[HN Gopher] Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack...
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Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
Author : pseudolus
Score : 158 points
Date : 2021-10-27 13:54 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.pnas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.pnas.org)
| pas wrote:
| > the newbies compete so intensely amongst themselves that they
| can't compete with the established dominant choice -- in the case
| of research, that often means [mostly only old papers get cited].
|
| The article does not mention tenure and the publish or perish
| incentive (which forces academia to work like the auto industry,
| just-in-time manufacturing of incrementally better output).
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gMszBSAX23uqYhytR/technologi...
|
| ( https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6xm5DFX4AEjP3_.jpg )
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Emphatically not in global terms, but probably so in the United
| States.
|
| Diffuse national priorities since 2000 have misallocated academic
| research, corporate R&D and government investment from hard-
| science to social science.
|
| Also, the inverse relationship between the "financialization" of
| the US economy & the decline of applied science innovation is
| stunning. By way of example, applied sciences have lost a lot of
| talent to fintech jobs.
|
| Similarly, the US-Russia cold war, for all its many downsides,
| did drive applied research. 20 years or so of low-intensity
| conflict in the ME wasted vast amounts of capital on logistics,
| munitions and purchased alliances that would have otherwise found
| its way to various DOD research programs.
| crmd wrote:
| I enjoyed this podcast[0] with Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein,
| where one of their central discussion points is the current
| stagnation of technological innovation, beginning in the mid
| 1970s, with the sole exception of computer software.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/nM9f0W2KD5s
| thegreatdukd wrote:
| Peter Thiel aka Computer Software businessman and Eric
| Weinstein aka theoretical mathematician and his pal in software
| business. Like they know anything about the technological
| innovation, outside of computer software.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I read some machine learning research papers among others. The
| explosion of papers from chee-na, at all quality levels, at
| orders of magnitude more than a year before.. was/is hard to deal
| with for me
| zibzab wrote:
| Care to elaborate why?
| blamestross wrote:
| Equilibriums are often punctuated.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| First you shouldnt define scientific progress via academic
| progress.
| nedrylandJP wrote:
| If it's still going "BOINK"... then we're good.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70488
| conformist wrote:
| From the study's abstract: "The deluge of new papers may deprive
| reviewers and readers the cognitive slack required to fully
| recognize and understand novel ideas. Competition among many new
| ideas may prevent the gradual accumulation of focused attention
| on a promising new idea."
|
| - This appears to be a key problem in academic research that
| matches my personal experience. More papers with less novelty are
| not only not beneficial, but beyond some point they become a net
| tax on everyone in the field. Without innovative approaches to
| fix the incentive structure of modern science, this is going to
| get worse over time.
|
| Are there any obvious solutions aside from "hacks" such as e.g.
| private foundations flooding specific fields with cash to reduce
| the need to publish?
| mjburgess wrote:
| It's my view that most unexplained areas today are chaotic
| systems where reductionism fails: brain-body, ecological systems,
| etc. Even, i think, extremely fundamental physics.
|
| I have the sense that "robust" science doesnt work here: the
| "explanation" is precisely the irreducible chaos. There isn't
| much more to be said than to point.
| DrNuke wrote:
| Scientific progress is still way ahead engineering readiness in
| terms of results... and engineering readiness, while catching up,
| validates and enables further scientific progress.
| api wrote:
| This is not a question that would be answerable until at least 50
| years from now. Discoveries that seem inconsequential are often
| profound, and vice versa.
|
| Rise and decline of large scale human efforts and societies is
| generally only visible in retrospect. A good chunk of the people
| in any golden age think they are in a dark age or that doom is on
| the immediate horizon.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| The entire college phd system is toxic and self serving.
|
| At my local college the guy the physic department building was
| named after was obsessed with some weird thing that no one
| understood and when he died they just mothballed all his
| "projects" equipment. No one had any idea what it was or what to
| do with it and it filled a good part of the building. He was not
| easy to get along with and shot down anything that he didn't like
| without even discussion. I'm told this is not in any way uncommon
| in the field.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Academia now selects for people who are good at navigating
| bureaucracy and getting research funding rather than people who
| are good at doing actual research
| crazy_horse wrote:
| What kind of comments does HN select for?
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Novel-length comments that no one reads aside from the
| first few sentences.
| 323 wrote:
| The kind which agree with the HN group think - "nuclear
| energy is good", "Electron is bad", "Chrome is good", oh
| wait, that was 2009 HN group think, today is "Chrome is
| bad".
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Shitting on academia is certainly one of them, but lets
| look at the merit of each comment for themselves.
|
| As someone with a lot of friends in academia, but luckily
| not dependent on it myself, I was quite shocked by the
| amount of politics, polishing, neck rubbing etc. going on.
| Scientists present as very clean and orderly to the
| outside, but the process of writing a paper and getting it
| published is usually super messy.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| I don't want to say of course it is, but of course it is.
|
| It's an environment full of smart and hungry and
| competitive people. There are politics, yes, but you can
| damn well choose to avoid them, especially if you offer
| value.
|
| Nobody in any industry presents all of the warts and
| difficulties of getting to a solution. If you wanted to
| hear about six years of failed experiments, I've got lots
| of time, but I feel like you don't want to hear it and
| neither do the people reading and writing research
| papers.
|
| You'll find that outside of the superstar schools, the
| smaller schools (certain depts) are staffed with
| brilliant people. They'll tell you about the nuances of
| academia if you're a normal person but they're not going
| to show up on HN where people say what they do is
| worthless, so people get warped views of what the
| majority of it is.
| iamcurious wrote:
| >Scientists present as very clean and orderly to the
| outside, but the process of writing a paper and getting
| it published is usually super messy.
|
| Just like cooks!
| crazy_horse wrote:
| Do you really expect useful discussion when you say stuff like
| this? Normal academia isn't like that.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Then you don't know what normal academia is like.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| I have worked in academia. I can't think of a single prof
| like that in my department. They exist, but that's not why
| people choose to spend decades of their life in poor paying
| jobs.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| This is likewise anecdata. Experiences vary, so I don't
| know if I'd throw "normal academia" out there without
| having a full view of the sector as a whole, which few if
| any do.
| [deleted]
| Rooster61 wrote:
| Sounds par for the course for academia I have been exposed
| to, although that's anecdata. Not sure what "normal academia"
| entails.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I am not in favour of naming people, but in case of academics I
| think senior professor is something like being an employer.
| It's not going to change when people see it as a distant
| example. You could say I don't understand the method of this
| person and don't like his/her approach.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood
|
| Sounds like the beginning of every great scientist's biography.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| True, but he died before he ever published anything about it.
| I was dating a girl that worked there at the time is the only
| reason I got to see any of this. There were hundreds of these
| large 6-10ft tall cylinders with lots of science looking
| stuff in them that were made I guess? for interchanging
| between some sort of system in a sub zero room full of other
| equipment. I was kind of impressed at first then more
| disappointing that literally no one could even tell me what
| the stuff was or what he was working on. I didn't get to
| really see what was in the cold room since everything was
| already disassembled and boxed or piled up in the case where
| it didn't fit in boxes. Also I don't know what the room is
| really called but it was made to be cold and was not active
| at the time I was there.
|
| There were also piles of very expensive scientific machinery
| that he gutted for single parts. Because apparently simply
| sourcing the part he needed for say $250k less was beneath
| his time so since he had tenure and budget he would just
| order something he already knew had what he wanted and gutted
| it leaving behind a very expense broken machine/instrument.
|
| He also believed that women brains were incapable of doing
| science so she didn't really like him much as you could
| imagine.
| tonmoy wrote:
| Ah. That explains the stagnation in fields like molecular biology
| and electrical engineering /s
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I wish the article had addressed the other issue in the area:
| funding. The US stopped lavishly funding scientific research
| sometime in the 1970s. Private industry has taken up the
| difference, but private industry wants to focus on immediately
| usable research for profit, rather than fundamental stuff that'll
| be useful for the next century for all of society.
|
| Is it that surprising that the most cited research papers come
| from the tail end of the federally funded research era?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That "lavish funding" era extended largely from WWII, with
| specific focus on technologies such as radar, fire-control
| (computers), and the Manhattan Project, was inspired strongly
| by Vannevar Bush's "Science: The Endless Fronteir" (itself
| something of an HN perennial), and kicked mightily in the
| keister by the Sputnik scare and nuclear / missile arms race of
| the 1960s.
|
| By a decade later, numerous factors had taken much of the steam
| out of the sails (to mix metaphors): the Vietnam war, foreign
| exchange and major changes in global currency, and the
| emergence of domestic peak oil in the US (lower 48 at least)
| with ceding of control over global petroleum production and
| prices to the Middle East, along with numerous consequences
| there. At the same time, Detante and the opening of China, and
| political scandals (most notably Watergate), and the civil
| rights and anti-war movements, changed attitudes toward
| government (amongst the Left) and toward academia (amongst the
| Right). The former is well documented through the general
| counterculture movement, the latter probably through the Lewis
| Powell Memorandum.
|
| At the same time, there was what I'd see as a real decline in
| the pace of both scientific and technological progress in
| almost all areas, save information technology and some
| materials science.
