Professor Jim Al-Khalili Unravels Computer Science's Past |Doc of the Day

The history of computer science.
Professor Jim Al-Khalili unwraps the evolutionary histories responsible for the modern human condition, as currently represented by our sophistication in energy manipulation and information technology.
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[@joepearcemstogo]

I literally go to sleep every night to his documentaries. Sounds insane but I’ve seen each one about 600 times

[@blacksheepnfld1322]

So, it's not just me who watches these documentaries over and over and over etc....

[@winstonmaraj8029]

I Listen to him on the BBC's Life Scientific all the time.

[@freddyrosenberg9288]

These documentaries are incredible. I never re-watch anything, but these... I make an exception for these.

[@falcychead8198]

Not insane at all; though in my case, being "old school," it was Sagan's _Cosmos_ that was my lullaby.

[@Artie_D]

@@winstonmaraj8029me too

[@DJ-KAOS]

Jim's a great guy and his science videos are some of my favourite. The content is utterly fascinating and it's presented in a way that allows ordinary people like myself to understand it. It's just such a MASSIVE SHAME that some sections of his videos are often spoiled by the noisy backing tracks that completely drown out the narrating 😕 If you enjoy his videos as much as I do, I recommend you watch the one about the history of electricity. I promise you will not be disappointed 😉

[@jameskennethflynn]

😊

[@martine4590]

I totally agree - that noise is spoiling the videos and the subject

[@SparkyLabs]

content? I struggle to keep engaged it goes so slow.

[@trudyandgeorge]

Thank you for the recommendation. These are just top tier productions. And I completely agree about the sound. I must be getting older because I often feel this way. Yesterday it was the commercial radio blaring away while I was sat in the dentist's waiting room. God forbid we be left to our own thoughts for a single second 😅🔫

[@sgcollins]

This is part two of the 'Order and Disorder' series, the 'story of information'. Directed by Nic Stacey, music by Alex Menzies.

[@parrotraiser6541]

How could you give a history of computing without mentioning Boole (symbolic logc) and Babbage, (the Analytical Engine)?

[@JohannBaritono]

Valid point

[@pyb.5672]

Yeah how come they weren’t able to squeeze the history of the hundreds of people who had a direct impact in the evolution of information into a 1 hour program? Bunch of idiots.

[@richardhedd3080]

I wish I had a teacher like Professor Jim Al-Khalili when I was younger. I might have learned something.

[@PaulThatcher-iu5in]

Not to diminish Jim's achievements, but he and I had the same Physics teacher at Priory School, Portsmouth, then a Comprehensive, 40-odd years ago - and to its credit, that school and its teachers fostered that spark of curiosity about science in many of us. Me, I'm a linguist and language teacher, but never lost that love of Physics, so that now, all these years later, I'm still on the road of discovery...

[@techcafe0]

I sometimes find the background audio tracks to be way too loud, especially compared to the voice narration, making it difficult to follow along. Please keep this in mind for your viewers, who'd like to HEAR what's being said, and not so much noisy background distractions. Thank you.

[@katarinajanoskova]

I don't think they have much say about this. Many of these are not exactly allowed to be shown on youtube. If they had the original soundmix, I'm sure it would sound perfect.

[@RWBHere]

@@katarinajanoskova No, trust me; I've heard the same racket on almost every recent UK and US TV broadcast which can be received from originating broadcasters in Britain. An additional annoyance is a continuity announcer shrinking the closing titles which contain useful information, whilst talking over what might be the only piece of desired music in a programme. For me, the result of the foreground music and noises is a big turn-off. I rarely watch TV nowadays, other than live events, because of the constant and stressful noise bombardment which is inflicted upon viewers. And there's no way for viewers to turn it off so that they can hear what is being said. Anyone who has tinnitus or another hearing difficulty stands little chance of learning from anything which is being said because of the often pointless 'music' and other noises which have been added to the broadcasts.

