[HN Gopher] The most important scientific problems have yet to b...
___________________________________________________________________
The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
Author : anarbadalov
Score : 133 points
Date : 2020-01-08 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| [deleted]
| yters wrote:
| Most of reality is inexplicable according to modern science. So,
| there are probably vast quantities of discoveries to still be
| made.
| scottlocklin wrote:
| One of the great Spanish thinkers, criminally underrated in Anglo
| countries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal
| enriquto wrote:
| I'd rather say he's criminally underrated in Spain.
|
| It is definitely easier to hear casually about Ramon y Cajal in
| "anglo countries" than in Spain. For example, I have spent my
| childhood in the spanish state, and I first heard about Ramon y
| Cajal during the first conference that I attended, in
| Switzerland, from a lovely presentation by an English
| professor.
|
| One of the dramatically few spanish first-rate scientists, and
| he's not a household name. Very, very sad state of affairs.
| scottlocklin wrote:
| I learned about him talking to a Spanish plumber while eating
| a bocadillo.
| iagovar wrote:
| I'd say he's pretty well known in Spain. I knew about him
| from school, so maybe your school didn't teach you about him
| or you didn't pay attention.
|
| I studied first in Madrid and later in Galicia.
| yiyus wrote:
| I do not know what you are talking about. We study Ramon y
| Cajal in school, the most important grants in Spain are named
| after him, there is a Ramon y Cajal square or street in every
| city... Even the most ignorant Spaniard knows him and will
| tell you that he is our most respected scientist from all
| time.
|
| Science, in general, is criminally underrated in Spain, but
| Ramon y Cajal is literally the household name.
| buboard wrote:
| He s known as the father of Neuroscience, i don't think he s
| underrated
| luhn wrote:
| (1897)
|
| An excerpt from _Advice for a Young Investigator_.
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/437689.Advice_for_a_Youn...
| breck wrote:
| Impressive how timeless this is.
|
| I would say the great problem of science right now is integrating
| all of the knowledge there is.
|
| It's time scientists stopped publishing dumb weakly connected
| PDFs, and start switching to a GitHub like pull request model.
|
| We could build a single strongly typed peer-reviewed repo of all
| of the world's scientific information, complete with definitions,
| experiment protocols and data, and make it universally
| downloadable and usable by all.
| walleeee wrote:
| I think you're describing something like a hybrid social
| network/semantic web with versioning, knowledge provenance, and
| asynchronous peer review.
|
| One serious problem for any such system is ontology selection:
| how is one to represent the entire body of scientific knowledge
| under a single type system? Different fields of inquiry make
| use of extremely diverse conceptual models. I suppose
| mathematics are in a way a unifying language, but there's
| hardly a single homogeneous mathematical discipline.
|
| The present "weakly" connected network has almost zero
| technical barriers to entry. It uses well-established
| technology within a well-established workflow, and it offloads
| the hard, fuzzy work (e.g., all the model-binding that would
| presumably take place in the proposed system) to the most
| flexible computing device we know of: the brain. Everything is
| already freely downloadable/usable, for the most part (lots of
| research is open access, and what isn't can often be obtained
| from the investigators by request).
|
| That said, maybe the sort of thing you describe could be
| translated into a research question. One could try to compare
| the shape of various data under different encodings, for
| instance (some sort of topological analysis?) to identify
| similar structure? I think category theory has been used to
| unify previously disparate regions of mathematics.
|
| There are already a few entries in the social network/resource-
| sharing platform space. Have a look at Open Science Foundation.
| Academia and ResearchGate are similar, but without the
| materials-and-data-sharing.
| yiyus wrote:
| Having such a repo would be great, but IMO we'd still need
| those dumb PDFs.
| breck wrote:
| Okay okay you can still have your PDFs, but only after you
| submit your pull requests.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Ah yes, the old everything-is-broken-and-software-engineering-
| has-all-the-answers trope.