|
| TFA actually focuses fairly narrowly on one element, which is
| the explosion in publishing. I'll address that in a top-level
| comment, as I feel it's been overlooked by most other comments.
| philipkglass wrote:
| I'd add a growing awareness of and concern for the
| environment. The United States had its "Moore's Law" era for
| nuclear technology for about 20 years after WW II. After
| that, concern about weapons test fallout and other
| environmental releases of radionuclides made experiments much
| slower and more expensive. To the extent that many ideas
| never left the drawing board.
|
| There are similar stories with chemical technology,
| manufacturing, even electricity generation. Fossil fuel
| depletion is one example of overtaxed _sources_. Strontium 90
| in human teeth, acid rain, phosphate driven algal blooms,
| etc. are emblematic of overtaxed _sinks_. The US circa 1960
| enjoyed a faster-than-sustainable pace of development
| (scientific and technological) by borrowing from the future
| on multiple axes.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Oh, absolutely.
|
| I didn't want to head down that rabbit hole, but there are
| a few lines of argument which lead to the conclusion that
| the end-stage of most technologies involves both ever-
| diminishing positive returns and an increased concern in
| dealing with unintended consequences. I call these "hygiene
| factors", though environmental concerns would certainly be
| a prime example.
|
| One framing of this looks at the _mechanisms_ by which
| technologies achieve results. I 've identified nine of
| these: fuels, materials, energy & power transmission and
| transformation, technical knowledge ("technology"), causal
| knowledge ("science"), networks, systems, information, and
| hygiene. These seem reasonably well-defined.
|
| The area of accelerating rates of returns seems specific to
| network / dendritic structures (physical, conceptual, or
| both). Even here, growth ultimately slows, probably best
| considered governed by a logistic function.
|
| https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww
| goalieca wrote:
| Was academia terribly relevant in my field when I was a grad
| student? Nope. In general, the work was poorly supervised, not-
| reproducible, and the peer review process was completely broken.
| Students just wanted to graduate and professors just wanted
| tenure and funding points.
| echelon wrote:
| Something has changed. I can't imagine Einstein's generation
| functioning like that.
|
| Have pioneers of innovation moved to private corporations now
| that they have capital that rivals academia? Private companies
| can reward innovators with more than just credentials.
|
| Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, Google Brain, OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, ...
|
| Granted, this isn't even across all fields as they are not all
| economic drivers.
| ldng wrote:
| And even then, can you really put the two first in the same
| bag as the others ? I have the feeling their research scope
| were noticeably broader, no ?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And more relevant to the actual Einstein's generation (and
| the few before), GE, GM, Bayer, IBM, 3M...
|
| Bell Labs and Xerox Parc are gone. OpenAI, Tesla and SpaceX
| are very different places, and Google has Alphabet that
| actually tries to be like those but fails. And I imagine that
| cutting funding from projects before they can mature is a
| large cause of that failure.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Bell Labs was only pseudo private. The government required
| they have that research lab in exchange for being allowed to
| have a monopoly. One should also consider that institutions
| like that were partly so productive for being at the right
| place and time in history, when we were developing the tools
| to exploit the low hanging fruit nature has to offer us. That
| whole era, we snatched it all up quick. Spaceflight and such
| didn't stagnate after because we turned to idiots, but
| because mass and aerodynamic drag and Newton impose pretty
| inalienable constraints.
| mrjangles wrote:
| I was watching a good documentary about Bardeen and
| Shockley and their development of semiconductor tech in the
| 50s. The military got their hands on some of their samples
| and work and put together a team to try to work out how
| they were doing it. The scientists they were interviewing
| were very depressed because for every month of progress
| they made catching up to Bardeen and Shockley, those guys
| would be a further 3 months ahead of them by then.
|
| My point is, you can make claims about Bell labs being semi
| private, but that doesn't explain why all the innovation
| happened at Bell Labs and not at some fully government run
| lab or the military. The government couldn't even keep up
| with them when they knew what to do, forget about the
| government actually initiating that kind of research.
|
| In the last 50 years almost nothing has come out of
| government research. All innovation has occurred in the
| private sector, or privately owned research universities.
| At best, the government has succeeded in some cases where
| government funded academics managed to get private funding
| from industry.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Source?
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Book: "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of
| American Innovation"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thanks. Had a hunch that might be it ;-)
| bjornsing wrote:
| Something I often think about is how eccentric the leading
| researchers were in Einstein's generation. Just look at a
| picture of the guy himself. Or consider Kurt Godel, who
| starved to death when his wife was hospitalized because he
| could only eat food prepared by her.
|
| Different times/cultures tend to put different personalities
| in charge, and that has a huge impact on what gets done.
| Overall I have a feeling the curious eccentrics are now out,
| and the charismatic corner cutters are in...
| ColinWright wrote:
| Also discussed at considerable length here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821498
|
| (different write-up, same problem)
| privong wrote:
| I just wanted to note that the paper the blog post is discussing
| received some attention here on HN a little over 2 weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821498
| mjreacher wrote:
| On the topic of progress in science I personally believe that
| fields where computation is useful/important (such as biology,
| chemistry, etc) will continue to progress without much issue, as
| computation for now at least is continuing to grow without much
| issue itself, and as it grows it will take at least some time for
| the appropriate computational methods to be developed. However
| for other fields where computational resources may not have as
| much significance (such as theoretical particle physics) I can
| see that stagnation may be an issue.
|
| As many other commentators have noted there are lots of problems
| in academia to do with funding and how ideas are spread, etc,
| however these problems seem to be fundamentally economic or
| political in nature, so just throwing more bodies/scientists at
| the problem will not resolve them, therefore there must be
| systematic change from the economic/political sides to improve
| the situation.
|
| Another thing that pops into mind is in regards to low hanging
| fruit. An obvious solution to why progress may be waning in
| fields where computation is not important is that all the easy
| work has already been done (see Dirac's quote about 2nd rate
| physicists doing 1st rate work in the late 1920s with QM) and
| thus in order for there to be progress
|
| 1) students must have significantly more background knowledge as
| they need to know more about what does or doesn't work
|
| 2) creative ideas should not be shunned
|
| 1) imo is already a bit of a problem and I guess at one point in
| the future there may be issues once humans reach limits to how
| much their can learn in a certain time but for now this can be
| mitigated by being more efficient in how students are taught. For
| example in my own personal experience in math once you get to
| PhD/research level topics nobody reads textbooks to gain broad
| knowledge on a topic but rather reads them for reference. There's
| just too much to learn and know so instead if you're researching
| some topic you try learn whatever you need as you go rather than
| from a bottom up approach.
|
| 2) is linked to the problems in academia as I mentioned but I
| guess as more technologically advanced societies should have the
| advantage over less technologically advanced ones and science is
| of course basically a prerequisite for technology advances then
| this problem will solve itself natural selection style.
|
| One other thing I would like to note about academia with regards
| to inefficiencies is how much is still locked away behind
| paywalls or other inefficiencies due to decentralization. For
| example lots of historical journals I've seen that only have the
| content in a certain language, etc things like that. For the
| scientist and for anyone in general interested in science it
| would be easier if there was just a central place to look for
| topics that would include all historical content in some common
| language so it would be easily accessible. An example again from
| math is me having information in a Hungarian journal that no
| longer exists. Not only is the information behind a paywall but
| also it was in Hungarian and only photo scans so I had to OCR it
| myself. This is an example of an inefficiency and I doubt most
| would go as far as I did to find that information, so potentially
| you have huge quantities of information that may be lost unless
| it is cited by modern literature on the topic, which is not
| always the case.
| xor99 wrote:
| I think this comes down to the growth of scientific management
| and technocracy in research and that bureaucracy's attempt to
| fight over dwindling public funding for the sciences coupled with
| lack of private non-commercial sources of funding. Universities
| are mostly made up of managers or researchers that end up acting
| like managers in order to justify their position. This leads to a
| set of bureaucratic rules for scientific success and a range of
| conferences that prop that system up. Disagreement, the
| possibility to be stupid and wrong, and the ability to take
| random choices based on intuition are eliminated when the
| majority of a field acts like scientific managers.
|
| I highly recommend reading "The Body Electric" which details an
| excellent example, in both technical and social terms, of how
| structural effects like the above impede highly "random" or
| creative ideas in science.
| findalex wrote:
| > Disagreement, the possibility to be stupid and wrong, and the
| ability to take random choices based on intuition are
| eliminated when the majority of a field acts like scientific
| managers.
|
| How do we democratize physical sciences in the same way as CS?
| My bet would be on the combination of the two (simulation) and
| providing the high-level tools to the masses.
| iamcurious wrote:
| By focusing on Small Science. Big Science needs big money,
| big equations, big machines, big careers, big meetings, etc,
| so big science should be last resort. Make experiments cheap,
| cheap enough that it becomes embarrassing not to double
| check. Cheap enough that half of the comments in a science
| article are about people doing the experiment themselves
| right there.
| ping00 wrote:
| Would you mind sharing the author's name as well please? I'm
| interested in checking this book out.
| xor99 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_(book)
|
| This one, the main relevance is that the author came up
| against bio and medical establishment that refused to accept
| even the scientific interest of studying the effect of small
| voltage profiles/current on tissue and bone growth. One
| reason was that the main source of info in the mid-20th
| century was a soviet scientist, but thats definitely not the
| whole reason as it comes back to debates about vitalism and
| the role of electricity in bodily functions/philosophy (etc).
| Theres a whole lot of similar work in studies on
| bioelectricity at the moment which if successful seems like
| it could become a dominant approach too lol. Pretty tricky to
| think about how that process works over decades or hundreds
| of years.
| supernovae wrote:
| No, it isn't waning. There are struggles, but that doesn't mean
| its waning. We're having massive progress in medicine, space,
| cosmology, environment, biology, food, transportation.
|
| Hell, the only thing that's waning is public perception of
| science and that seems to be a deliberate political attack.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think it's obviously waning if you look at any field that
| deals with physical world: a car from 1940 looks totally
| different than one from 1980's, but the one from 2020 and 1980
| looks almost the same.
|
| Space rockets are same as they were in 80's, where are nuclear
| engines, fusion propultion, etc?
|
| Its the same for airplanes, appliances, and everything execept
| computers.
|
| https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1451342274667876353?t=RO7...