[@chaueter1041]

That’s interesting, maybe it’s my ADHD, but I love the background music. It actually enables me to focus more on the words and simultaneously let my imagination fixate.

[@rudihoffman2817]

The way that theoretical math enables all sorts of world changing tech is WAY cool!

[@petergreen5337]

Thank you very much. Another beautiful lesson and documentary.

[@andersonfernandes7753]

I´m from Brazil and i dont talk english, i understand a little about this language, but i put the legends to portuguese. This is video is amazing, this history and the things talked about in this video help me alot to understand this field. I´m a software engineer student, and i think this is very good to me and my learn to understand more of technology. THANK YOU Doc of the Day!!! Sorry about the wrong write, i´m practicing haha...

[@harikrishna69]

You are doing very well!

[@RWBHere]

This video is about information, not computer science. They are two almost completely different subjects,

[@AWBepi]

I love the information but the soundtrack is maddening.

[@roytaylor2161]

Jim Al-Khalili makes a basic error of omission by missing out the music produced by rotating drums invented at latest by 1770 in Switzerland but possibly earlier, and which almost certainly gave rise to the development of punch cards. And then, to quote Science Direct: The Babbage Analytical Engine, 1833, is considered the first steam-powered computer. Charles Babbage is considered by many to be the 'Father of the Computer' and his assistant, Lady Ada Lovelace, the 'First Computer Programmer' because she wrote mathematics problems for Babbage's machines. A conceptually much larger leap than Morse Code as the intended design allowed for the computation of 1,000 stored numbers with up to 50 digits, something not achieved for another century! How were these most basic facts missed out?

[@robkeeleycomposer]

I totally agree - I guess, to be fair, there would be the usual time constraints, and I suppose there are out there quite a few docs about Ada and Babbage: it's still a damn good programme I think - I sure learned a lot.

[@Uvisir]

and what about george boole?

[@bittertruth6575]

He never actually built it. The one's you see in the museums etc were built in the 1990's to honour his 200th birthday. Also Ada alludes to Jacquards punchcards when she envisaged the 'programs' for the analytical engine: "In this, which we may call the neutral or zero state of the engine, it is ready to receive at any moment, by means of cards constituting a portion of its mechanism (and applied on the principle of those used in the Jacquard-loom), the impress of whatever special function we may desire to develope or to tabulate. These cards contain within themselves (in a manner explained in the Memoir itself, pages 677 and 678) the law of development of the particular function that may be under consideration, and they compel the mechanism to act accordingly in a certain corresponding order." (Scientific Memoirs/3/Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq./Notes by the Translator, Augusta Ada Lovelace) Also look into the Banu Musa brothers (9th century) for "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument". It was a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century."

[@ryangierman4421]

The flaw of the demon on the box is that no one asked where the energy comes from to open and close the door between the boxes. Also, for the demon to observe and act on on sorting atoms would be work and work absolutely requires energy to be expelled even if by the supernatural

[@isatousarr7044]

What specific breakthroughs or key figures in the history of computer science do you think have had the most significant impact on modern technology?

[@thehowlingterror]

BBC documentaries...best in the world.

[@firstnamelastname307]

Note that tam tam beats in Africa was incremental fast long distance sound carrier way to exchange information before electricity. I guess, for ages before even ....

[@OConnorCarr-b7l]

Smith Margaret Garcia Elizabeth Hernandez Brian

[@streglof]

Back from when the BBC actually made decent documentaries

[@BradleyLayton]

I thought some of this content was new...

[@lockedoutofaccount]

It's such a shame Alan Turning died so young what a genius he was.

[@SuperGreatSphinx]

Thanatos

[@FARDEEN.MUSTAFA]

It was a great documentary about Classical information of Classical Algorithms in Classical World. Professor Jim Al Khalili is a great Physicist. It's great to learn Quantum Physics from Great Minds. My favorite Quantum Information are Dark Energy's 120 0s and one 1s, Voyager 1's 32 0s and 1s which didn't make sense for data scientists and engineers. I love tricky information. I like 0s and 1s. How beautifully these 0s and 1s indicate black and white era of modern science and technology. If computer scientists follow James Clerk Maxwell method of devil, definitely the most beautiful and Quantum Particles of Cosmos become Dark Matter and Dark Energy. I didn't know about his devil method. That's why some computer scientists and engineers blame Quantum Mechanics for Classical calculations and measurements of Geometry and Algebra.