| breck wrote:
| Sometimes things do.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Wikipedia?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I am attempting to imagine the horror of wading through all of
| the pull requests received by, say, the physics department.
| Requests were awful enough when postage stamps were required.
|
| You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas"
| and "just need someone else to work out the math."
| throwaway_tech wrote:
| >You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great
| ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math."
|
| You're not wrong, but, it is important to note there also
| isn't a shortage of great physicist who "just need someone
| else to work out the math."
|
| For example in 1846, Faraday proposed that visible light is a
| form of electromagnetic radiation. But because he couldn't
| back up the idea with mathematics, his colleagues ignored it.
| It took 18 years for Maxwell to come along and prove it.
|
| This sentiment about math is so cringe, because it is the
| same type of prejudice of social class that Faraday himself
| fought against his whole life being the son of a poor smith.
| Not to mention physicists such as Carl Sagen, generally held
| in high esteem within the physics community, always preached
| of an eventual point in physics that transcends math (i.e.
| something more fundamental and basic) to describe the
| universe.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| It isn't prejudice, or classism, or any -ism, it pure
| numbers. We have billions of people who have ideas about
| how the world works and a much smaller number of people who
| can work to disprove those ideas.
|
| Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and
| prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want
| someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the
| experiments. And woe betide those who want to say "by the
| way, your idea leads to perpetual motion/faster-than-light
| travel, so I will not bother." I personally have
| experienced _soul-crushing_ numbers of philosophers who
| happen to think they 've disproven special relativity who
| are also under the impression that the Michelson-Morley
| experiment was performed precisely once and everyone just
| sort of ... ran with it, never looking back.
|
| Who has time to weed through this sort of thing? It isn't
| ideas that physicists lack for, not in the least.
| throwaway_tech wrote:
| >We have billions of people who have ideas about how the
| world works and a much smaller number of people who can
| work to disprove those ideas.
|
| Like I said you aren't wrong...its just important to
| note, that some of the best minds in physics didn't have
| the math chops to prove their ideas. But if we ask why
| there are so many more people with ideas of how the world
| works and such a small number that can validate/disprove
| them speaks directly to classism. Being able to
| prove/disprove physics theories is generally, going to
| require a significant investment in education from early
| childhood that has been, and still is, out of reach for
| most. Its not a lack of intellect or talent, but lack of
| investment across the board.
|
| In other words until the ideas are disproven you
| shouldn't call them a cranks simply on the basis they
| don't have the math chops to prove their own theories.
|
| >Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network
| and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want
| someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the
| experiments.
|
| Seems to be a pretty efficient strategy. The entire point
| of this website is to support a similar model where YC is
| bombarded by investors who want someone else to do the
| heavy lifting, and business and make the returns.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| No, it is not classism, it is finiteness of resources.
| The constraining factor is the number of experiments we
| can perform based on what we have. Those accelerators do
| not just whiff themselves into existence as fast as
| people have ideas. We could wave our CRISPR wand and
| produce an army of geniuses, we would still need those
| experimental setups to test out the ideas, and those
| costs both money and time.
|
| Cranks are cranks. I will most definitely call them that
| and continue to do so. I no longer camp out like that
| because I could not bear it any longer. If you would like
| to spend your life attempting to work out the particulars
| of some FTL drive that supposedly works by repeatedly
| raising magnets above the Curie temperature and then
| lowering them back under it, have at it. Fire up IRC. I
| suspect you will spend much time laboring to support the
| ideas of cranks because it simply is not a good use of
| your time. It was a good use not of my time, either.
|
| That's all it is -- efficient allocation of limited
| resources. My time, your time, someone else's time. How
| are these decisions made? How do we decide which of the
| ideas do we examine first?
|
| If it is "possible greatest payout," then we would spend
| all of our collective time on perpetual motion devices.
| They would, after all, be the greatest payout. And yet
| the patent office won't even look at them.
