I have nothing to add to this comment. I just want to make sure everyone knows that “the Baghdad battery” name goes fucking hard.
Any conclusive proof that this was used to produce electricity? Consensus seems to be that it wasn’t.
No conclusive proof. It didn’t have a passthrough for one electrode of the two. It did have remains of acid inside and corrosion on the electrodes. One can speculate whether it was an experimental device, a faulty device or something else entirely (one alchemist trying to replicate another’s secrets and doing it wrong?).
To add insult to the injury, it was lost or stolen during the war in 2003, so more analysis can’t be done until it gets re-discovered. :o
I haven’t heard an alternative hypothesis, though… I try to imagine what else besides electrochemistry would one do with two dissimilar metals in an acid. It ruins the metals, it doesn’t make any known medicine or effective poison, it likely fouls the jug too… for a person to put copper and iron into a jug full of acid, there has to be a reason for doing it…
That all said, an attempted reproduction by Mythbusters, with ten of these jars, using lemon juice as the electrolyte, properly wired in series, did work, producing a voltage of about 4V. And prior to Mythbusters, various other researchers built similar reproductions using different electrolytes, which also produced a voltage. There is evidence to support that if the Baghdad Battery was produced properly, it would have worked as an electric power source.
They would probably kill you thinking you’re into witchcraft or something.
Before or after you cause a pandemic with our modern germs and illness?
I think you’d be more likely to be the one infected
Why?
Because your immune system isn’t used to being constantly bombarded with those pathogens.
Antibiotics are the only thing that keep most modern day people alive. That and sanitation didn’t really exist back then.
IIRC you’d either already have been exposed to the more deadly diseases but have immunity because of widespread exposure, inherited immunity, and being exposed to less dangerous forms that evolved- or in many cases having likely been immunized as a child. As for bacterial infections yea- but people of that time would be at just as much risk. But, they’d be at a lot more risk of viruses from you because they wouldn’t have those immunity factors.
Unlikely. It looks like this would be around the time when magi were about.
deleted by creator
If this concept intrigues you, I recommend watching Dr. Stone.
Master of never used science.
You’d still probably manage to get by offering services as an accountant. Illiteracy was the norm the world over for most of history, good math understanding was even rarer.
But first, you need all the guns (and other modern weaponry) to gun down anyone trying to kill you. Might be useful to make them listen to you as well.
Hopefully they will understand modern day English
This is kinda the premise of Brandon Sanderson’s new book The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook to Surviving Medieval England lol, I recommend it! It’s one of the secret project Kickstarter books so it might not be on regular shelves yet but it should be soon, and the audiobook is out for sure
