One of the great Spanish thinkers, criminally underrated in Anglo countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal
He s known as the father of Neuroscience, i don't think he s underrated
The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
11–20 of 156 posts
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#12Well, if they were solved, then they would not be regarded as problems...
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#13Ramón and Cajal, two great thinkers.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#14Impressive 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…
Having such a repo would be great, but IMO we'd still need those dumb PDFs.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#15Impressive 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…
Ah yes, the old everything-is-broken-and-software-engineering-has-all-the-answers trope.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#16Well I definitely didn't expect to see this at the end:
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 – 1934)
But I believe he's probably still right in 2020.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#17I 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
This is a wonderful short story related to this question: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#18Impressive 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…
I am attempting to imagine the horror of wading through all of the pull requests received by, say, the physics department. Requests were awful enough when postage stamps were required.
You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math."
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#19I 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)
#20I 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.
Sure, but this doesn't address the possibility that there may well be problems of sufficient complexity that this model doesn't work.