|
| No, our first filter is: can this be tested? And to test,
| we must measure. To measure, we must calculate. And there
| is our math.
|
| Good ideas will bubble up from the bottom, and more than
| one person will have a good idea. If one of those people
| does not have the math and another does, then science
| will eventually get around to the person who has the
| math.
|
| What's _your_ algorithm for deciding whose ideas get
| worked on? I bet that it has some kind of criteria
| attached to it. I doubt you are suggesting selecting
| humans from across the planet purely at random and asking
| for their scientific ideas.
|
| Simply put, this is the scientific method. Make a new,
| better scientific method if you have a better (by whose
| standards?) algorithm for deciding whose ideas are worth
| examining first.
| raymondrussell wrote:
| Ramon Y Cajal was a contrarian when this was written, but he had
| great timing. In the late 19th century, it was fairly popular to
| believe that all the laws of physics had already been established
| --remaining progress would come from improvements in experimental
| methods. There's a famous "physics is over" quote misattributed
| to Lord Kelvin (actually said by Michelson, the guy who measured
| the speed of light).
|
| A few years after this was written, Planck proposed energy
| quanta. And in 1905, Einstein published his four Annus Mirabilis
| papers, introducing the photoelectric effect (applying quantum),
| special relativity, and the mass-energy relationship.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Thanks for the context. Thought that this was contemporary. The
| language did seem antiquated.
| dekhn wrote:
| This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective
| truth about the universe as we'll ever do:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient...
|
| and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the
| tiny bits.
|
| I personally don't expect anything that will change with
| respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
| ivalm wrote:
| And like all such books, almost certainly it is wrong.
|
| Backwards time travel or FTL are not measure of progress.
| Even with the field of "fundamental" physics:
|
| 1. There are lots of things we do not understand in cosmology
| (cosmological constant, nature of dark matter,
| matter/antimatter asymmetry, force unification at very high
| energy scales, gravity at high energies, etc). Each of those
| could potentially revolutionize our understanding of the
| universe
|
| 2. There are lots of things we do not understand at small
| scales (Casimir effect/vacuum energy relationship, plank
| scale effects, why the particle soup, gravity on very small
| scale, reason behind asymmetry in helicity/weak interaction
| and other parity/symmetry related effects, doing "useful"
| calculation with renormalization group, etc). Each of those
| could potentially revolutionize our understanding of the
| universe.
|
| There is also a lot to be done in our understanding of
| computing (as in, nature of computation)
|
| 1. Computation related problems (Church-Turing thesis, novel
| algorithmics + computing platforms such as quantum
| computing). Is approximately correct/probabilistic computing
| a loophole for getting essentially/mostly correct results in
| P time for NP-hard problems? Nature of AGI/what enables
| sapience when doing computing.
|
| Of course as we go into "less fundamental" sciences like
| chemistry/biology/etc then the amount to be learned is just
| overwhelming, we truly know very little.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| The difference between the problems physicists were
| tackling at the turn of the 20th century and the ones we're
| trying to tackle today is that we don't have the technology
| or the resources required to build the kind of experiments
| that would allow us to study these phenomena at a
| meaningful scale and test out our hypotheses.
|
| E.g. https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-
| time-and...
|
| "We Could Solve the Mysteries of Time and Space--If We Had
| a Particle Accelerator the Size of the Solar System"
|
| That's the problem. Our collective civilization will need
| to move a few levels forward before we can afford to tackle
| these problems.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| But the same was 100,200,300 and so years ago. Thete were
| always some sort of limitations, mostly technological.
| I'm not saying that we'll build solar system size
| colliders any time soon, however 50-100 more years and we
| should be much much more sophisticated in terms of what
| we can do in space and back on the earth.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Linear extrapolation is not always adequate. I tend to
| agree with GP that we may be close to a saturation point.