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Electric cars.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Cars are vastly different than they were in 1980. Fuel
| injection, aerodynamics, airbags, driver assist, hybrid and
| electric drivetrains, etc... the difference between a 1980
| Honda Civic and a 2020 civic is massive.
|
| In 1980 we weren't landing self piloting rocket stages on
| drone ships and reusing them a month later. The engines
| powering our rockets were completely different chemistry and
| metallurgy. We weren't building hyper efficient carbon fiber
| airframes with high bypass turbofans (Dreamliner). Even my
| washing machine is using about half the energy compared to a
| washing machine in 1989.
|
| Composites, manufacturing, and design are all completely
| different to how things were in the 80s
|
| Just because something has a similar form factor doesn't mean
| it is the same. There is a strong argument that the past 40
| years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of
| the human race when it comes to making things.
| goatlover wrote:
| > There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has
| seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the
| human race when it comes to making things.
|
| I still think somewhere between the late 19th century to
| the middle 20th century had the most impactful change in
| human history, and things have slowed somewhat in term of
| overall impact since then, with more gradual improvements.
| 1881-1951 saw more transformative changes than 1951-2021.
| As in the world changed more in the previous 70 years.
|
| There's still a lot of change going on, and some of it is
| transformative. But not to the extent of the radical
| transformations from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries,
| with revolutions in science, technology, economics, trade,
| transportation, communication and political structures.
|
| This might be more true of the developed world than the
| developing, which probably has seen those transformative
| changes more in the last 70 years. But in terms of what
| came to exist, it's hard to beat that period of time.
| walls wrote:
| Cars, planes, and rockets all have optimal shapes for their
| environment, of course they're not going to change much once
| they get to that point.
|
| Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at
| least) performance, efficiency, and safety.
|
| Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption
| of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much
| as they can out of the old fleet.[0]
|
| SpaceX has been _landing_ their rockets for several years
| now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lapFQl6RezA
| f6v wrote:
| I was watching the Boardwalk Empire not so long ago. When
| the main character was a boy, people were wearing fancy
| clothes, sending letters, and riding horses. As a grown
| man, he talked on the phone and flew a plane. Whereas my
| parents were flying planes when they were young. I fly
| almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it
| takes the same time to get from A to B.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and
| efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.
|
| It takes even longer now while you wait in lines to get
| through the security parade.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Now you can contact almost anyone on earth using a pocket
| size computer and even see them, and share with them a
| very large portion of humanity's knowledge.
| dTal wrote:
| >a very large portion of humanity's knowledge.
|
| I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a
| dangerous thing to tell ourselves.
|
| Walk into any university library, pull a random book off
| the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds
| that the information on that page can be found in a
| google search?
|
| And that's just the things that are publicly documented
| at all. There's libraries worth of implicit industrial
| knowledge too, including material that is explicitly
| proprietary. How does Intel or AMD design a modern
| computer chip? How does Rolls Royce design a jet engine?
| How do you fabricate a mono-crystalline solar cell? How
| do you mine for raw materials?
|
| This is "I, Pencil" writ large. I would estimate only the
| smallest fraction of humanity's knowledge can be found on
| the internet - well under a percent, at least if you
| don't count "emailing an expert". If we had to rebuild
| society on the basis of what we could find on the
| internet, we'd be lucky to reach 20th century technology
| levels.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Walk into any university library, pull a random book
| off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the
| odds that the information on that page can be found in a
| google search?
|
| If you include pirating sites? Close to 100%, most books
| are scanned into pdf's and can be found free online. So
| only thing stopping this is legal and not technological.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > > Walk into any university library, pull a random book
| off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the
| odds that the information on that page can be found in a
| google search?
|
| > If you include pirating sites?
|
| Or...just Google's own collection:
|
| https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9690276?hl=en
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Fair enough. A very large portion of catalogue-able
| knowledge? Or orders more than was available before
| within a few seconds in your hands.
| johncearls wrote:
| While your parents have been flying in the same planes,
| they payed twice as much (inflation adjusted) and a lot
| less often.
|
| I too wish I was vacationing in Luna City tovarich, but
| things have gotten better by quite a bit.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-
| air...
| supernovae wrote:
| General Aviation was destroyed for many reasons, none of
| which were really technology or innovation problems.
| Commercial General Aviation was decimated by NIMBAs,
| Commercial Airline pressure, massive population growths,
| expensive to insure/maintain/own and to be honest, a lack
| of care of passion from aviation for the past few
| generations.
|
| But.. the homebuilt and sport space has innovated quite a
| bit - glass cockpits, auto pilots, efficient engines,
| electric power plants, micro jets, composite aircraft..
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NIMBYs, not NIMBAs?
| supernovae wrote:
| yah, yard/area ;)
| goodcanadian wrote:
| My brain imagined that "A" stood for "airspace."
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years
| now, and are about to take an even bigger step with
| Starship."
|
| From 1940s, in 20 years we invented jet planes and rockets,
| and since then for the next 60 years we are fiddling with
| the same basic rocket design. Are you seriously pretending
| that taking 3 generation to learn to land them is as big of
| an achievement?
|
| If we kept up the pace of progress, we would have skyhooks
| in service, nuclear thermal rockers, nuclear electric
| propultion, fission fragment rocket and dozens of others.
|
| We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us
| to where we were before, being able to reach the moon.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think you're making a flawed extrapolation here,
| because the space race and the cold war overly inflated
| the pace of progress in space at the time.
|
| With the meagre funding that has remained since the end
| of that there has been pretty good progress so far.
| supernovae wrote:
| Starship is designed for mars. They built a new space
| craft that will be re-usable, at a cost efficiency never
| seen before that uses technology specially designed
| because of Mars. It's engines will use Methane -
| something no other manufacturer was able to master
| because of specific issues with those styles of engines
| and they did it in with the purpose of generating methane
| on mars to be able to fly back. The methane can be
| synthesized on mars from CO2 in atmosphere and Hydrogen
| in Ice. They had to invent the largest re-usable rocket
| platform, the first re-usable and working methane engine
| and the first flight computer that could take off and
| land...
|
| Not only that, but they invented or invested in massive
| technology for manufacturing all of this such that the
| engines are often 3d printed and designed with precision
| only dreamed of before.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "First flight computer that could tiake off and land"
|
| Soviet Buran could do that in the 80's
|
| "Starship is designed for mars"
|
| Original starship design was 5x larger and could take
| meaningfull payload to Mars. It had to be scaled down so
| that it use the ancient Saturn 5 launchpad and other
| infrastructure and be more affordable. Current starship
| is in the same weightlifting category as saturn 5.
|
| "First engines to use Methane"
|
| So what? If it was first one to use Uranium, that would
| be a revolution. This is just burning a different
| propellant. Its an incremental step. It is not a 60 -year
| milestone. Its like saying 'i upgrading home boiler from
| coal to oil' - so what? You are still stuck will low
| energy fossil fuels
| supernovae wrote:
| Landing a winged aircraft is different than landing a
| rocket.
|
| Starship is designed for mars and its design changes
| pending mission realities. The fact they're progressing
| so quick is awesome.
|
| First engines to use Methane are great - and it shows a
| mission profile that is correct for a trip to mars -
| since they can use science to generate fuel while on
| mars.
|
| Uranium wouldn't be a revolution and there is no way it
| would ever pass certification for leaving earth orbit
| beyond small decay batteries that have been used for 60+
| years.
|
| Just because you don't agree with the cool shit going on,
| doesn't mean it isn't cool.
|
| And if it could have been done 60 years ago, it would
| have been done 60 years ago.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Just because you don't agree with the cool shit going
| on, doesn't mean it isn't cool."
|
| Dota is cool shit too, but I am not pretending it's an
| achievement that will be remembered in 3 generations,
| like the invention of an airplane.
|
| I feel your categorisation is fed by being a fan of
| SpaceX and fails to put things into proper perspective.
| lopis wrote:
| In any field, you will have lower fruit to pick.