[@trudyandgeorge]

It sounds like you would enjoy Stephen Wolfram's latest work on the potentially computational nature of physics. Specifically the idea he has dubbed 'computational irreducible complexity'; these classical bits, black and white as they are, produce behaviour that is fundamentally impossible to predict. Not simply difficult like the chaotic nature of some systems, but impossible.

[@TheSillybilly15]

The amazing thing was how did he know where to punch the holes in order to produce the self portrait

[@dundundun4242]

The inventor of modern writing was Barney rubble

[@hypercomms2001]

One man who deserved recognition is John Von Neumann, whose stored program control Computer architecture we still used today. He also had a lot to do with the development of the atomic hydrogen bombs.

[@DickzLand]

What’s most interesting is what comes next. Taking all that information and computing the probability of the next “word”. Large language models, or GAI does simply that and we are surprised at the result, the “appearance” of intelegence.

[@richarddeese1991]

Thanks. Unless we invoke magic, the partition takes energy to open & close. tavi.

[@mellertid]

Yes! But what I personally don't understand is how that energy cannot theoretically be smaller than the gain from the sorting of the molecules. I believe it, but I don't get it.

[@PacoOtis]

For you, Jim, this very weak! Very!

[@paulandrews__]

And let’s please not forget the barbaric way Alan Turing was treated by prim and proper, homophobic Great Britain, leading to his suicide. So, as much as I celebrate the captured word in clay tablets, there is a special group of those tablets and papyruses, and their creators, who have a special place reserved in hell.

[@manifold1476]

"papyruses?" ------> papyri

[@BobBob-tr9bc]

40 odd years ago i worked in an engineering firm they had punch card programmed lathes.

[@kevg3563]

Interesting video. However, a small mention about teleportation of actual physical objects would have been good. For example.... You scan a drinking cup using a modern 3D scanner, then send the data over the internet to someone the other side of the world. The receiver then uses the data to recreate an exact physical copy of the cup using a 3D printer. When you think about it, it is a form of teleportation.

[@julianjames1971]

Not really its just making a copy. The original hasn't moved.

[@PaulThatcher-iu5in]

NOT teleportation: instead of Capt Kirk and Lt Uhura zipping about the galaxy, there would be hundreds of copies of them all over the place - a solution I would be in favour of, as multiple William Shatners would have crashed Bezos' 'Blue Origin', while multiple Nichelle Nichols would have meant I might have actually met my crush from when I was 12 years old...

[@zeitfieldunite4488]

Jim does a great job explaining with clarity at a certain speed for all to understand. Overall a great documentary, obviously from a British perspective gives Alan Turing praise although there are many poineers who contributed to computer science, a bit of diplomacy. Like Michio Kaku the japanese lecturer from New York who glorifies Albert Einstein, a patriotic path

[@rstidman]

it was great, but I could have done without the masturbating demon. just kidding, the masturbating demon was cool too.

[@lunainezdelamancha3368]

When I was a child we used to write letters and sent telegrams. I loved the etiquette for personal, business, and legal correspondence. Then telephones became affordable and very popular. People forgot how to write a simple memo. A few decades later we were using cell phones and laptops. We went back to writing.....no etiquette or grammar rules. All these changes in a very short period of time if I consider I'm in my 50s'.... 😮mind blowing.

[@whirledpeas3477]

An atheist born in Iraq is great enough. But a man born in Iraq named Jim is awesome. I love this guy.