| ivalm wrote:
| This is not clear to me at all. I don't think "bigger
| particle accelerators" is what we need, and lots of the
| questions I posted are not necessarily solvable by
| particle accelerators. We do need new experiments, but
| probably in a sense of "new ways to observe the universe"
| rather than "old ways to observe the universe scaled
| bigger."
| earlINmeyerkeg wrote:
| I personally believe a lot of that stuff cannot be further
| studied unless we are able to divert solutions to other
| problems in our society first. I'm saying that we need to
| have things like mass quantity sustainable energy,
| significant automation, global unification and standards,
| higher minimum education levels.
|
| I'm saying that imagine 50% of the population works in blue
| collar general labor or semi-skilled labor fields. Now in
| this hypothetical worlds, all those jobs are managed by
| autonomous robots. Also we have a green power that is
| sustainable, storable, sufficient for even double the
| population, and can be held in high densities at low
| volumes. So there are now innumerable sectors within the
| economy that we don't need people themselves to learn. That
| leaves more time for people to take extended amounts of
| time to learn and study. I mean quite literally a Star-Trek
| "post-scaricity world" in a lot of ways. People use time to
| further themselves and expend time on cultural or
| scientific endeavors. Life is no longer about struggle and
| survival since money clearly would have no value if any and
| everything can be made or consumed for free. I mean it's
| really interesting to think that the only "conflict" that
| would exist is between people trying to min-max life in
| terms of achievement. There would be no achievement in
| religion, money, or ownership since everybody can do it.
|
| Ultimately what I'm saying is that a lot of our advances
| are contingent upon other sectors becoming automated and
| allow for more people to get into academic sectors.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| The origin of life, why life is evolvable, the evolution of
| the complexity in a eukaryote cell, and multicellular
| consciousness/intelligence are to me big unanswered questions
| in science.
|
| Although, life can be reduced to chemistry and chemistry to
| physics I feel we are missing some high-level self-organizing
| principle of the universe.
| ggggtez wrote:
| >why life is evolvable
|
| Sorry, could you explain why you think life _is not
| evolvable_ exactly? Assuming you take the existence of a
| single celled organism with DNA as a given (we still don 't
| know the origin of life), evolution gets you the rest of
| the way rather nicely. Notably, "life" usually contains the
| assumption that it is evolvable as part of the definition.
| If the children of the organism can't adapt to the
| environment, we don't consider those things to be "alive"
| (e.g. a 3d printer that can print a copy of itself isn't
| _alive_ ).
|
| As for the origin of life, all serious scientists are
| onboard with abiogenesis, though we don't know the
| mechanism. Every year, new science comes out showing how
| microfluid droplets with organic compounds + the natural
| environment, can result in behavior that looks similar to a
| cell.
|
| For example, this one shows fairly interesting "cell like"
| movement without any life, and there was another last year
| that proposed a possible abiogenesis of cell walls through
| evaporation and organic compounds that suck up large
| molecules into the interior when evaporated.
|
| https://qz.com/487712/why-these-colored-water-droplets-
| seem-...
| AareyBaba wrote:
| We know that life is evolvable because life exists and we
| know the biochemical mechanisms involved (DNA + cellular
| biochemistry).
|
| Evolution implies a relatively smooth path through "DNA
| space" from, say for example, an early single cell
| eukaryote to a mushroom. However the search space is
| enormous. Even if we account for billions of years of
| evolution and a trillions of evolutionary experiments
| each year, a simple random walk with selection through
| DNA space should go nowhere because of the numbers
| involved. The curse of dimensionality[0] means there has
| to be some other principle of nature to make the search
| space yield a path from one viable life form to another.
| The search space of life would have to be 'smooth' in
| some sense. That 'smoothness' is something we don't
| understand.
|
| If DNA space is just 256 bits (as a dramatic
| simplification), then 2^256 is a very very big space to
| search just by chance [1]. Now imagine a space orders of
| magnitude bigger.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?t=22 (3Blue1Browns
| wonderful illustration of how large 2^256 is)
| ggggtez wrote:
| Physics might be bumping up against limits of knowledge, but
| I think it's quite short sighted to claim that this means all
| of Science is bumping up against fundamental limits.
