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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)

#61

Post by earenndil »

carapace wrote: post #43

ORT (Only Read Title) but uh... WTF is gravity? Why is gravitational mass and intertial mass identical (in all known situations)? Do we orbit the Sun or the image of the Sun? In other words, what's the speed of gravity? Can we control gravity? - - - - What is subjectivity? Why is "it" always now? "You" and "now" are synonyms, why? - - - - WTF is up w/ the structure and dynamics of the Solar System? ( 97.77° axial til…

> WTF is gravity?

That's metaphysics, not science.

> Do we orbit the Sun or the image of the Sun? In other words, what's the speed of gravity?

The image. Speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light.

Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)

#62

Post by jhbadger »

raymondrussell wrote: post #24

Ramón 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…

As typical with contrarians, Ramón y Cajal said some things that held up well and others that didn't. In the same book "Advice for a Young Investigator" that this excerpt is from he also gave his view of theorists: "Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one because it is easier to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon"!

Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)

#64

Post by iCodeSometime »

gooseus wrote: post #46
whatshisface wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

nah

Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)

#65

Post by ggggtez »

AareyBaba wrote: post #57
dekhn wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

The origin of life, why life is evolvable, the evolution of the complexity in a eukaryote cell, and multicellular consciousness/intelligence are to me big unanswered questions in science. Although, life can be reduced to chemistry and chemistry to physics I feel we are missing some high-level self-organizing principle of the universe.

>why life is evolvable

Sorry, could you explain why you think life is not evolvable exactly? Assuming you take the existence of a single celled organism with DNA as a given (we still don't know the origin of life), evolution gets you the rest of the way rather nicely. Notably, "life" usually contains the assumption that it is evolvable as part of the definition. If the children of the organism can't adapt to the environment, we don't consider those things to be "alive" (e.g. a 3d printer that can print a copy of itself isn't alive).

As for the origin of life, all serious scientists are onboard with abiogenesis, though we don't know the mechanism. Every year, new science comes out showing how microfluid droplets with organic compounds + the natural environment, can result in behavior that looks similar to a cell.

For example, this one shows fairly interesting "cell like" movement without any life, and there was another last year that proposed a possible abiogenesis of cell walls through evaporation and organic compounds that suck up large molecules into the interior when evaporated.

https://qz.com/487712/why-these-colored-water-droplets-seem-...

Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)

#66

Post by walleeee »

breck wrote: post #8

Impressive how timeless this is. I would say the great problem of science right now is integrating all of the knowledge there is. It's time scientists stopped publishing dumb weakly connected PDFs, and start switching to a GitHub like pull request model. We could build a single strongly typed peer-reviewed repo of all of the world's scientific information, complete with definitions, experiment protocols and data, and…

I think you're describing something like a hybrid social network/semantic web with versioning, knowledge provenance, and asynchronous peer review.

One serious problem for any such system is ontology selection: how is one to represent the entire body of scientific knowledge under a single type system? Different fields of inquiry make use of extremely diverse conceptual models. I suppose mathematics are in a way a unifying language, but there's hardly a single homogeneous mathematical discipline.

The present "weakly" connected network has almost zero technical barriers to entry. It uses well-established technology within a well-established workflow, and it offloads the hard, fuzzy work (e.g., all the model-binding that would presumably take place in the proposed system) to the most flexible computing device we know of: the brain. Everything is already freely downloadable/usable, for the most part (lots of research is open access, and what isn't can often be obtained from the investigators by request).

That said, maybe the sort of thing you describe could be translated into a research question. One could try to compare the shape of various data under different encodings, for instance (some sort of topological analysis?) to identify similar structure? I think category theory has been used to unify previously disparate regions of mathematics.

There are already a few entries in the social network/resource-sharing platform space. Have a look at Open Science Foundation. Academia and ResearchGate are similar, but without the materials-and-data-sharing.

Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)

#67

Post by izzydata »

charlieflowers wrote: post #53
whack wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> "Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has been thoroughly mastered by many ;) Well done!

Apparently it was the first thing humankind mastered.

Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)

#68

Post by HenryKissinger »

ivalm wrote: post #56
dekhn wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

And like all such books, almost certainly it is wrong. Backwards time travel or FTL are not measure of progress. Even with the field of "fundamental" physics: 1. There are lots of things we do not understand in cosmology (cosmological constant, nature of dark matter, matter/antimatter asymmetry, force unification at very high energy scales, gravity at high energies, etc). Each of those could potentially revolutionize…

The difference between the problems physicists were tackling at the turn of the 20th century and the ones we're trying to tackle today is that we don't have the technology or the resources required to build the kind of experiments that would allow us to study these phenomena at a meaningful scale and test out our hypotheses.

E.g. https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and...

"We Could Solve the Mysteries of Time and Space—If We Had a Particle Accelerator the Size of the Solar System"

That's the problem. Our collective civilization will need to move a few levels forward before we can afford to tackle these problems.

Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)

#69

Post by iagovar »

enriquto wrote: post #26
scottlocklin wrote: post #5

One of the great Spanish thinkers, criminally underrated in Anglo countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal

I'd rather say he's criminally underrated in Spain. It is definitely easier to hear casually about Ramon y Cajal in "anglo countries" than in Spain. For example, I have spent my childhood in the spanish state, and I first heard about Ramon y Cajal during the first conference that I attended, in Switzerland, from a lovely presentation by an English professor. One of the dramatically few spanish first-rate scientists,…

I'd say he's pretty well known in Spain. I knew about him from school, so maybe your school didn't teach you about him or you didn't pay attention.

I studied first in Madrid and later in Galicia.

Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)

#70

Post by klyrs »

sadmann1 wrote: post #2

I do wonder if every generation picks slightly higher hanging fruits in science will there come a time when a single human lifetime won't be enough to digest even the most specialised domain of science in order to build upon it

In my exposure to number theory, this certainly seemed to be approaching. Grad students barely have a grasp on the basic definitions; postdocs seemed shaky but familiar; professors "get it" but don't claim to understand. And sure, we've got Terry Tao making everything look easy, but that isn't a comfort.
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