[@jonathanharvey2156]

Although his ACTUAL name is Jamal

[@JoeyCbr]

and more obvious it would take energy to open and close the partition

[@doilyhead]

The newly developed animations of RNA transcription provided by the newest microscopes is are mind boggling examples of "natural computation".

[@blackthorne-rose]

This video is completely mis-titled. It is the history of the understanding and use of information. Very little is said (if anything) about computer science at all... except the theoretical beginnings of digital information storage. Also I still find the demon-box analogy completely absurd. The expenditure of energy happens with both the processing of thought, whether accumulating OR deleting information, AND the manipulation of the box. It's like using an inapt analogy to describe the mechanics of an actual principle. BUT... once some genius uses it, and a buncha academic types then (and therefore) conclude that a vaguely applicable analogy is pure gold... far be it from the rest of us to question THEM!!!! lol!!!!

[@Pawtooler]

It occurred to somebody... PERHAPS ACCEDENTIALLY... What only the British think? Give the racism a rest or we'll help the Irish have their way with you.

[@joepearcemstogo]

Jim is #1 in my book!

[@blackthorne-rose]

This "demon box" is complete nonsense. Mr. demon does NOT simply use information. He uses ENERGY to open and close the hole between the two sides of the box. I don't see what's so amazing about that at ALL....

[@susanwangari3753]

Thanks for giving the best explanation of the bing bang theory, almost completed the How many information or rhythm can be into one drop of rain and we still can't catch it?Mix of sugar from up to the salt on earth.🤷🏾‍♀️🎯💯👍🏾👏🏾🥁

[@rudihoffman2817]

My goodness, this is amazing education. Having read many books on human progress and science, I thought this would be redundant. But the way Jim K related this info is just delightful!

[@TerrydanielDavidson]

I feel privileged to have met Jim A-K several times as my father worked at Surrey University as a project manager with their data systems. And I can say with confidence that he's as engaging in person as he is in his videos. He really is a national treasure.

[@davidkantor7978]

Maxwell’s Demon is not going to work. 1: how will it know when a fast-moving molecule is approaching? Shine light on it? That would knock it off course. 2: when the demon opens the door to let a fast-moving molecule go from right to left, he needs to do that at a moment when there is not a molecule on the left side, that would pass through to the right. As the left side gets hotter, there are more molecules there, moving faster. You’re not going to find a moment when there isn’t such a molecule on the left - at the same moment that a molecule on the right is heading toward the door. As the left side gets hotter, the demon will need to wait longer and longer for the right moment to open the door. The wait time could grow without a limit; I like to say that it will eventually be a thousand years between when those moments occur. It’s similar to trying to make a left turn onto a busy two-way street. (Right turn for those in England.) This is also a microscopic view of what is meant by Pressure.

[@elfootman]

I really enjoy Al-Khalili's documentaries, I like their style

[@ferroalloys594]

Computer Science has very little, if anything, to do with physical computing machines...

[@exe.m1dn1ght]

21:57 this clicked for me ! superb documentary !

[@vcom2327]

I don't need to watch this. I've lived the history of Computer Science. Not terribly exciting.

[@Pasha8204]

Need 4k

[@มดแดง-ฃ3ข]

คือหลักการนี้มีคนคิดขึ้นมาพร้อมกับเครื่องยนต์ไอพ่นเครื่องแรกในโลกตั้งแต่สมัยสงครามโลกครั้งที่ 2แต่เนื่องด้วยเยอรมันขาดแคลนทรัพยากร ก็มาเลยพัฒนาไม่ต่อเนื่อง

[@oldfatbastad6053]

i never rget bored with a JaK documentary 😃

[@lawrencebishton9071]

use you all y. starts carry on of i.t the carry off is ingledale from the adventures of post ann pat you know cat the red van black white 🤣

[@georgen9755]

high paying jobs are simply impossible despite innovation and technology change no one is willing to admit that jobs simply don't exist jessy

[@afreezaphorogiancossack2194]

That's not Prof. El Khalili on the thumbnail! Where is he? What did you do with him!

