The bouncing ball!

It's the last week of the year and I'm just back from a week-long vacation. I'm yet to get out of the holiday mode - no wonder, I'm blogging at work ;) 2010 has been quite eventful and I have hardly gotten a moment of my own to reflect and articulate. But here's a thought - the bouncing ball!

Ever seen a ball bouncing? Dumb question, right? Everyone has and it's in some sense mundane. And as far as the physics is concerned, we have known it since grade 8, maybe. What makes this mundane process (of the ball bouncing) strikingly interesting though, is the analogy that I'm about to propose.

Let's take a look at a bouncing ball to recollect our 8th grade stuff. In the past, I would have had to use an image to describe what I meant. With the latest technology provided by SimInsights Inc. it is now possible for me show you a simulation instead! SimInsights allows simulations created on their website to be embedded anywhere on the web. This is one level above YouTube! :)

The ball is dropped from a height, it bounces to a smaller height every time, blah-blah-blah. That's all I remember being taught in school. The part I don't clearly recall being mentioned is that each successive bounce takes smaller amount of time! *

Now the beauty of this is that this small ball can help us understand a much bigger picture of things that are relevant to us. Take technology, for example. I might sound a bit from the 'old-school' in the coming parts, but here's the thing - the transistor was perhaps the biggest thing responsible for the technology revolution in the 20th century. Then came mainframes, desktops, laptops, tabs, mobile devices and so on. On the technology application front, it took the Apple's and Microsoft's decades to build great software/hardware and now there are a few-months old start-ups working on maybe one iPhone app and getting several million dollars in funding!

Now, the analogy - let time be time (on a larger scale though) and the height of the bounce be an abstract notion of the 'depth' of the technological impact. See it? The so called depth is reducing with time and there is a smaller and smaller time gap between the generations!

I'll leave the rest open to interpretation but I have a few questions - are we headed towards a degeneration (as in the height of the bounce)? Are we investing human intelligence on solving short-term and shallow problems, rather than the deep long term ones? Will some technology tomorrow pump up the bounce to newer heights again?

final thought - Concern!

* For the sake of the chain of thoughts, this propped up in a mathematical debate I had a few months back. Without digressing too much, I would say the debate was to identify when the ball has technically stopped bouncing - the height of the bounce shall never go to zero, but the sum of all bounce times is bounded!