this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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i think i could explain some things. not everything but some things. especially fundamentals of physics as that's what i'm focusing on.
Even if you could explain these things, could you prove them and provide a practical application that relies on them?
yeah. take the voltaic pile for example. it generates a continuous current. pretty fascinating in itself, but i could also build an electromagnet with it, build a simple electromechanical generator, and power a lightbulb with it. if you give me enough money and time to buy all the ingredients and figure stuff out in detail.
Can you make a lightbulb?
Specifically, a lightbulb that is bright enough to be useful but doesn't burn out so fast that candles aren't more economic / convenient.
Gotta invent glass blowing and vacuum pumps first.
Well we're starting from scratch here so I think we've got to invent the universe first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc
And discover tungsten
Eh, there were other filaments that worked well enough, I think (carbonized string or something, maybe?). It's the vacuum that's the real trick to keeping it from burning out too quick.
building a lightbulb is trivial, building an efficient lightbulb is more difficult. you just take a wire and embed it in glass.
and obviously i would need the assistance of some kind of goldsmith for that. (goldsmith = a smith that is capable of producing fine-grained structures)
also once people see it's possible, somebody else will invest a whole lot of work into making it better until it is better than candles, yes, i think so. especially considering that candles used to be expensive before the modern times.
Is building a lightbulb really trivial? Glass has been around for millennia, but transparent glass wasn't. If you didn't have transparent glass, would you know how to make it?
When you say "embed it in glass" do you mean just wrap glass around a wire so the two are in contact? I don't know what the advantage of that would be. You can get a wire to glow without glass, just pass enough current that it heats up to over 1000C. It would even be visible at about 600C in a completely dark room. If you have the wire in contact with glass you need to keep the temperature below the melting point of glass, which is between about 1400C to 1600C. That probably wouldn't be better than a candle. Also, that "bulb" wouldn't last long because of the difference in thermal expansion between metal and glass.
A typical light bulb has two things: space between the glass and the filament, and either a vacuum or something other than oxygen inside. There are 2 reasons for that. One is to allow the filament to get to a temperature that would melt glass. If there's a space between the two, the filament can get white hot while the glass stays below its melting point. The reason for the argon or vacuum interior is that if you had an oxygen atmosphere the filament would corrode and/or erode quickly. There wouldn't really be any point in building the "bulb" part of the light bulb without also changing the atmosphere inside the bulb. You probably couldn't get argon gas in antiquity. You could probably get a partial vacuum, however.
IMO, the "white hot glowing wire" wouldn't be too difficult if you could build a big enough battery. The "light bulb" would be significantly more challenging.
Well, candles that don't stink at least.
I think oil lamps were more common?
Also expensive.
The history of technology is basically the history of light getting cheaper and cheaper.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-price-of-lighting-has-dropped-over-999-since-1700
You'd also need to invent a power grid to make a lightbulb useful, otherwise it's nothing more than a curiosity.
yeah i know how to build a transformator
Would you know where to find the relatively pure zinc and copper that you'd need for a voltaic pile?
On a serious note, most of physics would just sound like witchcraft to them.
" You know the tides you see are caused by the gravitational pull by the moon "
" What is a gravity?"
" It's a force that's exerted by large bodies on each other "
" So is it like magic?"
"..........."
" What other gods do you believe in?"
Correction: tides not moon. Thank you @gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
now i can upvote it :)
I think the hard part would be finding someone to explain things too, you'd probably have to travel to spread the news or something
Gods, I'd try so hard to figure out how to explain how to make a basic diode⦠Like how do you explain silicon to people who have no reason to believe you and don't know that air is a soup of a bunch of different gasses, and from there doping it with the elements on each side of it?
I'd probably just stick to electromechanics. Any time after the invention of permanent iron magnets I can do a lot of cool stuff.
Because yeah it's not enough to say it. Try explaining the periodic table to Trajan and you're going to sound like the time cube guy. You have to demonstrate the veracity of each step. If anything, the best place to start might be the scientific method.
The scientific method itself would be massively useful. It's amazing how long it took humanity to get there, and how much it changed things. Even in the 1700s astronomy and astrology were basically both considered equally important fields of study. The queen of England had important advisors who took the alignment of celestial bodies into account when deciding policy.
What I think would be the most useful thing to know how to build isn't electromechanics, it's just plain mechanics.
In WWII US warships calculated firing solutions using purely mechanical, analog computers. If you knew how to build a shaft, a gear, a cam and a differential you could do pretty astounding calculations. Even just knowing how to build and use a slide rule would be pretty mind blowing for a lot of people in ancient times. Or you could just be the guy who invented zero.