[@rudihoffman2817]

Anyone else read James Gliecks book “information”?

[@higgsboson2280]

I think this my favourite documentary ever.

[@joetoocool]

Why didn’t Jim mention the Babbage Analytic Engine and Ada Lovelace who wrote programs for it? Or did I miss it? They lived in the 1800’s, long before Turing. There’s even a programming language named after Ada. They should have gotten a mention. In my mind, this is a big miss by Jim. I hope someone can explain why they were omitted. He must have known about Babbage’s work.

[@tearlelee34]

I thought information could not be lost according to Dr. Kip Thorne.

[@kyzercube]

@ 34:26 THEY TOOK HER JOB!!!! Dayum, this Dr. Doron Swade's even boasting about it. That's messed up 🤣

[@Wizthings]

Surely, It was Professor George Boole's work that inspired Claud Shannon's paper. Boole was aware that his algebra could be utilised in machines. Boole stated he didn't have the skill or inclination to make these machines.

[@danielmorris2319]

Fascinated by what the ancient mesopotamians felt about their new writing techniques. I’m wondering if it’s the earliest known usage of the phrase “These kids and their tablets” Possibly more remarkable is that their words for eye, dear and idea were all phonetically identical to modern English.

[@KonradSchK]

The story of infomation. Not computer science?

[@Heni930]

You are right, I think this is a fake channel and probably the uploading person gave it the title.

[@doilyhead]

Apparently the connection isn't obvious to some people.

[@victorswenson5026]

these guys sure like Turing....seems like a lot of bologna to me

[@sam7417]

So "Computers" were mainly wonen in the old world? Say no more

[@mellertid]

The computers of 1936 used pen and paper but also adding machines (mechanical calculators).

[@dubsar]

4:47 "One of the few people who can still read them". As if Dr. Finkel was born over four thousand years ago.

[@KarldorisLambley]

interesting 5 minutes of science. shame it took an hour to convey it.

[@tonypap1]

I love these documentaries and Jim is one of THE very best. But I do wish the writers would think of something different to say at the beginning of these documentaries other than...."this is the story of......"

[@wstanley1404]

What about the antikythera mechanism?

[@tricky778]

From about 6:00 or maybe earlier... And I thought Roy Walker invented Catchphrase.

[@deep-insight]

Very insightful again 👍 It intrigues to think that destroying information increases entropy… I would have wondered creating and maintaining would also increase the entropy elsewhere in the universe. Nonetheless, it makes literal sense that deleting info will increase entropy, as it is hard to change habits as quite literally one’s world seems to go in a disarray while changing habits 😉

[@vordag]

where does the information come from?

[@deviantikon]

Great video! Very moving.

[@rudihoffman2817]

OMG…I live the maxwells demon graphics!

[@rudihoffman2817]

Oops ,live equals Love here…but you probably intuited this.

[@honeybee-fp6bx]

Jim is comparable to carl sagan

[@jrodriguezquiros]

This is like Connections 2.0

[@summerbeeme]

amazing one, thx a lot!

[@pd.dataframe2833]

what about charles babbage

[@cinemaipswich4636]

Professor Irving Finkel is lousy at telling jokes, but he is a powerhouse of knowledge about how we first learned how to write. Along the way, we created a class of students that copied words to clay tablets and papryus, so that their teachers could grade them. Thereby those old stories of renown were oft repeated, rather than just said. Writing is the greatest invention of humankind. Alan Turing had great respect for Jacquard and his invention.

[@duckbizniz663]

I do not know what he is talking about, but he seems to be very confident about what he is saying. If Lyon France could make such beautiful silk patterned fabric so easily by using punched hole in thick paper then France should have dominated the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the first-half of the 19th century. But it was England who dominated industrial manufacturing beginning in the 1830s with mechanized looms making blank pattern cotton fabrics. But I do remember attending undergraduate college and those math majors with their stacks of fortran cards. Those early computers read the fortran cards and executed their commands. So I am confused.

