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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)

#71

Post by earlINmeyerkeg »

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…

I personally believe a lot of that stuff cannot be further studied unless we are able to divert solutions to other problems in our society first. I'm saying that we need to have things like mass quantity sustainable energy, significant automation, global unification and standards, higher minimum education levels.

I'm saying that imagine 50% of the population works in blue collar general labor or semi-skilled labor fields. Now in this hypothetical worlds, all those jobs are managed by autonomous robots. Also we have a green power that is sustainable, storable, sufficient for even double the population, and can be held in high densities at low volumes. So there are now innumerable sectors within the economy that we don't need people themselves to learn. That leaves more time for people to take extended amounts of time to learn and study. I mean quite literally a Star-Trek "post-scaricity world" in a lot of ways. People use time to further themselves and expend time on cultural or scientific endeavors. Life is no longer about struggle and survival since money clearly would have no value if any and everything can be made or consumed for free. I mean it's really interesting to think that the only "conflict" that would exist is between people trying to min-max life in terms of achievement. There would be no achievement in religion, money, or ownership since everybody can do it.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that a lot of our advances are contingent upon other sectors becoming automated and allow for more people to get into academic sectors.

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

#72

Post by dumbfounder »

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

We are still in an explosive growth mode, and probably will be for a very long time (>100 years is my guess). But yes, it will be asymptotic at some point, unless you think the amount of science to grasp is infinite.

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

#73

Post by ggggtez »

dekhn wrote: post #28
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…

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.

Physics might be bumping up against limits of knowledge, but I think it's quite short sighted to claim that this means all of Science is bumping up against fundamental limits.

Just because many of the questions we want to solve today are of practical significance (inventing new medicines, perhaps) doesn't make it any less scientific.

Indeed, almost 20 years after the Human Genome Project, we have only scratched the surface on how to understand what any particular genes are doing, and are very far from doing anything more than "hacking" on existing genes, let alone writing a biological program from the ground up.

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

#74

Post by glial »

jhbadger wrote: post #62
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"!

At least in the psychological sciences, he's not wrong.

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

#75

Post by throwaway_tech »

at_a_remove wrote: post #55
throwaway_tech wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math." You're not wrong, but, it is important to note there also isn't a shortage of great physicist who "just need someone else to work out the math." For example in 1846, Faraday proposed that visible light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. But because he couldn’t back up the idea with mathematics, his c…

It isn't prejudice, or classism, or any -ism, it pure numbers. We have billions of people who have ideas about how the world works and a much smaller number of people who can work to disprove those ideas. Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments. And woe betide those who want to s…

>We have billions of people who have ideas about how the world works and a much smaller number of people who can work to disprove those ideas.

Like I said you aren't wrong...its just important to note, that some of the best minds in physics didn't have the math chops to prove their ideas. But if we ask why there are so many more people with ideas of how the world works and such a small number that can validate/disprove them speaks directly to classism. Being able to prove/disprove physics theories is generally, going to require a significant investment in education from early childhood that has been, and still is, out of reach for most. Its not a lack of intellect or talent, but lack of investment across the board.

In other words until the ideas are disproven you shouldn't call them a cranks simply on the basis they don't have the math chops to prove their own theories.

>Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments.

Seems to be a pretty efficient strategy. The entire point of this website is to support a similar model where YC is bombarded by investors who want someone else to do the heavy lifting, and business and make the returns.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

jhbadger wrote: post #62
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"!

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by ggggtez »

izzydata wrote: post #67
charlieflowers wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apparently it was the first thing humankind mastered.

Obviously, we are discussing immortality of non-human species.

However, we more or less understand that morality of larger lifeforms is encoded in our DNA (e.g. telemers). Mortality seems to be a defense against cancer.

There is no particular reason that a human needs to grow old, except for the accidents of evolution.

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

#78

Post by cryptonector »

jhbadger wrote: post #62
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"!

How is that wrong? Clearly anyone who says that is being somewhat facetious / comedic.

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

#79

Post by cosmodisk »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #68
ivalm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Myst…

But the same was 100,200,300 and so years ago. Thete were always some sort of limitations, mostly technological. I'm not saying that we'll build solar system size colliders any time soon, however 50-100 more years and we should be much much more sophisticated in terms of what we can do in space and back on the earth.

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

#80

Post by baddox »

whack wrote: post #35
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?

"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…

> But I would draw a distinction between the things that fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs building really cool toys that we would love to have.

It may very well be that understanding emergent phenomenon at the appropriate level of emergence will turn out to be vitally important, and that reductionism (while undoubtedly useful in many scenarios) is impeding our understanding of emergent phenomena like consciousness and evolution.

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