Timeline for How difficult would it be to reverse engineer a device whose function is based on unknown physics?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
32 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 22, 2022 at 15:49 | answer | added | AI0867 | timeline score: 0 | |
| Nov 19, 2022 at 18:55 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | Clearly it would be much harder if the physics were unknown and two things follow… How certain can you be that the "unknown" constituent makes any useful difference? It might be clear that a pre-Einsteinian physicist would have greatly more trouble analysing a post-Einsteinian artefact and isn't the operative word there "might", not "greatly"? That aside and more relevantly, what's to say the physics in question is unknown and if it was, what's to say it's unknowable? Why do you think even good, let alone the best physicists can't work with what's in front of them? | |
| Nov 17, 2022 at 22:04 | comment | added | Bruce | In a sense that is what we have done when working out quantum mechanics. We had a device, a piece of material that has a given spectrum in response to irradiation, and we worked out how it worked and started to make our own - for example, transistors. | |
| Nov 17, 2022 at 19:24 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | No, never. Reverse engineering depends on engineering. Is that much clear? | |
| Nov 17, 2022 at 17:24 | comment | added | RonJohn | "create some kind of anomaly such as a traversable wormhole". Like in the Star Gate franchise? They seem to have figured it out pretty easily. | |
| Nov 17, 2022 at 7:06 | answer | added | WorkaroundNewbie | timeline score: 0 | |
| Nov 17, 2022 at 6:38 | comment | added | Victor Stafusa | Imagine some people from the stone age, even those who are considered the most clever, smart and wise between their people, trying to understand how the heck a smartphone works. | |
| Nov 17, 2022 at 5:09 | answer | added | Yakk | timeline score: 7 | |
| S Nov 16, 2022 at 23:37 | vote | accept | TehKaoZ | ||
| Nov 16, 2022 at 23:04 | comment | added | keshlam | Popular thought exercise in engineering schools: Suppose a recent fighter jet fell back in time a century or two. What would they learn from it? The stock answer used to be "how to make high-quality resistors; the rest would be beyond the available analysis tools." These days, with surface mount components that are barely recognizable as components and too small to examine without a good microscope, even that might be doubtful. I'm leaning toward demanding you defend anything they are able to learn. | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 21:45 | comment | added | Juraj | You might be interested in this paper: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/… | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 18:04 | answer | added | JBH | timeline score: 49 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 16:01 | comment | added | Jedediah | How delicate are the components? If the original device is disassembled and reassembled (by someone who doesn't understand it), will it still work? Is there more than one of the device? (That is, if the scientists and engineers wanted to slice one up to look for circuitry, or to analyze the materials, etc - would there be a working example left?) | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 15:31 | answer | added | John O | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 14:34 | comment | added | Daniel Darabos | We can't even reverse engineer many objects that don't use fictional physics. E.g. mosquitoes. We can't explain in full detail how it works, and we couldn't build one. | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 14:32 | answer | added | Negdo | timeline score: 2 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 13:47 | answer | added | Austin Hemmelgarn | timeline score: 17 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 13:03 | comment | added | TehKaoZ | sphennings, I could always hand-wave the detail, but I wanted to know that, if from an engineering standpoint, is it required to fully understand everything about what a device does in order to duplicate it. This is why I provided a real world example. I am not an engineer, so I wanted to know if it possible from a technical standpoint to reverse engineer something without fully understanding how its end-function is accomplished. | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 12:52 | vote | accept | TehKaoZ | ||
| S Nov 16, 2022 at 23:37 | |||||
| Nov 16, 2022 at 12:47 | comment | added | TehKaoZ | Matthieu M. I debated how to phrase the question, but based on the standard definition of reverse engineering on Webster, "to disassemble and examine or analyze in detail (a product or device) to discover the concepts involved in manufacture usually in order to produce something similar" , replicating and reverse engineering are the same here. | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 11:32 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | There is a significant discrepancy between title and body. Reverse-engineering a device implies, to me, understanding how that device works or at least how to operate it. Replicating a device, however, may or may not require any such understanding. Could you please clarify exactly what you want: Understanding, Operating, or Replicating? | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 11:26 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Nov 16, 2022 at 11:21 | answer | added | Kamitergh | timeline score: 2 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 9:17 | answer | added | Daron | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 8:29 | answer | added | Barbaud Julien | timeline score: 34 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 7:44 | answer | added | Sanfera | timeline score: 7 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 5:19 | review | Close votes | |||
| Nov 23, 2022 at 19:50 | |||||
| Nov 16, 2022 at 4:57 | comment | added | sphennings | This seems like something that's more of a story detail than any fact of your world. Perhaps the engineering team struggles for years but never gets anywhere, perhaps they solve it in the nick of time to save humanity. Regardless of how the story plays out the grit and tenacity of the characters will have as much of an impact as anything else. It's a cool story to write but we're not here to write stories for you. | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 4:53 | answer | added | DKNguyen | timeline score: 6 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 3:53 | answer | added | L.Dutch♦ | timeline score: 4 | |
| Nov 16, 2022 at 3:42 | history | edited | L.Dutch♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
edited title
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| Nov 16, 2022 at 3:25 | history | asked | TehKaoZ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |