The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
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The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
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Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#2I 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
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#3The author of this essay died in 1934.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#4[deleted]
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#5One of the great Spanish thinkers, criminally underrated in Anglo countries.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#6(1897)
An excerpt from Advice for a Young Investigator. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/437689.Advice_for_a_Youn...
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#7I 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
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.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#8Impressive 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.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#9I 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
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.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#10The author of this essay died in 1934.
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.