World created beyond the imaginary
08
May
The story of Claude Shannon, who worked in a MIT laboratory
of Vannevar Bush and Alain Turing crosses through World War II, while working on secret projects, which were two sides of the same coin, unaware of one another’s project, the idea of passing the language to a human code, the System X that worked Shannon, and the one of Turing that was to decipher the code of the Machine Enigma capture of the German army.
Not being able to talk about his projects, speaking at lunches and gatherings in Gödel’s Incomplete Theorem, and the idea of creating a machine that could encode human thought, he said in a joke, “could be a mundane brain like that of the president of Bell Laboratories”, place of secret projects in development.
Bell Labs began as an AT & departament in Washington and later of independent labo of the project’s development (photo above).
The major obstacles to innovation initiatives stem from the mental blocks caused by unproven beliefs, prejudices and perceptions about the possibilities of technology, which are not only strongly alienating, but are inhibitors of creativity and can condemn processes of poor mental development. In spite of the irony of Shannon and Turing with the president of Bell Laboratories, there developed from the first valves, the first transistor that was awarded a Nobel Prize, the telephone systems in their most diverse versions arriving the dialed line and the use of the network for transmission over the internet, and the optimal fiber system, whose first test was done in Georgia.
Also lines of radio and television handsets, the development of the Linux precursor UNIX system, the first solar cells, several Nobel prizes and famous students passed by.
The challenge of pioneers is never simple, critics are always willing to devalue the human effort of progress, Bell Laboratories and other study centers, such as CERN and Research Institute around the world, Brazil has some of them as INPE in São José dos Campos, are central drivers of human creativity and project the future of man.
