Critical Focus | My, How Things Change
THE MICROSCOPE
2024, Volume 71:1, pp. 30–42
DOI
https://doi.org/10.59082/LIOA1075
AUTHOR
Brian J. Ford
EXCERPT
We are deluged with claims that AI is a revolution, but greater upheavals have created our modern world. We should cherish past acccomplishments — and kick that bucket list. To celebrate the 50th article of Critical Focus, here is my latest idea: the negative birthday. Take your age and deduct that from the year when you were born, then you can see just how much science (and society) have changed in a lifetime. The average reader of The Microscope is about 38, born in 1986. Deduct their age from that date and we go back to 1948. The Second World War had recently ended, telephones had operators, hardly anybody had a television (there were only 146,000,000 in the entire U.S.) and McDonald’s was founded only eight years earlier. And 38 is young.