|
| Just because many of the questions we want to solve today are
| of practical significance (inventing new medicines, perhaps)
| doesn't make it any less scientific.
|
| Indeed, almost 20 years after the Human Genome Project, we
| have only scratched the surface on how to understand what any
| particular genes are doing, and are very far from doing
| anything more than "hacking" on existing genes, let alone
| writing a biological program from the ground up.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| This seems like the kind of thing people a hundred years from
| now will point at and laugh about how quaint our time was.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good
| standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient
| computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-
| fictiony but possible?
| dekhn wrote:
| I just said time machines and faster than light travel are
| unlikely to ever occur; I do think life extension and AGI
| are not technically impossible, but rather inevitable (my
| training is in biology, and I work on machine learning).
|
| For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different
| physics than the current model, while the last two, they
| seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
| whatshisface wrote:
| A radically different paradigm of physics would result in
| technologies that can't be imagined in the present
| paradigm of physics. For example nobody had even remotely
| guessed that transistors were possible until well in to
| the development of solid state theory.
| dekhn wrote:
| we have plenty of unrealized technologies that can be
| imagined in the present paradigm but that we're not
| exploiting yet (see for example recent advances in 2D
| topological materials).
|
| (based on my understanding of transistors, the first ones
| were conceived before the theory for them existed, and
| the first ones were built around the same time the
| quantum theory for them was expressed).
| nostrademons wrote:
| The nature of a paradigm shift is that it recasts all the
| existing laws of nature as special cases of a more
| powerful, more general model of reality.
|
| Who knows, maybe we'll find that we actually are living
| in a simulation and then figure out how to hack the
| matrix. The idea of "travel" and "time" would become
| obsolete then; you'd just poke new values for your wave
| function into the simulation's RAM.
| dekhn wrote:
| This seems implausible for many reasons, it seems more
| likely that if we're living in a simulation, we'll have
| trouble figuring out how to proloxify the feeblegarps.
| whack wrote:
| "Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has
| been thoroughly mastered by many ;)
|
| I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science
| and its applications. In my mind, science is about
| understanding the world, whereas fields like
| engineering/medicine are about their practical
| applications.
|
| I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress
| that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology
| etc. But I would draw a distinction between the things that
| fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs
| building really cool toys that we would love to have.
| dekhn wrote:
| I think the point of the "End of Science" argument is
| that any discoveries in biology (and physics) will merely
| be elaborations of basic principles that already exist,
| rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered
| principles.
|
| For example, CRISPR. Many people think that CRISPR was an
| amazing discovery, but really, it's just a biological
| system that has existed for a long, long time, where a
| collection of smart people realized that with some
| engineering it could be used for effective genetic
| modifications with high precision and no need for
| engineering custom proteins to bind specific sequences.
| That seems fundamentally different from, for example, the
| experiments that established that DNA is the molecule of
| heredity when nobody had an idea how DNA could encode
| information.
| epistasis wrote:
| DNA as the molecule of encoding information for heredity
| is also "merely" a discovery of an ancient biological
| system. However, it's not as though physics predicts the
| existence of DNA specifically, or CRISPR, yet these
| things are important for understanding biology, and in
| the case of CRISPR it's been turned into a technology
| that humans can use. Which is why I have a lot of
| complaints about the commonly held belief such as this
| one:
|
| > merely be elaborations of basic principles that already
| exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet
| undiscovered principles.
|
| This is not a meaningful or thoughtful examination of
| even chemistry. 3D structure of proteins is "merely" an
| elaboration of physical properties, yet "physics" doesn't
| have the tools to make much progress on solving the 3D
| structure of a sequence of amino acids, despite it being
| a purely physics process.