|
| > We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take
| us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon.
|
| How good were we ever at reaching the moon, though?
| moffkalast wrote:
| And you could make the same case for other inventions.
|
| Hammers in 1860 looked like hammers. In 1880? Same thing.
| In 1900? Same old hammers. 1920? 2020? Yep you guessed it,
| still a hammer.
|
| Some things are invented and then perfected to a point
| where you can't really improve them much in a cost
| effective way. That doesn't mean that new stuff isn't being
| discovered and worked on at the same or faster rate.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| But now we can buy plans to build our own hammer factory
| factory factories.
|
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2005-09-30-smith-
| whyihateframe...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Powered landing was definitively proved technology in 1969.
|
| Applying it to booster reuse on Earth waited a bit longer.
| chrisamiller wrote:
| Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as
| hell has. The medical and biological sciences are where a lot
| of innovation has taken place, and the pace of technological
| advancement in things like DNA sequencing (as one example) is
| breathtaking.
| f6v wrote:
| > Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure
| as hell has.
|
| https://www.cancer.gov/about-
| cancer/understanding/statistics
|
| > 1.8% per year among men from 2001 to 2017
|
| Is that the rate you expect?
| chrisamiller wrote:
| People are living longer and age is a dominant risk
| factor for cancer. In a world where cancer care wasn't
| improving, we'd expect to see massive increases in deaths
| due to cancer. What's also not captured by that number
| are the years of life after cancer diagnosis, which for
| many cancers has gone up dramatically. It's a tough
| problem, but the curves are bending in the right
| direction.
|
| If you want a more punctuated example, how about gene
| therapy, which is doing things like restoring (partial)
| vision to the blind.
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-gene-
| therapy-p... Early days still, but we've laid the
| foundation for a really exciting next decade or so in
| genomic medicine.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Safety, performance, handling, comfort, ease-of-use,
| reliability, and efficiency have all significantly improved.
|
| The difference in experience of driving a 2020 Tesla Model S
| vs a 1980 Cadillac Seville is more drastic than that same
| Cadillac and its 1940s equivalent.
| supernovae wrote:
| I still beg to differ... The shape of cars is even
| changing... We have Cyber trucks coming out, we have several
| EV trucks coming out - battry tech is improving, engine
| performance is still improving, fuel efficiency is only being
| attacked for political reasons - It's pretty cool that a Jeep
| - a brick on Wheels has several options of efficiency and
| power that are major improvements from just a few years from
| - from a 4xe hybrid to a turbocharged engine to a diesel
| option.
|
| Airplanes? There is a really good Nova episode on the
| electric race - we're nearing an electric age with airplanes
| even in commercial aviation - In the next 5-10 years we'll
| probably have the short hops covered by quiet electric planes
| - that innovation isn't necessarily paced by science, but by
| safety, engineering and certification - things we don't want
| to shortcut since humans are involved in these systems.
|
| Hell.. we've been dabbling with autonomous cars too and
| driver assist and lane assist... I can go on and on
| fsflover wrote:
| Relevant recent comment thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29000086.
| taneq wrote:
| These are examples of technologies maturing, not scientific
| progress waning.
| kiba wrote:
| There's only so many ways to arrange a car.
| rmah wrote:
| I started driving in 1982... and I can say with 100%
| certainty that cars of 2020 may not _look_ all that different
| from cars of 1980, but under that skin of glossy steel and
| glass, they are _very_ different. The engines are different
| (electronic fuel injection, timing and compression ratio
| monitoring), the transmissions are different (dual clutch,
| torque vectoring differential), the electronics are
| _massively_ different, safety features are like out of sci fi
| (parking cameras, adaptive cruise control, anti-lock brakes,
| in-dash navigation, ). All that and the quality (fit &
| finish, reliability, durability) is hugely better.
|
| A typical mid-market car of today would have been considered
| absurdly high quality and uber-luxurious in 1980. The
| difference is night and day.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I started driving around that time, too... in a 1950
| Studebaker. Not only do I agree with everything you say
| about the difference between cars of today and 30 years
| ago, the _magnitude_ of advances has accelerated too.
| goatlover wrote:
| In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be
| flying and nuclear powered by the 80s. That's what I
| think about with accelerating magnitude of advances. What
| we have now seems much more like the expected linear
| progress of 70 years, helped along by the computing
| revolution, where most of the actual magnitudes of
| progress has occurred.
| zardo wrote:
| > In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be
| flying and nuclear powered by the 80s
|
| Who is the 'they' in this statement?
|
| (I think this may say more about what sort of statements
| get hyped and remembered, than what reasonable people
| thought)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| They predicted flying nuclear cars, but not driving
| 100,000 miles before the first tune-up.
| aaron695 wrote:
| 100% HN
|
| Pick any object and they are insanely different to the 80's.
|
| With exponential change since the internet.
|
| Look at a clothes peg, look at a screwdriver, look at a
| drill, look at a wheelchair, look at at fridge and look at a
| car.
|
| A clothes peg 1980 - 2000 a linear amount of change, post
| internet 2000 - 2020 exponential amount of change.
|
| Cars are so different it's hard to know where to start. Seat
| belts, air bags, paints, roof bars, lights, unleaded fuel,
| glass, cup holders (yes they matter), seat covers, car
| smells, locks, just keep on listing parts. Electric. GPS.
| LOMAX. Is this a troll? You'd be here forever.
|
| Some general ideas existed in the 80s (like the idea of
| rockets existed a thousands years ago), some are new ideas,
| and some are ideas that have finally gained acceptance, some
| are ideas that are now affordable, some are ideas that need
| the material science, some are ideas that need the new
| processes, some are ideas that need the supply chains.
|
| A lot of these marvels are not scientists though. It's
| commerce and internal company inventors that have changed the
| clothes peg for the better for instance. Maybe some of the
| material science is from universities, maybe.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| That ignores an enormous about of vehicle safety improvements
| (roof crush resistance, various collision detection/drift
| detection, electronic stability control, crumple zones... ad
| nauseum).
|
| That also ignores really impressive improvements in ICE based
| cars (idle shutdown, cylinder deactivation, reduced
| pollution).
|
| That's not even touching on electric vehicles and self-
| driving car advances.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The fact that we are still discussing ICE cars proves my
| poity. The first electric care was built 120 years ago and
| London had an Electric Bus company (!) in year 1903.
| kloch wrote:
| Two inventions were required for BEV's to compete with
| even 1920's ICE vehicles: the power MOSfet (1970's) and
| the Lithium-ion battery (1990's).
|
| GM was about to put Lithium-ion batteries in the EV1 when
| the project was cancelled in 1999. It was less than 10
| years later that Tesla introduced it's game changing
| Roadster. In between Toyota's Hybrid technology both
| helped and hurt EV development. It helped advance EV tech
| but reduced commercial and regulatory pressure for pure
| BEV's.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| The first electric car is unrecognizable from a Tesla
| Model 3. It is not appropriate to compare them. To me, it
| sounds just like saying SpaceX and Starlink is
| fundamentally the same as an R7 + Sputnik. It's a narrow
| view of progress to ignore substantial incremental
| improvements over time. While you might not see big
| external differences between a 1980s car and a 2020 car,
| a number of engineering professionals working in
| different disciples would be incredibly impressed.
| lkbm wrote:
| Yeah, we still use ICE cars, which unfortunate, but
| outside of greenhouse gases they're immensely less
| polluting than they used to be[0]. 1968->2010 reduced NO
| 99%, CO 95%, and particulate matter 99.92%. (I'm guessing
| this is looking at engines for PM. Tires/brakes still
| produce a lot, as I understand it.)
|
| The EPA says tailpipe emissions are 98%-99% cleaner, with
| a 71% overall drop across "six common pollutants" despite
| miles traveled climbing 114%[1] (They use a few different
| starting and end points throughout that article.)
|
| It's easy to miss how much cleaner modern cars are.
|
| [0] https://andyarthur.org/how-much-cleaner-our-cars-are-
| today.h...
|
| [1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-
| climate...
