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The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
41–50 of 156 posts
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#42Impressive 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.
Sometimes things do.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#43ORT (Only Read Title) but uh...
WTF is gravity? Why is gravitational mass and intertial mass identical (in all known situations)?
Do we orbit the Sun or the image of the Sun? In other words, what's the speed of gravity?
Can we control gravity?
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What is subjectivity?
Why is "it" always now?
"You" and "now" are synonyms, why?
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WTF is up w/ the structure and dynamics of the Solar System? ( 97.77° axial tilt!? Go home Uranus you're drunk!)
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QM and Relativity, chocolate and peanut butter?
Or the Universe is messing with us and actually is describable by multiple irreconcilable models?
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#44> It is nevertheless true that if we arrived on the scene too late for certain problems, we were also born too early to help solve others.
I think this could be used to describe almost any point in history though. The greatest discoveries in science have always required massive breakthroughs in thinking, that typically defy conventional intuition. Perhaps there are some rare moments in time following a major discovery where the fruitful areas of inquiry seem obvious. But “I don’t even know where to start looking for the next major scientific discovery” or “this hypothesis might be wrong and we could potentially spend the rest of time investigating it” seems to be the default state of trying to make major breakthroughs in science.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#45Well written. One thing that I keep thinking is that even if you know the law, there's still a lot of applications where its use is unobvious.
For instance, you might be satisfied you know how a pendulum works. Now put another pendulum on it.
Or you think you understand gravity, because you got taught the inverse square law. And you then get Kepler's laws. But then with three bodies, things get really hairy.
Or you understand statics and materials. But how do we shove that into finite elements? Not an obvious thing, and required some real investigation.
There's also completely new ways of seeing things. Who would come up with information theory? Doesn't seem like something that would obviously be found, despite not really requiring any physical experiment.
And then there's things like algorithm research that turn out to be really big once there's a bit of computational power on the horizon. (Probably people think about the algo before they can try it on a machine.)
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
Why not better understanding of complexity and complex systems?
The assumption that any of these new technologies would be desirable and create a net positive effect in the world sounds very naive after seeing the results of something as simple as "connecting the world".
We need to have a better understanding of how new technologies interact with our existing technologies (including institutions and communities) and our environment, or else we risk (further) destabilizing everything that has allowed us to get this far.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
"Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has been thoroughly mastered by many ;) I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science and its applications. In my mind, science is about understanding the world, whereas fields like engineering/medicine are about their practical applications. I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology et…
I think the point of the "End of Science" argument is that any discoveries in biology (and physics) will merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles.
For example, CRISPR. Many people think that CRISPR was an amazing discovery, but really, it's just a biological system that has existed for a long, long time, where a collection of smart people realized that with some engineering it could be used for effective genetic modifications with high precision and no need for engineering custom proteins to bind specific sequences. That seems fundamentally different from, for example, the experiments that established that DNA is the molecule of heredity when nobody had an idea how DNA could encode information.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#48Ramón Y Cajal was a contrarian when this was written, but he had great timing. In the late 19th century, it was fairly popular to believe that all the laws of physics had already been established—remaining progress would come from improvements in experimental methods. There's a famous "physics is over" quote misattributed to Lord Kelvin (actually said by Michelson, the guy who measured the speed of light). A few year…
This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
This seems like the kind of thing people a hundred years from now will point at and laugh about how quaint our time was.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
Why not better understanding of complexity and complex systems? The assumption that any of these new technologies would be desirable and create a net positive effect in the world sounds very naive after seeing the results of something as simple as "connecting the world". We need to have a better understanding of how new technologies interact with our existing technologies (including institutions and communities) and…
personally I believe that improving the techniques we use to study complexity is the most important thing in science today. In many fields we are now drowned in tons of high quality data, yet scientists struggle to store, process, and turn that data into knowledge.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just said time machines and faster than light travel are unlikely to ever occur; I do think life extension and AGI are not technically impossible, but rather inevitable (my training is in biology, and I work on machine learning). For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different physics than the current model, while the last two, they seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
The nature of a paradigm shift is that it recasts all the existing laws of nature as special cases of a more powerful, more general model of reality. Who knows, maybe we'll find that we actually are living in a simulation and then figure out how to hack the matrix. The idea of "travel" and "time" would become obsolete then; you'd just poke new values for your wave function into the simulation's RAM.
This seems implausible for many reasons, it seems more likely that if we're living in a simulation, we'll have trouble figuring out how to proloxify the feeblegarps.