|
| Is the world "physical" in the sense that probably don't
| have new fundamental forces of nature? Of course. That
| doesn't mean that physics helps understand much of the
| physical world, because the "elaboration" in the "merely
| elaboration" has nothing to do what physicists or other
| scientists consider "physics."
| charlieflowers wrote:
| > "Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has
| been thoroughly mastered by many ;)
|
| Well done!
| izzydata wrote:
| Apparently it was the first thing humankind mastered.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Obviously, we are discussing immortality of non-human
| species.
|
| However, we more or less understand that morality of
| larger lifeforms is encoded in our DNA (e.g. telemers).
| Mortality seems to be a defense against cancer.
|
| There is no particular reason that a human _needs_ to
| grow old, except for the accidents of evolution.
| baddox wrote:
| > But I would draw a distinction between the things that
| fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs
| building really cool toys that we would love to have.
|
| It may very well be that understanding emergent
| phenomenon at the appropriate level of emergence will
| turn out to be vitally important, and that reductionism
| (while undoubtedly useful in many scenarios) is impeding
| our understanding of emergent phenomena like
| consciousness and evolution.
| gmuslera wrote:
| You don't send a message if the receiver can't understand
| it.
|
| People need to have a point of contact with that
| extrapolated future to became a popular science fiction
| work, even the culture in the far future fiction is usually
| pretty similar to our own (or at least, the one of the
| moment where that book was written).
|
| Present works (not the ones with inherited universes from
| old ones) are updated to our current expectations of the
| future, so you have sentient computers and other "possible"
| technology, and probably in 50 years we will have a
| different set of standards and not something as naive as
| what used to stand as possible 50 years before.
| gooseus wrote:
| Why not better understanding of complexity and complex
| systems?
|
| The assumption that any of these new technologies would be
| desirable and create a net positive effect in the world
| sounds very naive after seeing the results of something as
| simple as "connecting the world".
|
| We need to have a better understanding of how new
| technologies interact with our existing technologies
| (including institutions and communities) and our
| environment, or else we risk (further) destabilizing
| everything that has allowed us to get this far.
| iCodeSometime wrote:
| nah
| dekhn wrote:
| personally I believe that improving the techniques we use
| to study complexity is the most important thing in
| science today. In many fields we are now drowned in tons
| of high quality data, yet scientists struggle to store,
| process, and turn that data into knowledge.
| jhbadger wrote:
| As typical with contrarians, Ramon y Cajal said some things
| that held up well and others that didn't. In the same book
| "Advice for a Young Investigator" that this excerpt is from he
| also gave his view of theorists: "Basically a theorist is a
| lazy person masquerading as a diligent one because it is easier
| to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon"!
| glial wrote:
| At least in the psychological sciences, he's not wrong.
| [deleted]
| cryptonector wrote:
| How is that wrong? Clearly anyone who says that is being
| somewhat facetious / comedic.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Well, it's true that we can't really tell how serious he
| was being. And it is worth remembering he was a
| neuroscientist who studied neurons. He was probably
| thinking of people who made complex theories about "how the
| brain works" without ever designing experiments to test
| them, not physics theorists.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a
| diligent one
|
| Tell that to Einstein.
| behringer wrote:
| Didn't we recently confirm gravitational waves by
| checking out a couple interacting black holes, originally
| theorized by Einstein 100 years ago? I think even
| Einstein would agree that it was much harder to discover
| it than to theorize it.
| prostaff wrote:
| www.aeroworxglobal.com We can sovle them!