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Car styling being somewhat static does not imply that
| Scientific Progress is waning. You could say something
| similar about clothing styles: comparing clothing styles
| between 1980 and 1990 there was a lot of difference.
| Comparing between 2010 and 2020 - not much difference. This
| has a lot more to do with economics and tastes than
| scientific progress (or lack thereof).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Car styling being static is because we are likely very
| close or at some local optima. That is minimising the drag.
| In past we may have had some idea, but now we can compute
| the best shape. Plus there is regulatory pressure that
| makes some solutions illegal.
| germandiago wrote:
| Agree with your last sentence. Everything is analyzed/used from
| a political point of view.
|
| We need de-polarization. First thing would be to get rid of so
| much power by these people that rule at their convenience all
| of us. I really think it would be a better environment for
| everyone.
| derbOac wrote:
| I think "scientific progress is waning" is maybe not the
| correct phrase. I think it's more like "scientific
| establishment is waning" or "scientific efficiency" or
| something like that. The issue isn't so much "is progress being
| made?" I think that's clearly the case. The question is "are
| resources being wasted?" or "what are the opportunity costs?"
|
| The blog post at the end kind of focuses on turnover of ideas
| and progress, which I'm not sure is quite the right focus. I
| think the original question, about how papers are being cited,
| are good papers being cited enough, are bad papers being cited
| too much, are papers being cited appropriately, is probably
| more on-point.
|
| I think people have this schema that academic science is a
| bunch of brilliant people just looking around, and when one of
| them comes up with a brilliant idea, others recognize it
| because they're brilliant, and then it floats to the top. What
| happens in reality is really different: you have a bunch of
| people who are pretty smart, but not always as brilliant as
| they are made out to be, and they have their own
| misunderstandings, blind spots, and biases. Ideas explode in
| popularity because the field as a whole is ready to understand
| or accept them, not because of the ideas per se.
|
| Re: "political attacks" I think this that's self-inflicted in
| that the worst part of all of this is the denial of how broken
| academics is at the moment among the scientific establishment.
| In any event, the focus of the article isn't really even about
| typical conservative anti-climate, anti-vaccine research, it's
| about citation patterns, written by academics, about academics.
| epistasis wrote:
| Agreed. I only see my little corner of biology, but I am
| continually astonished at what is being learned. Often times
| the pace of learning and the diversification is such that I
| often don't find out about significant discoveries until a
| couple years after they happen, and I can still bring the ideas
| to others years later after that and people will say "holy crap
| that's amazing, I can't believe I hadn't heard of that." Even
| scientists can't keep up outside of their area of expertise,
| and there will be even greater discoveries as different
| specialties are connected together.
|
| Media coverage is terrible, which is just fine because the
| fields are changing so quickly that who knows where things will
| be in a few years, ans the invention of understandable lay
| explanations take a long time to develop.
|
| I used to learn about, say, physics from popular media, but I
| don't get that any more. Presumably some things are going on in
| those fields.
|
| I think there are two effects: the expanse of human knowledge
| is now so wide that the human mind is having trouble keeping up
| even compared to a few decades ago, and also the media has
| changed massively over the last few decades as internet
| advertising has gutted its funding model.
| xmprt wrote:
| Biology is one field that seems to be making massive
| breakthroughs recently. On the other hand, it seems like a
| lot of theoretical sciences like Physics haven't have similar
| breakthroughs in decades.
| robocat wrote:
| > Physics
|
| I believe that the "hard" sciences are much much easier
| than any soft science, which is one reason they have
| progressed so far. When you are arguing with a presumably
| objective reality, one party remains rational.
|
| Hard sciences are seen as harder due to university systems,
| and nothing to do with actual genuine difficulty of the
| science.
|
| Soft sciences are much harder to tease out fact from
| fiction, and your discoveries often modify reality so even
| your facts actually change (macro economics). Also for a
| lot of soft sciences, there are a lot of facts that don't
| have to make sense (path dependencies for phenotypes of
| random mutations).
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| > Hell, the only thing that's waning is public perception of
| science and that seems to be a deliberate political attack.
|
| No doubt there are political attacks on science, but it's also
| true that science is often politicized and also corporatized,
| both by forces outside of science and those who practice it.
| germandiago wrote:
| How come a person that is interested in doing science
| politizes it? I think the first party interested in doing it
| is people who live from politics, not from science.
|
| At least not people who honestly live from science.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| One reason is money. Government institutions are one of the
| biggest sources of funding, so if you're a scientist,
| avoiding anything that could be politically connected can
| be difficult to do.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Whatever politics touches, it taints. No surprise here.
|
| But one of the items you mentioned is _food_. I sort-of doubt
| that we have a great progress in food. People seem to be much
| fatter than ever before. That would suggest a lot of cheap
| calories, but less quality of food overall. Unless we measure
| progress in food by raw caloric content, we might actually be
| regressing.
|
| The burden of metabolic diseases is certainly at an all-time
| high and not a single country in the world managed to reduce it
| meaningfully again.
| brandmeyer wrote:
| You'd be wrong there, too. Genetically engineered crops have
| boosted food yields to an extent not seen since the Haber-
| Bosch process.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One thing obvious is the breakdown between theory and experiment
| in physics.
|
| Newton's great accomplishment was discovering a link between
| terrestrial and extraterrestrial physics.
|
| Today on the large scale we see it takes multiple kinds of "dark
| matter" to explain the rotation of galaxies, structure of galaxy
| clusters, and cosmology. "Dark matter" evades any attempt to
| detect it on Earth.
|
| Einstein's prediction of how light was bent in gravitational
| fields was tested by Sir Arthur Eddington in a few years. Last
| year observational evidence was found for a circa-1980 theory of
| black hole jets. Neutrino Oscillations were detected in 1998 and
| have been one of the few areas where particle accelerators get
| non-null results; the theory for that was developed in 1957 by an
| Italian physicist who defected to the Soviet Union. (No Nobel
| Prize!)
|
| Since the gap between theory and confirmation of the theory could
| span a whole career, young physicists need to survive by pleasing
| their elders with fashionable theories for a decade without any
| feedback from the physical universe.
|
| A strange counterexample was the 1980 rise of inflationary
| cosmology, where the problem and solution were discovered
| together. (Somehow nobody was bothered by the "Horizon Problem"
| until then.) It was Alan Guth's answer to survival in the physics
| hiring drought of his time.
| goohle wrote:
| > A strange counterexample was the 1980 rise of inflationary
| cosmology, where the problem and solution were discovered
| together.
|
| Yeah, then in 2004, 30 scientists signed open letter[0] to stop
| pushing of creationism into physics.
|
| Moreover, it was predicted[1] that dispute between Ether and GR
| will be resolved in favor of Ether when Higgs boson will be
| discovered, because continuous Higgs <<field>> (a medium) must
| be presented everywhere for Higgs bosons to create mass. Higgs
| boson was discovered about 10 years ago.
|
| [0]: http://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/~dsoares/open-letter.htm
|
| [1]: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.882562
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| Looks like the scientist who discovered neutrino oscillations
| is Bruno Pontecorvo and his life story is quite interesting.
| Here's what he had to say about the Soviet Union in 1992:
|
| _Now, for the first time, he is prepared to talk about the
| choice he made. But, with most Communist countries having
| changed their colours, how does he feel about the dedication of
| his life to the Communist cause?
|
| 'The simple explanation is this: I was a cretin,' he said. 'The
| fact that I could be so stupid, and many people close to me
| should have been quite so stupid . . .' The sentence was left
| unfinished.
|
| Communism, he went on, was 'like a religion, a revealed
| religion . . . with myths or rites to explain it. It was the
| absolute absence of logic.' He stuck by his faith, even after
| the invasion of Hungary in 1956. When Andrei Sakharov, a fellow
| physicist, turned against the system, it made no difference. 'I
| had always admired him as a great scientist and a man of
| integrity. However, my idea was that he was naive . . . it was
| I who was naive.'_
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/confessions-of-an-a...
| kloch wrote:
| I don't understand why consensus jumped to the conclusion that
| there must be a new form of undetectable matter instead trying
| to figure out what we don't know about gravity.
|
| Theoretical particle physics is even worse. There haven't been
| any advances since the 1970's. Experimental particle physics
| has done a great job in verifying/testing the predictions from
| the 1960's/1970's but theoretical physicists are stuck in a
| rut.
| [deleted]
| mabbo wrote:
| There's a lot of different data out there and a lot of
| different theories. The dark matter hypothesis fits a lot of
| the data really well with a very simple model, few extra
| constraints or variables.
|
| The alternative theories don't fit the entire set of data as
| well. Or they do, but by choosing additional complexity,
| rules, constants that are chosen to make the model work, but
| can't be explained otherwise.
|
| Dark matter isn't a full explanation, no doubt, but imho it's
| the best we have.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Consensus shifted away from MOND and towards LCDM due to
| degrees of freedom in observations. A trivialized comparison
| would be "Why did artists give up on finding the best color
| and instead focus on finding the best arrangement of color on
| canvas?"
| lumost wrote:
| The trouble is that astronomers have limited ability to
| detect matter and estimate its mass. Given the predictions
| from GR, the idea that there was new astronomy and particle
| physics was easily more attractive.
|
| ~50 years on without significant progress for particle
| physics + GR means we are starting to be interested in
| alternatives.
| pontus wrote:
| One of the more convincing argument I've heard is the "bullet
| cluster". Basically it's composed of two clusters of galaxies
| that recently collided. Since dark matter and normal matter
| interact differently (dark matter interacting weakly), you
| could imagine that the two would have different centers of
| mass following such a collision.
|
| If there's really just modified gravity without any dark
| matter, the distribution of the regular matter would be
| sufficient to model the gravitational dynamics but if there
| is such a thing as dark matter, you'd see that the
| gravitational effects would be consistent with a center of
| mass which is displaced from the center of mass for the
| regular matter. This is, in fact, what you see, suggesting
| that there really is some type of dark matter.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster
| zehaeva wrote:
| Mostly because no one has found a modified version of gravity
| that can explain all of the observed data.
|
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsta.2011.
| ..
| kloch wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Part of why dark matter is such an attractive explanation
| is because there are no constraints on it. Unfortunately
| this seems to have relieved pressure to explore and test
| modified gravity.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| What do you mean there are "no constraints" on dark
| matter. There are plenty of constraints. I think you just
| have no idea what you are talking about.
| kloch wrote:
| For example, how much of it there can be or where it
| comes from. Contrast with Neutrinos.
|
| But you are correct, I don't know what I am talking about
| which is why my comments were phrased in the form of a
| question or literally with the words "I don't understand"
| nitrogen wrote:
| _how much of it there can be_
|
| Something like this?
|
| https://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_astro/dark_energy/chart.
| jpg
| kloch wrote:
| Is that a chart of how much we think there is (model
| fitting based on observations) or how much we think there
| _should_ be based on how it is created?
|
| With Neutrinos we know how they are created and have a
| very good upper limit on how much there should be and
| it's not nearly enough to explain the observed effects.
| Same for the CMBR.
|
| I'm not saying there couldn't be much more Dark
| matter/energy than neutrinos or photons but it's a bit
| too convenient to introduce a variable that is allowed to
| take any value and match it to observations without an
| explanation of what it is (besides having mass) or how it
| is created.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Calculations involving dark matter might as well be an
| experiment in curve fitting.
|
| We won't find dark matter in your or my lifetime, because
| it doesn't exist. It is a convenient, flexible, and
| inelegant fudge factor.
| serverholic wrote:
| What makes you think anyone is jumping to conclusions? Many
| explanations have been proposed but the undetectable matter
| explanation is still the leading candidate.
|
| From observations, we can see dark matter acting
| independently of visible matter. It's very difficult to
| explain this any other way.
| digbybk wrote:
| > I don't understand why consensus jumped to the conclusion
| that there must be a new form of undetectable matter instead
| trying to figure out what we don't know about gravity.
|
| Is it implied in "I don't understand" that "it's not
| understandable?" There is quite a bit of evidence that point
| towards dark matter and away from problems in our theories of
| gravity. We have direct evidence for forms of matter that do
| not interact with particular fields, it would be unsurprising
| to find other forms that are extremely difficult or
| impossible to detect.
| godelski wrote:
| Most notably if it was just gravity then we'd expect the
| effect to be more homogeneous. But with dark matter
| distribution it isn't. The distribution of dark matter is
| highly non-homogeneous and acts just like matter does,
| creating webs and clumps. It would be weird for a field to
| do this, especially since fields are associated with
| particles (we still haven't found the graviton, which is
| the exception to that statement, so far. But we also don't
| expect to find it without a substantially larger
| accelerator. One that would be difficult to build on earth)
| colechristensen wrote:
| Well you never really "see" anything, you see effects of a
| thing. Especially at the edges of physics where all the low
| hanging fruit is understood.
|
| We see an effect which isn't accounted for by the things we
| understand well and come up with several theories to explain
| that effect. Eventually we gather enough evidence to confirm
| or deny those theories and science marches on.
|
| There are several theories as to what causes the effects that
| are primarily attributed to dark matter, by no means is it
| settled. But the theory that fits the best is that there is
| quite a lot of mass out there that we can only observe so far
| by large scale gravitational effects on matter we can see
| more easily.
|
| Sure, it could be something else but a really convincing
| candidate hasn't come up.
|
| We're in the same situation physics was in towards the end of
| the 19th century. It seems like physics is nearly "done" with
| only a handful of odds and ends left unexplained. Maybe it
| is, maybe we'll get a breakthrough that opens up a whole new
| world of physics. It's hard to be sure but over and over we
| keep probing and not really finding significant "new
| physics".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My immediate take on "dark matter" was that there is
| something strange about gravity and inertia.
|
| At the galactic level, however, there is a lot of cases where
| it seems you can see the mass distribution of dark matter.
| They've found starless hydrogen clouds that seem to be
| dragged around by a dark matter halo.
|
| If you think about the evidence from galactic rotation curves
| you are likely to think that "this galaxy has some dark
| matter in it" but the modern point of view (which seems to
| work) is that "this dark matter has a galaxy in it."
|
| When it comes to cosmology at the larger scales I don't
| really believe in the "multiple flavors of dark matter and
| dark energy" that is fashionable now. I wonder, for one
| thing, if the universe is really homogeneous at large scales
| and if that breaks the assumptions of current models.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Heliocentrism was proposed in the 3rd century BC. When it was
| confirmed? Microorganisms were hypothesized in 11th century,
| were confirmed in 17th century.
| analog31 wrote:
| 18th century, due to the consequences of Newtonian mechanics.
| lr1970 wrote:
| > the theory for that was developed in 1957 by an Italian
| physicist who defected to the Soviet Union. (No Nobel Prize!)
|
| This was Bruno Pontecorvo, Enrico Fermi's student and early
| collaborator. One defected to USSR, another to the USA
|
| > It was Alan Guth's answer to survival in the physics hiring
| drought of his time.
|
| Credit where credit is due: Andrey Linde's contribution to
| Inflationary Cosmology cannot be overstated.
| netcan wrote:
| >>Since the gap between theory and confirmation of the theory
| could span a whole career, young physicists need to survive by
| pleasing their elders with fashionable theories for a decade
| without any feedback from the physical universe.
|
| There are multiple ways of defining science: a method,
| methodology, epistemology... One definition is that science is
| the scientific culture. Stuff that impacts culture, without
| conflicting with methods epistemology can still change science.
| Science in a world where generations pass between hypothesis
| and test is a different kind of science.
| surajs wrote:
| nah, just humanity
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| There are probably 100 times more scientists doing research than
| in the 1920's and the technological means for research are
| incomparably more advanced, so in that regard we're definitely
| moving at a much faster pace.
|
| Progress in fields like physics is definitely more incremental
| though as compared to e.g. the first half of the last century
| when the foundations of modern physics were laid (quantum
| mechanis, special and general relativity, quantum field theory,
| ...). Then again, there are many "small" cracks that start
| showing up in various theories (dark matter & dark energy being
| one), so I hope we'll soon discover something as groundbreaking
| as general relativity or quantum mechanics that explains some of
| them and makes the universe even more interesting.
| merpnderp wrote:
| But what about the replication crisis? Was there such a crisis
| in the 1920's? Because the motivations for things like
| p-hacking all point at something broken in science.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Back then we didn't need replication. If Freud approved it,
| it was correct.
|
| BTW this is only half joke. He is still the most cited
| researcher ever.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If one wants to limit focus only to the field of psychology,
| there's been a very long history of exceedingly flawed theory
| and experimentation, dating to the 19th century.
| rcpt wrote:
| > When the rare paper does break through, it usually does so in
| less than 12 months, suggesting that popularity comes from social
| media, news coverage, or via existing networks of people who are
| already well-connected in the subject area--rather than from
| citations in other work
|
| I buy ads for one of my papers. Only a few dollars per month but
| I like to think it's worth it
| abrichr wrote:
| Fascinating. If I understand correctly, you are saying that you
| buy paid advertising for academic papers that you have
| authored, is that right? Can you please elaborate? e.g. what
| platforms do you use, which keywords / audiences are you
| targeting?
| rcpt wrote:
| I buy ads to the arxiv link to a paper I wrote.
|
| I tried Twitter (the paper is about Twitter) but seems like
| the minimum spend is $50 per day. Also got the feeling that
| they weren't targeted enough based on who followed me.
|
| I've had a small promo running on Google search ads for a few
| years (disclaimer I now work at Google). The keywords are
| roughly what's in the title. I don't know if it's leading to
| citations.
|
| I don't know if anyone else has done this.
| zibzab wrote:
| Why is this so important to you that you spend money on it?
|
| Do you feel it helps your carrier if you have a highly
| cited paper?
| rcpt wrote:
| I think it's neat.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| screye wrote:
| Imo, it has to do with incentives and rewards.(in CS at the very
| least)
|
| The Hindex is a measure thats become the target. So 1 seminal
| paper is much much worse than 10 completely forgettable papers.
| It is also common to divide seminal work into smaller publishable
| morsels to rack up the hindex at the cost of novelty and clarity.
| The lack of incentive to pursue novel works, also means that most
| papers are incremental by design. Imo, this is the biggest waste
| of money at academic phd programs. However, the students need to
| take their career somewhere, so an uncomfortable compromise is
| met.
|
| Another problem is how every conference is converging into the
| same impact maximizing mush without any meaningful differences
| between them. This has massively affected searchability, which as
| we know leads to even greater 'agglomeration at the top'. Having
| different standards for novelty, experimental rigor, math rigor,
| scale, technical fit and the like would allow for accepted papers
| to follow internally consistent searchable constraints, while the
| diversity of target audiences accross conferences would allow for
| different types of research to coexist. In my field, conferences
| are only differentiated by deadlines and status. Everything else
| is secondary.There arent too many papers. There just that the
| quality of curation has gone to shit.
| luckluckgoosed wrote:
| Doesn't h-index prevent exactly the scenario of having 10
| forgettable papers? Having a couple of great papers yields a
| high h-index, but 10 forgettable papers would hold the number
| at a low count because you need N papers with at least N
| citations each. So a seminar paper would +1 to that h-index
| indefinitely, whereas low value papers would upper bound the
| h-index to their citation count.
