The ships sailing silently through the black hole of world trade

Ever since the first invisible electronic phenomena were pressed into service as radio waves, inventors have tried to render them visible. For the best part of a century there were only two ways of doing this. The first (still with us) was by creative imagination, as is to be seen in the cartoonists' method of adding text to a bolt of lightning coming out of a radio speaker, for example. The second, the analogue method, works by translating the signal into the analogous movement of ...