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Well, if they were solved, then they would not be regarded as
| problems...
| deith wrote:
| Ramon and Cajal, two great thinkers.
| gfiorav wrote:
| If this was a joke, it's a pretty good one
| deith wrote:
| It's probably one of the most widely known jokes in Spain.
| anarbadalov wrote:
| Just a quick note to the moderators: thanks for adding (1897) to
| the title and clearing up the confusion that i caused! i assumed
| Ramon y Cajal was more of a household name.
| [deleted]
| carapace wrote:
| ORT (Only Read Title) but uh...
|
| WTF is gravity? Why is gravitational mass and intertial mass
| identical (in all known situations)?
|
| Do we orbit the Sun or the image of the Sun? In other words,
| what's the _speed_ of gravity?
|
| _Can we control gravity?_
|
| - - - -
|
| What is subjectivity?
|
| Why is "it" always _now?_
|
| "You" and "now" are synonyms, why?
|
| - - - -
|
| WTF is up w/ the structure and dynamics of the Solar System? (
| 97.77deg axial tilt!? Go home Uranus you're drunk!)
|
| - - - -
|
| QM and Relativity, chocolate and peanut butter?
|
| Or the Universe is messing with us and actually _is_ describable
| by multiple _irreconcilable_ models?
| earenndil wrote:
| > WTF is gravity?
|
| That's metaphysics, not science.
|
| > Do we orbit the Sun or the image of the Sun? In other words,
| what's the speed of gravity?
|
| The image. Speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > It is nevertheless true that if we arrived on the scene too
| late for certain problems, we were also born too early to help
| solve others.
|
| I think this could be used to describe almost any point in
| history though. The greatest discoveries in science have always
| required massive breakthroughs in thinking, that typically defy
| conventional intuition. Perhaps there are some rare moments in
| time following a major discovery where the fruitful areas of
| inquiry seem obvious. But "I don't even know where to start
| looking for the next major scientific discovery" or "this
| hypothesis might be wrong and we could potentially spend the rest
| of time investigating it" seems to be the default state of trying
| to make major breakthroughs in science.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Well written. One thing that I keep thinking is that even if you
| know the law, there's still a lot of applications where its use
| is unobvious.
|
| For instance, you might be satisfied you know how a pendulum
| works. Now put another pendulum on it.
|
| Or you think you understand gravity, because you got taught the
| inverse square law. And you then get Kepler's laws. But then with
| three bodies, things get really hairy.
|
| Or you understand statics and materials. But how do we shove that
| into finite elements? Not an obvious thing, and required some
| real investigation.
|
| There's also completely new ways of seeing things. Who would come
| up with information theory? Doesn't seem like something that
| would obviously be found, despite not really requiring any
| physical experiment.
|
| And then there's things like algorithm research that turn out to
| be really big once there's a bit of computational power on the
| horizon. (Probably people think about the algo before they can
| try it on a machine.)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well I definitely didn't expect to see this at the end:
|
| _Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852 - 1934)_
|
| But I believe he's probably still right in 2020.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| Why come up with new ideas and solve hard problems when you can
| just be the User for X and become a unicorn based no nothing but
| smoke, mirrors and clever accounting like WeWork?
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Don 't introduce flamewar topics unless
| you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated
| controversies and generic tangents._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mtnGoat wrote:
| strange how this is selectively enforced around here. :x
| dang wrote:
| It always feels that the mods are against you. The other
| side feels the same way.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&q
| u...
| sadmann1 wrote:
| I do wonder if every generation picks slightly higher hanging
| fruits in science will there come a time when a single human
| lifetime won't be enough to digest even the most specialised
| domain of science in order to build upon it
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Right now, science has an emphasis on causal discovery. Showing
| that X is a mechanism by which Y happens. That includes finding
| the different X's for a Y and finding evidence for the
| relationship between a given X and Y. Once you know _how_ a
| thing works, that doesn 't necessarily make it easy to work
| with it. For example in quantum mechanics, a common phrase is
| "shut up and calculate" because the mental models are all
| messy.
|
| But as we all know (especially those of us who have refactored
| many systems), every once in a while you find a new way of
| looking at a thing that makes it all much simpler. A geometric
| way to look at an algebraic thing, or vice versa. Or a unifying
| structure to combine disparate pieces. Or just a "wow that was
| dumb" undoing of unnecessary complexity. It makes further
| progress easier.