| screye wrote:
| It kind of regresses to a median. 1 big paper, and 100 papers
| with zero citations aren't that useful.
|
| However, most top phd students/ assistant professors hover
| around the nebulous 5-30 hindex where getting 30 citations is
| a lot easier than publishing 30 papers. So, in most cases,
| you will prefer to figure out quantity, because the quality
| bar is so low. Additionally, they and lab mates always cite
| each other which leads to a free 10-ish citations overtime
| anyway. Lastly, authorship priority is not taken into account
| in hindex. So, a bunch of secondary-authors can easily get
| those numbers up at massively industrialized labs. So a small
| set of productive 1st authorships are given lower weightage
| than a large list of low-contribution 2nd authorships. Almost
| all super-high hindex professors are more like CEOs of a
| research company than primary researchers.
|
| H-index, like all metrics is useful. It sort of shows the
| median quality of papers by an author assuming that equal
| time is spent on all papers. It is informative, but making it
| too important in academia has led to it getting gamed with
| counter-productive incentive structures.
|
| H-index ignores away a lot qualities that are incredibly
| important to being a productive researcher, and has led to
| researchers with such qualities being progressively pushed
| out of academia ever since it has become THE target.
| carbocation wrote:
| It's painful because (IMHO) the H index is just a much worse
| approximation of something that we could actually achieve with
| PageRank for academic citations. In that case, a bunch of
| middling papers would be rewarded, but so too would one
| critical paper that lays a foundation for a field.
| lrem wrote:
| I always thought that PageRank was inspired on methods
| previously used for scoring academic papers. Now I'm
| wondering if I misunderstood something, or my professor
| misunderstood it first. Damn.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Wouldn't betwenness centrality be better?
|
| Think of an army randomly moving through your citation graph;
| the more particularly nodes are trampled over, the more
| pagerank it has.
|
| Now: if this army is informed about the shortest routes and
| instead moves about optimally, the most-trampled over places
| have higher betweenness centrality. I'd like my simulated
| citing scientist to be smart.
| tpoacher wrote:
| My view is that, like many other fields (including notably
| software engineering) before it, Academia has fallen victim to
| Goodhart/Campbell's law.
|
| Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles
| Goodhart: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a
| good measure."
|
| This follows from individuals trying to anticipate the effect of
| a policy and then taking actions which alter its outcome.
|
| Campbell's law (by Donald T. Campbell, a psychologist and social
| scientist), is similar, but has a more concrete focus on the
| predictably negative unintended consequences of using such
| indicators for decision / policy making: "The more any
| quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,
| the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more
| apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is
| intended to monitor."
|
| For example, how schools evaluated by marks end up 'teaching to
| the test' or outright help children cheat.
|
| A simple combination of the two (to misuse Donald trump style)
| basically would say that using metrics: sounds good, doesn't
| work; worse still, it backfires. Goodhart's law focuses on the
| fact that metrics don't work; Campbell's on the fact that they
| tend to backfire.
|
| We have seen this time and time again in software engineering,
| when managers try to use crap like LOC metrics, or more recently
| "slack activity" to judge the quality of a software engineer.
|
| Academia is now experiencing its own version of
| Goodhart/Campbell's law. Between impact factors, h-indices, and
| now REF exercises, scientific progress is but an afterthought,
| and the system self-selects either those with a high ability of
| navigating this monstrous maze of inane metrics created by
| bureaucrats, or those with the ability to successfully commit
| academic dishonesty (p-hacking, optimal division of publication
| units etc) without getting caught, or both. And only extremely
| occasionally, people with truly novel ideas and output, which
| happen to somehow still manage to obtain funding despite not
| fitting into any of the tight little checkboxes that need to be
| ticked to get a grant on the latest grant-bandwagon.
| blt wrote:
| What is a REF exercise?
| fouc wrote:
| It could be handy to have some sort of novelty scoring mechanism.
| zwieback wrote:
| I think we're just seeing a sector getting used to a systemic
| shift from for-profit vetting by name brand publications and
| universities to a freer publication system with lower average
| quality. As an engineer I'm a consumer of science publications
| and the way I get what I need has definitely been affected by
| this.
|
| We'll figure it out eventually.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's worth noting that scientific progress in the Soviet Union
| seriously stagnated in the Lysenko era due to the prioritization
| of ideology and the destruction of independent science.
|
| I'd argue we are seeing the same thing in many western countries,
| especially the USA, under the ideology of corporate control of
| academic research. Much can be traced back to Bayh-Dole
| legislation in the 1980s, which allowed universities to
| exclusively license patents (which had been developed with
| taxpayer money) to private entities.
|
| This created a new system of control and influence in academics,
| i.e. the Intellectual Property Office. What it really represented
| was the offloading of R & D burdens from the private sector to
| the public sector, while retaining private control of the patents
| generated in the public sector.
|
| This means academic scientists in the USA today labor under the
| constraints imposed by large profit-minded corporations, just as
| academic scientists in the Soviet Union labored under constraints
| imposed by communist ideologues.
|
| This is clearly seen in the pharmaceutical and medical sectors,
| where research into treatments for conditions is limited to
| patentable drugs only, older out-of-patent drugs are seen as
| unprofitable even if they're show to be effective treatments for
| off-label conditions.
|
| Another good example is the elimination of R&D programs for
| renewable energy by the state; as fossil fuel interests
| infiltrated government and exerted regulatory capture at
| institituions like the Department of Energy, solar R&D programs
| in the USA were basically eliminated in the 1980s and 1990s
| (leading countries like China, Germany and Japan to become the
| world leaders).
|
| There was also the gutting of environment pollution research that
| used to be funded by USGS, again due to regulatory capture and
| threats to deny funding in the 1990s.
|
| Basically, the new ideology in American science institutions
| seems to be 'only do research into subjects that can generate
| profits for our corporate sponsors', much as it was in the Soviet
| Union, where the line was 'only do research whose conclusions
| support the communist ideology'.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Excellent observation apart from the profit-minded corporations
| bit. Corporate R&D spending has greatly increased, while USGOV
| spending has remained mostly flat.
|
| https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/may/rd-busine...
| blt wrote:
| How does this conflict with the original comment's point?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Every major pharmaceutical drug I know of (including mRNA
| vaccines see Pfizer) is based on publicly-financed (NIH)
| research done at public univesities and transferred to the
| private sector under Bayh-Dole exclusive licensing regimes.
|
| Now, would a university academic overseer be pleased to find
| their chemisty professors doing 'open-source drug discovery',
| or focusing on alternative uses of old drugs that cannot be
| patented (say, cannabis extracts as pain medications
| competing with new patented opiate derivatives)?
|
| I don't see how anyone can honestly argue that the profit
| motive isn't seriously skewing (and limiting) the kinds of
| academic research being done in US universities today.
| Tuk9 wrote:
| Just move to China. Dysfunction in the US has no fix in sight.
| dahart wrote:
| The same is true in software. The first people in a company or on
| a project have by far the biggest impact on the structure and
| future of the software. People who join much later focus on
| smaller parts, and they might even be geniuses and coding
| superstars, but they will (naturally) work harder for narrower
| reasons on a smaller part of the project, relative to the whole.
|
| Papers in established fields naturally have narrower and more
| specific, i.e., smaller impact over time because most papers are
| fine-tuning things, asking smaller questions, and not building
| brand new theories or frameworks from the ground up. It's
| expected that Newtonian physics is not going to be re-invented
| every year, right? Newton did it, and now the questions left are
| how gravity works at scales and speeds we can't observe everyday
| on earth. Nobody will ever supplant Newton, because he was first.
|
| I've watched this happen in my own field, computer graphics. The
| early papers that have lasting impact are the ones that were
| inventing the field and laying the frameworks for how to think
| about it. The rendering equation, the shadow map and Phong
| shading are ideas that wouldn't get published today, however they
| were pioneering at the time. Now the questions we have are about
| things like what is the true microfiber surface shape of human
| hair strands, so that we can increase realism by 1% compared to
| the previous hair models.
|
| If you compare them side by side in the context of today,
| increasing realism of hair shading is a more difficult question
| to answer than the earlier question of how to interpolate a
| shading normal across a triangle.
|
| So, yes scientific progress is waning in the sense that we're
| inventing fewer fields and fewer new theories. There are fewer
| papers that are _expected_ to be or even trying to be
| foundational, because the foundations already exist. And it's not
| waning in the sense that scientific output has never been higher,
| and today's papers are answering harder (and more specific)
| questions.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| If you consider the set of all things to be learned. Some of
| those things will be easier to learn than others. Any
| intelligence setting itself to the task of learning things from
| this set is going to learn the easier things first. For a time,
| the power gained from learning early easy things may allow you to
| accelerate the rate of learning. But eventually you will hit a
| point where the things left to learn are so hard to learn, that
| the rate will start to decline.
|
| This does not imply something is wrong with our approach now, or
| wrong with people now. It is a natural and unavoidable thing,
| that the rate must at some point slow. Newtonian mechanics is
| incredibly simple to figure out, as evidenced by multiple people
| working it out about as soon as the tools were there to do so.