[@BradleyLayton]

The Fortran cards calculated standard deviations, growth trends, anything a Turing Machine could compute. The looms were single-purpose "fabric-pattern computers."

[@ivancota9762]

great. but why do you always skip Charles Babbage?

[@sandunranasinghe5356]

Great explanation

[@robertbarras8891]

24000 punch cards ! How long did that take?

[@JCKnuckles]

I love Prof. Jim ❤ he is brilliant and so ealSy to listen too!😮

[@jota55581]

He definatley has something of Alexi Sayle

[@sigbjrn-kf9ji]

The Atom, and, the secret life of caos, is also great.

[@vangelosecondomarco7549]

La semplice divina Dicotomia dell'Universo.

[@ZEROmg13]

soooooooooo what were cavemen doing with their paintings???

[@MichaelKingsfordGray]

Information cannot exist without an energy GRADIENT! It is the derivative of energy.

[@BradleyLayton]

Information is more likely a multidimensional tensor.

[@TSulemanW]

Nicely explain. the word computer is to compute ,

[@kyzercube]

@ 44:15 _" In this paper Shannon did something absolutely incredible. He took the vague, mysterious concept of information and managed to pen it down. Now he didn't do this using some cleverly worded philosophical definition. He actually found a way to measure the information contained in a message. "_ @ 44:37 _" Amazingly, Shannon realized that the quantity of information had nothing to do with its' meaning. Instead he showed it was related soley to how unusual the message was. "_ There is something fundamentally wrong with these claims. They're contradictory to one another. Also, fundamental constants and the mere concept of Occam's Razor fly in the face of it. " Unusual "... what a contrivance.

[@manifold1476]

Nice try. - - - Except that he (Shannon) " took the vague, mysterious concept of information and managed to - (WHAT???!!! "PEN" it down??? ------ *NO WAY* ) He managed to "PIN" it down. *WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR EARS* ???!!!

[@kyzercube]

@@manifold1476 Nah, he said " penned ". Hence Jim holding up the paper he wrote and talking about it as he said " penned it down ". I forgot the " ed ". My apologies. But it is interesting you make a counter argument that has nothing to do with what I was pointing out. Completely adjacent to anything I was talking about, hence why you could replace " penned " with " pinned " into the quote and it would not change the validity of my argument one bit. WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR BRAIN!!!!????

[@BradleyLayton]

Shannon always made the disclaimer that his theories as expressed mathematically, did not attempt to quantify meaning, but rather signal fidelity.

[@merouchecharaf7177]

dans lespace cesr sa

[@tonyblayney126]

I love jims programs, he could read a shopping list and make it interesting.

[@nikolettavitsaras1646]

Hahaha!

[@merouchecharaf7177]

enigma

[@stelianbalan6838]

What you can say about Mahabharatta and Vedas ?

[@homomorphic]

To be clear. Turing was not the originator of the idea of separation between instructions and data. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace absolutely understood the difference between instructions and data. Not saying Babbage or Lovelace are the origin of the thought either, I don't know who is, but whomever it was they absolutely predated Turing.

[@BradleyLayton]

Turing formalized the mathematics.

[@homomorphic]

@@BradleyLayton wrt to processors, Turing distilled the information theory. Babbage, for example, was building an actual machine and wasn't too concerned with the abstract nature of information theory, but he certainly understood the concept of instructions as beimg distinct from data. It was Von Neumann who later proposed that instructions and data (although fundamentally different in the information model) can be stored in the same physical cells.

[@BradleyLayton]

@@homomorphic , agree.😀

[@maxime9636]

Thank U so much Mr JIM💓💓💓👍👍👍

[@saedhama4230]

Amazing documentary

[@hrk7215]

Great. Thank you.

[@mraider_]

Does that mean that by creating order we can create energy?

[@mellertid]

Creating order takes energy - no such thing as a free lunch 😊

[@aaradhyashining9524]

In hindi

[@tokurahmojeed2110]

Nice one.