|
| I could imagine that, as the boundaries of science get more
| complex, there will be more scientists working on making the
| rest of it less complex. Meanwhile, maybe we get smarter and
| live longer. The calculations involved with many areas of
| modern science have already outpaced what we can do by hand,
| but we invented computers, so I can take the mean of a zillion
| numbers without much effort and spend my time elsewhere.
|
| And in med school, apparently they say "half of what we teach
| you will be false, but we don't know which half." As science
| progresses, you don't just add, you prune too.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Nicely put. In fact a lot of the field of quantum foundations
| (and interpretations) could be seen as an attempt to work
| towards this sort of perspective/paradigm shift.
| uoaei wrote:
| Scientific "unified" models hide this complexity by abstracting
| it away so we can keep chipping away at the next level. We can
| navigate this hierarchy, up or down, to understand respectively
| large- and small-scale behavior, and the hierarchical model
| makes it so humans can still comprehend at a given level of
| abstraction.
| [deleted]
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Sure, but this doesn't address the possibility that there may
| well be problems of sufficient complexity that this model
| doesn't work.
| stabbles wrote:
| That's an interesting question. In Kuhn's view on science the
| tree would be replaced after a paradigm shift, meaning there is
| enough low-hanging fruit in a period of normal science (between
| two major breakthroughs). I wonder if Kuhn had any claims about
| whether paradigm shifts would happen less often in time.
| klyrs wrote:
| In my exposure to number theory, this certainly seemed to be
| approaching. Grad students barely have a grasp on the basic
| definitions; postdocs seemed shaky but familiar; professors
| "get it" but don't claim to understand. And sure, we've got
| Terry Tao making everything look easy, but that isn't a
| comfort.
| clSTophEjUdRanu wrote:
| Doubtful. Just look at computer science. How many people
| actually grasp what the computer is doing at the lowest level?
| Relatively few compared to the number of developers there are.
|
| Abstractions are the key.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| We are still in an explosive growth mode, and probably will be
| for a very long time (>100 years is my guess). But yes, it will
| be asymptotic at some point, unless you think the amount of
| science to grasp is infinite.
| hinkley wrote:
| A sometimes-spoken hope is that the universe is built on
| relatively simple rules with complex behaviors. If fields grow
| too complex, they hope to find some underlying principle that
| explains (away) that complexity.
|
| We started out that way, I dunno if we'll end that way.
|
| And even if it does eventually come down to 30 rules that
| explain everything? How many rules does Chess have? Way more
| than Go, and both can take decades to really understand.
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| This is a wonderful short story related to this question:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
| commandlinefan wrote:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
| tom-thistime wrote:
| The author of this essay died in 1934.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I was going to post a criticism along the lines that all the
| historical examples given by the author were from the 19th
| Century until I saw you point this out!
|
| The date definitely changes my perspective but I still think
| the essay is a little too waffley - it doesn't to give any
| actual examples or indications or where the author thinks
| important scientific problems lie. In fact it kind of begs the
| question. In response to a concern over whether there are
| important scientific problems left to solve, it simply lists
| some historical important scientific breakthroughs.
|
| I suppose the point is that breakthroughs are unexpected...
| Animats wrote:
| Right. _" Who, a few short years ago, would have suspected that
| light and heat still held scientific secrets in reserve?
| Nevertheless, we now have argon in the atmosphere, the x-rays
| of Roentgen, and the radium of the Curies, all of which
| illustrate the inadequacy of our former methods, and the
| prematurity of our former syntheses."_ That had to be from the
| early 20th century.
|
| The problems today are either in areas where complexity is the
| limiting factor, like biology, or beyond current experimental
| reach, like string theory and dark matter. The complexity
| problem can probably be overcome with computer assistance.
| Experimental reach is harder.
| rygh wrote:
| May be it's yet to be discovered
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