| General relatively quite a bit harder and more complex. Whatever
| rules tie the quantum world to general relatively appears to be
| trickier still. Hopefully we get there some day.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I think there are a lot of major, groundbreaking discoveries
| ahead of us in fields like biology and applied physics. I think
| it's plausible that we may be able to cure aging in our
| lifetimes. I think that we're going to see breakthrough
| discoveries in socioeconomics and anthropology too.
|
| With that said, you can only discover electrons once. The last
| new particle discovered was the Higgs Boson, and what are the
| practical applications of the Higgs? Nothing compared with the
| practical applications of the electron.
|
| So, waning? Probably not, at least, not yet. But, we are getting
| out into the branches of science and not working on the roots
| anymore.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| The nature of scientific progress isn't linear so it's entirely
| possible that progress is slowing down. I'm not sure how you'd
| quantify scientific progress though.
|
| If you've not read Thomas Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific
| Revolutions_ , I highly recommend it because it lays out how
| science progresses. If you think about it, most of our current
| technology stems from late 19th Century and early/mid 20th
| Century science. There are exceptions and different disciplines
| experience revolutions perhaps at different rates. I don't know
| much about biological science but CRISPR comes to mind in that
| regard.
| pizzazzaro wrote:
| Its almost like we dont invest in it anymore...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Hey dang, can we change the title to the full article's title?
| It's:
|
| > Is scientific progress waning? Too many new papers may mean
| novel ideas rarely rack up citations
|
| The current title ("Is scientific progress waning?") is so
| clickbait that it's just getting people reacting to the question
| instead of the study.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| No.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| That law is as unscientific as can be. In fact the very wiki
| article says that it has been empirically disproven.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This article and the HN discussion (as I write this) themselves
| illustrate a major component of the problem, with rich irony.
|
| The full title of the article is "Is scientific progress waning?
| Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up
| citations".
|
| As submitted, the first, generic, clause was chosen. The second,
| more specific clause, might at least tip off readers that there's
| something more afoot.
|
| The article narrowly addresses a specific premise: "There are so
| many papers coming out in the largest fields of science that new
| ideas can't get a foothold". And indeed, _that notion itself has
| failed to gain a foothold in the ensuing HN discussion._ Instead,
| I see numerous threads in which some popular narrative, many with
| merits, _but not specific to the contents of the article itself_
| are being advanced and discussed. (There are a few notable
| exceptions, of course.)
|
| As the article notes, _even within single disciplines_ , there
| may be well over 100,000 articles published. _No single
| researcher within a field can even keep up with the_ titles*
| published on a daily basis, along with their other research
| loads. As an empirical validation of this, I'll point to numerous
| instances of high-volume data assessment:
|
| - The New York Times content-moderation desk manages a sustained
| rate of about 700--800 comments moderated per moderator per day.
|
| - Facebook's content moderation data suggest similar rates.
|
| - Data by Stephen Wolfram ("quantified life") and Walt Mossberg
| (general interivews) suggest that people can handle a peak of
| about 100--300 email messages of any significance and complexity,
| per day.
|
| At 100,000 articles/day, a researcher would be faced with 235
| titles _per day, every day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year_.
|
| This raises a few questions:
|
| - Are all papers actually "paper-worthy"? (With apologies to
| Elaine of Seinfeld: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=gfDyOyrY-zM)
|
| - What is driving publication of papers? Is it advancement of
| _knowledge_ or gatekeeping functions within institutions and
| disciplines?
|
| - What methods for capturing _useful_ and _valid_ information
| should be applied in cases of information overload? I 've argued
| for years that in such cases, _selection_ is less of a concern
| than _rapid, low-cost, and unbiased elimination_. That is, it 's
| essential to _discard_ information _which cannot be usefully
| utilised and which will in fact impair the ability to process
| relevant available information_.
|
| - There's the meta-question (addressed by most comments so far on
| this thread) of what the limits and value, or even _definition_
| of science are. Whilst that 's an interesting question of itself,
| and should probably have its own conversation, it's the least
| part of this specific article's merits.
|
| Note that HN itself faces this issue, with numerous submissions
| daily, of which about 30 count as having made the front page. I'm
| increasingly going through the "Past" or "Front" links to find
| what's been curated on a given, or using Algolia to search for
| the top submissions for a given week, month, or year. That last
| is somewhat awkward where the immediate prior interval isn't
| selected, but illuminating. Rates of progress and/or stasis, as
| well as tropes and remarkable incidents, become much clearer when
| aggregated.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed from the title to the subtitle above. Thanks!
|
| More than 30 stories make the front page per day - how many
| depends on how you want to count them, but actually 30 would be
| the lower bound of all such numbers.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Right. The history pages typically list about 100, and I
| suspect even that is a subset of submissions.
|
| But if you were simply to skip by period looking at front
| page, it's 30 items.
| BlueTie wrote:
| Understandability is waning. Which in many places amounts to the
| same thing.
|
| Newtonian physics could be understood by an average child.
| General Relativity could be understood by intellectuals somewhat.
| The cutting edge of physics now is barely understood by the
| people who are publishing the papers.
|
| For additional progress to continue in a lot of fields we're
| giving up a lot of understanding.
|
| If we give a mouse a maze that requires understanding of calculus
| or trigonometry to get to the cheese - the mouse just won't get
| there. Doesn't matter how many attempts we give it - the
| reasoning is beyond its capacity.
|
| Why would humans be any different to our own upper limits of
| understanding?
|
| (mostly stolen from a chomsky lecture called "the ghost and the
| machine")
| _game_of_life wrote:
| Indulge me with an odd potential counter-point though.
|
| What if human knowledge is fundamentally both more inductive
| and collectivist than we care to admit? After all, Hume's
| problem of induction (that deductive reasoning stems from
| induction) does seem to suggest this as a potential resolution.
|
| Isn't understanding mostly a set of connections and
| relationships about a thing? I can use memorized/practiced
| knowledge of trig and calc to solve problems, sure, but just
| like the rat if I was born 4000 years ago I'd probably just
| struggle with the concept of negative numbers -- with near
| certainly I wouldn't be able to invent them to solve a maze
| either.
|
| So I would argue that perhaps all knowledge and understanding
| seems to be fundamentally inductive, and is hard to conveive of
| with just a single person in isolation, same as a mouse. Large
| communities of people with millenia of progress, useful
| abstractions, and recorded insight though?
|
| Perhpas understanding is scalable with communities and time,
| and thinking of understanding on the individual level of a
| mouse or a human is missing the forest for the trees?
| goohle wrote:
| GR is hard to understand, because it uses wrong postulates. A
| medium (Higgs <<field>>) is present everywhere, so we can use
| it (or CMB) as 0 point.
|
| BB is wrong theory because photons are not immortal things,
| they are losing energy with time, thus H0(s) are representing
| rates of loss for different frequencies. Our local group of
| galaxies is expanding, because we are falling into Great
| Attractor and Shapley Attractor, but it's coincidence.
|
| QM can be reproduced and studied at macro scale using walking
| droplets or air bubbles in water bubble in microgravity.
| dilawar wrote:
| This. I don't even bother to read physics article in quanta
| anymore. I won't compare some theories to astrology but if
| someone does, I won't run to defend either.
|
| I struggle with thwir math articles, but I know that if I find
| time on weekend, I'll get the theorem (may not be the proof).
| Knuth books feels the same. Hard reading but rewarding.
|
| Biology is always pleasing to read. CS is my bread and butter
| so I usually bookmark them.
|
| PS: Masters in electrical engineering and PhD in system
| biology.
| mrjangles wrote:
| As a general rule, if you are hearing about some scientific
| endeavor in the popular press, it is because that science
| isn't very important, and they need publicity to get funding.
|
| What a lot of people don't understand is that there is
| actually a lot of real science going on in physics. There are
| two branches of physics, what you call condensed matter /
| atom optics. And then there is Cosmology / High energy
| physics.
|
| condensed matter / atom optics is where the real science is
| happening, and those who work in those areas consider the
| second group to be an absolute joke. The thing is, there is
| also a feeling of everyone working together to try to get as
| much money from the government as possible, which is why no
| one blows the whistle on what a complete scam cosmology and
| the like is. It is understood at a subconscious level that
| everyone could be hurt if academics start in fighting, and
| people would be ostracized for doing it. Also, there are a
| lot of bad scientists / zealots in condensed matter/ atom
| optics just as there is in cosmology, and they would try to
| ruin anyone who said a bad word about the church of academia.
|
| Anyway, as far as real physics goes, there was great article
| on here a while back about how we finally got to look at the
| atomic structure of glass, and how we can finally try to work
| out how it is put together. No one knows how glass is put
| together, there are a number of different theories, and none
| of them agree. That is the absolute peek of human achievement
| in science right now, trying to understand how things like
| glass are put together.
|
| So if someone tries to tell you they know how the universe
| was formed and all of creation came about, but they can't
| explain to you how that window next to them works, then they
| are clearly a crackpot, not a scientist. The most hilarious
| part is that if you pull them up on it they will say "Oh well
| you see the whole creation of the universe and everything in
| it is actually much less complicated than glass, so that is
| why we can get results in this area easier".
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