"If I had to pick a major disagreement between the present world and the past, it would be the importance of invisible amounts of mass and energy, be they trace chemicals or transistors. Moreover we tend to care about emergent information content, the patterns in the material, rather than the actual material.
To a typical Victorian that wouldn't be heresy so much as fantastic nonsense. Your great-grandparents' world was populated by people, animals, and human-scale artifacts. Man was more literally the measure of all things. Important things were assumed to be big and obvious, or at least visible to the senses."
"If I had to pick a major disagreement between the present world and the past, it would be the importance of invisible amounts of mass and energy, be they trace chemicals or transistors. Moreover we tend to care about emergent information content, the patterns in the material, rather than the actual material.
To a typical Victorian that wouldn't be heresy so much as fantastic nonsense. Your great-grandparents' world was populated by people, animals, and human-scale artifacts. Man was more literally the measure of all things. Important things were assumed to be big and obvious, or at least visible to the senses."
http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/10/predicting-the-future.html