How difficult is it to reverse engineer technology?

[Trekker4747]

Here's another one instead. If you handed an IPad 2 to the person who developed the original IBM computer would it even be comprehensible to the original developers?

Other than getting faster and smaller computers on a fundamental level have are not too much different today than they were 30 years ago, IBM developers operating in the 70s likely figured they sooner or later what transistor technology would be capable of they just knew that it wasn't at that point right now. So, yeah, an IBM developer from the 1970s would likely be able to understand a modernday iPad.

However to go more extreme the first iPad or even the first IBM computers would be utter magic to someone living in the 1920s or 30s whose computer knwoledge revolves around machines fucntioning off vacuum tubes and machines that occupy the space of entire rooms to the most basic of tasks right now that are something we take for granted out of a simple pocket calculator.

A person living in 1930 would look at a printed circuit board filled with these strange paths of gold and copper paths, these odd little black boxes, he'd have no clue what was going on with it and wouldn't even know how to even start to re-engineer it or reproduce it. This was the problem in the TNG episode "A Matter of Time" where a 22nd century inventor intends to take 24th century back home to "invent" it. Technology that's two centuries beyond anything he's ever seen, such a concept is ridiculous. A person from 1811 would be at a loss when looking at a modern day version of something he uses everyday. Could he understand how a fully automatic machine gun works that can fire 300 rounds a second when he's used to a simple six-shooter that jams half the time between cocking it?

In my opinion it'd be impossible for someone to comprehend a piece of technology that's more than a decade beyond their years, and while it may be possible for them to figure things out and how it works then they have to get into the world of reproducing it and we could make a valid "chicken and the egg" argument that for a device to built whatever is building it has to be almost as sophisticated. You're not going to reproduce microchips on a machine that's running off vacuum tubes.

 

[Jadzia]

With an electron microscope, and microfabrication, I believe it would be theoretically possible to reverse engineer any device from the future. All things are just arrangements of atoms, and we can see and make things that small now. In engineering terms, I think that was the singularity.

With an electron microscope, we can map a device in it's entirety. We can see the position of every microscopic component, and see the atomic/chemical composition of those components.

It's then just a matter of reproducing those chemical components, and arranging them in the same way as the original, using microfabrication. So we could clone the technology.

We may not understand it initially, but do we know that all technology operates by rules. A device performs a specific function, and that function has to be consistent. Technology wouldn't be reliable if it didn't operate by strict rules.

Being able to produce clones, means we can do experiments, and experiments and scientific analysis will discover the rules upon which it operates. Understanding the device is a short step from there.

 

[Christopher]

A person living in 1930 would look at a printed circuit board filled with these strange paths of gold and copper paths, these odd little black boxes, he'd have no clue what was going on with it and wouldn't even know how to even start to re-engineer it or reproduce it.

First off, I think Jadzia's right -- it's invalid to assume that comparing 1930 to 2010 is a perfect analogy for comparing 2010 to 2090, because there have been paradigm-shifting advances in science and analytical methods since then.

Second, I think you're grossly underestimating the intelligence and ingenuity of past scientists. Just because they lacked certain tools we have, that doesn't mean they were stupid -- after all, you're talking about contemporaries of the people who would invent transistors and microcircuits. Sure, they would've found the devices unfamiliar at first, but they surely could've attached probes to those gold and copper pathways and determined they had electric currents running through them. And once they'd plotted out the circuits that way, they'd be able to observe the flow of electricity through the device and determine which of those little black nubs were resistors, which were capacitors, which were diodes, etc. They wouldn't have had the term "transistor" yet, but the principle of such a device had already been patented in 1925.

You see, that's another thing you're overlooking. Just because a certain technology doesn't go on the market until a certain year, that doesn't mean the theory behind it didn't exist much sooner. Modern microcircuits are based on quantum-mechanical principles that were conceived in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Scientists studying them would recognize that they were practical applications of principles that were already known in theory. And that would give them the first step in figuring out how these components work.

Let's say we came upon a warp drive from an alien race a thousand years ahead of us. It wouldn't be a total mystery to us, because we already know how a warp drive would theoretically work. Theory can easily be centuries ahead of practice. Oh, we're surely missing a lot of details, but we have the foundations, and that's a starting point. This is the power of science -- it isn't random. It's a framework that lets us draw connections, that lets us begin with what we know and extrapolate from it to find new things. Given both the fundamental theory to compute from and a working device to study and test, it would indeed be possible to figure out how the device worked. It might take a while, but actually having a working model in hand would accelerate the process greatly.

 

[farmkid]

Theory can easily be centuries ahead of practice. Oh, we're surely missing a lot of details, but we have the foundations, and that's a starting point. This is the power of science -- it isn't random. It's a framework that lets us draw connections, that lets us begin with what we know and extrapolate from it to find new things. Given both the fundamental theory to compute from and a working device to study and test, it would indeed be possible to figure out how the device worked. It might take a while, but actually having a working model in hand would accelerate the process greatly.

I think this is key. In order to reverse engineer advanced technology, one must have some foundation to understand what's going on, even if they don't understand the basics. I had a thought on this the other day that I think is a good illustration. A light bulb would be impossible to reverse engineer for someone with no understanding of electricity. It's a very simple device, but if one has no concept of electricity, one can't even begin to understand how it works. Furthermore, if one took it apart to study it, the inert gas filling the bulb would be lost without the person noticing and attempts to recreate the bulb would fail.

 

[Christopher]

^Right. That's why you can't make reliable analogies between people in the past and people today. Any technology that uses electricity, optics, molecular chemistry, or a wide range of quantum phenomena will be in the reach of our existing theory if not practice. We even have a theoretical basis for far-future ideas like femtotechnology (subatomic computing) on the small scale or spacetime warping on the large scale. In order for a technology to be as far beyond our grasp as, say, a transistor would be beyond James Watt's grasp, it would have to be based entirely on theories we hadn't even thought of yet, and at this point in our scientific development, that's unlikely. It would pretty much have to be made of atoms and molecules, to employ the four fundamental interactions, and to obey the laws of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and the like. So we would be able to get a handle on it using that knowledge. We don't have the same gaps in our awareness of the basic building blocks of the universe that our ancestors did.

 

[Distorted Humor]

Do not underestimate the ability for scientists to figure out how something works though trial and error. For example, a 1930's scientist if given a Ipad might not be able to figure out all the technology, but it would prove that some of the theories of the time had real uses, and by studying it they would be able to figure out the more visual technology, and thus jump years ahead. Remember, Diodes where developed in 1906. With todays technology and the fact that you have scientific method, if a company has some tech from the future or better yet, the tech plus large sums of reference material, you could figure out how something works.

One of the most profitable things one could do if you did develop a time machine would be to download a large database from patent offices and "invent" new technologies.

 

[Silvercrest]

It also seems to me that the question is different depending if the device is viewed in operation (or at least capable of operating), as opposed to just finding a nonfunctional black box someplace and starting from scratch.

As Robert Maxwell pointed out, screw up the power input to the device and you fry it... but if it still has a functioning battery, you can get a pretty good idea of its power requirements. With the aforementioned iPad, you'll have a better idea whether you can replicate all those little gold wires and black nubs, if you see someone turn it on and try a few things.

Or by "reverse engineer", do we mean "start from zero data, derive purpose and function, and THEN determine whether we can build another one like it"?