If glass had not appeared in the world

If there were a future work on the history of the last thousand years, written not by humans but by artificial intelligence, how would it unfold? It's not hard to imagine a historical work in which the events that we humans consider pivotal: the fall of the Roman Empire, the discovery of America, the signing of the Magna Carta in England ...... might be mere footnotes.

　　For AI historians, it was the 18th century, when toy robots began to play chess in style; the birth of the punch card computer, inspired by the Jacquard loom, that was the watershed moment in AI history.

　　Of course, the book we are discussing, "How We Got Here," was not written by an AI historian. But it is written in such a way that it gives us an interesting perspective on a world that people usually take for granted.

　　If a light bulb were to write the history of the past few hundred years, it would emphasize how mankind went to great lengths to fight the darkness, and how, thanks to some accidental invention, the world was transformed by light, which has since broken the long history of mankind going to sleep at night, and even made night the most colorful period of life.

　　If you let the refrigerator to write a history, it will emphasize: how they have changed the human diet for thousands of years; how to help humans fight some once fatal diseases; then they also promote the birth of air conditioning, so that humans began to enjoy cinemas, shopping centers and other facilities; can also fight the heat, so that many places on earth would not be suitable for living, there are more and more residents, the scale of this wave of immigrants, enough to shock the human forefathers a hundred years ago.

　　The author of this book is Steven Johnson, an American media theorist and science popularizer. In Johnson's view, from tap water, glasses and books, to light bulbs, videotapes and smartphones, the stories told can be quite surprising if human history is viewed through the lens of what has become an indispensable part of everyday life.

　　Take glass, for example.

　　About 26 million years ago, on the eastern edge of the Sahara Desert, there was a sudden heat of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius (some speculate that it was due to an asteroid that exploded over the desert), causing a large area of sand to melt. When they cooled, the silica particles contained in the sand fused together and formed a special crystal that quietly covered the desert.

　　After another long time, to about 10,000 years ago, people passing through the area picked up these somewhat yellowed and blurred, but shiny, natural glass. After a few rounds in the market, they were made into decorative objects for the nobility, such as the sacred beetle brooch found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

　　Then in 1204, when Constantinople fell, a group of glassmakers strayed to Venice, turning Murano into the world's most famous glass island. After repeated experiments with materials containing different chemical compositions, Angelo Barovia, a merchant on the island, discovered that by burning seaweed to ash and adding it to the glass solution, the potassium oxide and manganese rich in it would make the final glass formed pure and clear, just like crystal.

　　From then on, the appearance of the world changed in front of human beings.

　　In the 13th century, the world's first pair of glasses was created, allowing nearsighted and presbyopic eyes to see clearly and to read words in the dimness. Together with the mass printing later achieved by the Gutenberg printing press, books and reading became popular. Religion and knowledge, no longer the privilege of the few, began to become part of the lives of ordinary people and changed the course of human civilization.

　　The advent of the lens, in turn, led to the optical revolution, and in 1590, a father and son pair of Dutch opticians invented the microscope by laminating two lenses. From then on, mankind saw the microscopic world, the concept of cells, bacteria and viruses began to be born, and the fields of medicine and biology thus had a major breakthrough. The invention of vaccines and antibiotics, the extension of life expectancy of modern man, all thanks to this.

　　And the person who pointed the lens into the distance invented the telescope. 1610, a scholar named Galileo, with the help of this amazing device, discovered the secrets of the universe, confirmed the heliocentric theory, creating modern science, but also had a great impact on the world view of mankind.

　　With the help of this glass products, humans not only see things beyond the scope of vision, but also be able to preserve it, and even spread it: in the 19th century, photographers learned to record the world's scenes through the focus of the lens on photographic paper; in the 20th century, someone coated the glass with a layer of phosphor, to which the emission of electrons, it formed the later television images.

　　Today, the smartphone that we do not leave our hands every day is also another derivative of glass. And the network that provides support behind the world of information cannot be separated from another kind of glass. in 1887, Charles Vernon Boyce, on a whim, fixed a glass solution to a stone bow and fired it, pulling out a glass line 90 feet long. Even better, the glass fiber was actually exceptionally strong, comparable to a steel cord of the same gauge. It has since been used to make all sorts of things: insulation devices, clothing, yachts, surfboards ......

　　Nearly a century later, scientists at Bell Labs discovered that glass fibers had an even better use: a fiber optic, thinner than a hair, could replace millions of copper wires of enormous size and instantly transmit information of nearly unlimited capacity. Since then, the Internet and big data all over the world.

　　So, without the discovery of glass, you may not even read this article. If you say, no cell phone to read the article, no computer to write the manuscript, we can go back to the printing era, using paper and pencil to write and send book reviews ah. But without fiber optics and the Internet, this book, published in 2014 in another hemisphere, might not have been introduced to China for 10 years, and we would have no way to know of its existence. Today's global flattening of information and exponential growth of the knowledge base is due to the yellowing pile of crystals that people found in the desert 26 million years ago.

　　Many trivial details of daily life, viewed from a different perspective of time and space, may be full of evocative and surprising things. From ancient times to the information age, everything in human civilization has taken a hundred turns, seemingly born of both chance and implied necessity. In this way, why don't we interpret all our current anxieties and confusions in a different way and treat them in a more open and discerning way?