Einstein's Big Blunder

100 years ago, Albert Einstein published three papers that rocked the world. These papers proved the existence of the atom, introduced the theory of relativity, and described quantum mechanics.
Pretty good debut for a 26 year old scientist, huh?
His equations for relativity indicated that the universe was expanding. This bothered him, because if it was expanding, it must have had a beginning and a beginner. Since neither of these appealed to him, Einstein introduced a 'fudge factor' that ensured a 'steady state' universe,one that had no beginning or end.

But in 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that the furthest galaxies were fleeing away from each other, just as the Big Bang model predicted. So in 1931, Einstein embraced what would later be known as the Big Bang theory, saying, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened." He referred to the 'fudge factor' to achieve a steady-state universe as the biggest blunder of his career.

As I'll explain during the next couple of days, Einstein's theories have been thoroughly proved and verified by experiments and measurements. But there's an even more important implication of Einstein's discovery. Not only does the universe have a beginning, but time itself, our own dimension of cause and effect, began with the Big Bang.

That's right -- time itself does not exist before then. The very line of time begins with that creation event. Matter, energy, time and space were created in an instant by an intelligence outside of space and time.

About this intelligence, Albert Einstein wrote in his book "The World As I See It" that the harmony of natural law "Reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the
systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."

He went on to write, "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-- a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble."

Pretty significant statement, wouldn't you say?



From :
Perry Marshall

Learning-by-doing

Learning-by-doing is a concept of economic theory. It refers to the capability of workers to improve their productivity by regularly repeating the same type of action. The increased productivity is achieved through practice, self-perfection and minor innovations.

The concept of learning-by-doing has been used by Kenneth Arrow in his design of endogenous growth theory to explain effects of innovation and technical change. Robert Lucas, Jr. (1988) adopted the concept to explain increasing returns to embodied human capital. Yang and Borland (1991) have shown learning-by-doing plays a role in the evolution of countries to greater specialisation in production. In both these cases, learning-by-doing and increasing returns provide an engine for long run growth.

Recently, it has become a popular explaining concept in the evolutionary economics and Resource-Based View (RBV) of the firm.

Toyota Production System is known for Kaizen, that is explicitly built upon learning-by-doing effects.

Progress Ratio

Learning by doing is often measured by progress ratios. This number represents the cost of production after cumulative production doubles. Dutton and Thomas (1984) survey various industries and find the ratio to be typically around 80%. Thus, if a good has progress ratio of 80% and costs 100$ to produce after producing 100 units, when cumulative production reaches 200 units, it will cost $80 to produce. Formally, for some commodity, if Cost(t) is cost at time, t, d(t) is the number of doublings of cumulative output of the commodity in time, t, and a is the percent reduction in cost for each doubling of cumulative output (note: 1-a is the progress ratio), then we have Cost(t) = Cost(0)(1-a)^d.