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

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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

#91

Post by ivalm »

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…

This is not clear to me at all. I don't think "bigger particle accelerators" is what we need, and lots of the questions I posted are not necessarily solvable by particle accelerators. We do need new experiments, but probably in a sense of "new ways to observe the universe" rather than "old ways to observe the universe scaled bigger."

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

#92

Post by dang »

mtnGoat wrote: post #33
dang wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

strange how this is selectively enforced around here. :x

It always feels that the mods are against you. The other side feels the same way.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It's true that moderation isn't consistent, but that's not because it's selective in the way you imply. Rather, it's because we can't come close to reading everything, and can't moderate what we don't see. If you notice a post that breaks the site guidelines and hasn't been moderated, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen it yet.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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

#94

Post by dekhn »

epistasis wrote: post #59
dekhn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

DNA as the molecule of encoding information for heredity is also "merely" a discovery of an ancient biological system. However, it's not as though physics predicts the existence of DNA specifically, or CRISPR, yet these things are important for understanding biology, and in the case of CRISPR it's been turned into a technology that humans can use. Which is why I have a lot of complaints about the commonly held belief…

No, the elucidation of the structure of the DNA isn't just merely a discovery of an ancient biological system. It was the recognition that the structure was formed by antiparallel strands encoding information in a reversible molecular form, that represents a real level-up in human understanding of the universe. That's the whole point of that throwaway sentence at the end "It has not escaped our notice (12) that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Also, we can simulate protein folding well enough from classical physics and quantum approximations such that "rapid two-state folders" are considered solved. That was a major outcome in the course of my career, to which I contributed significantly :)

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

#95

Post by breck »

walleeee wrote: post #66
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 unif…

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

Great breakdown, thanks.

> 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?

I think you can do it through market forces and forking. Similar to Linux distributions you could have "science" distributions. As for the type system and unifying language, I think you can do a thing that can start from just a dot and no dot and build up characters and numbers and words and types etc, with no extra parts. So perhaps if you had something like that, where simplicity could be rigorously defined, you could get consensus on base level types. If people had strong differences, you could go off and fork a new distribution. I'd imagine you'd have a few distros emerge with decent gravity.

Pull request could be really neat. I can imagine you'd have the speed of light defined somewhere in a science distro, and there would be data from reproducible experiments that people have done. Perhaps someone comes up with an ingenuous at home experiment that is just a few steps and sends a pull request that would add that, and perhaps prune some more complex experiment.

> offloads the hard, fuzzy work to the...brain

Yes, exactly. I'd love it if it was computable (of course, this isn't an original idea--Wolfram Alpha is trying to pull it off). If I could "go to definition" of any scientific conclusion (not only to definitions, but to real data, and simple, repeatable experiments). If you kept "going to definition" all roads eventually would lead back to 0 and 1.

> 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'm giving it a go with Trees. I think it will work, but still might be a few years before I know for sure.

> 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.

I like those, especially OSF. Definitely a lot of activity in the space (I invested in some new ones as well). I haven't seen one yet that does the "science monorepo" thing, but hoping someone takes the lead there (and I'll do my best to support it with hopefully useful underlying tech and research).

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

#96

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

ggggtez wrote: post #77
izzydata wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mortality is not a defence against cancer. Mortality is a tool that allows species to more speedily adapt to changing environment. Sexual reproduction is another such tool, which ensures enhanced diversity of future generations, so some of the descendants will adapt better and leave more better adapted descendants.

Btw, in this sense cancer is just another tool, that limits lifespan and ensures generations change. Of course, it didn't appear as such, but most species have no natural incentive to develop a resistance to it.

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

#97

Post by breck »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #88
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…

Wikipedia?

Yes, but strongly typed.

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

#99

Post by ISL »

behringer wrote: post #83
jonny_eh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one Tell that to Einstein.

Didn't we recently confirm gravitational waves by checking out a couple interacting black holes, originally theorized by Einstein 100 years ago? I think even Einstein would agree that it was much harder to discover it than to theorize it.

The experiment would never have been done without the theory, and a long line of experiments suggesting that Nature and the theory had a lot to do with one another, first. We knew that gravitational waves, or something very much like them, happened due to the binary pulsar work by Hulse and Taylor in 1974.

Einstein's advance was quite spectacular, and early.

Source: Am gravitational experimentalist.

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

#100

Post by ethbro »

earlINmeyerkeg wrote: post #71
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…

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 fi…

Where does population control enter into this hypothetical?

Because that's the only way you get to post-scarcity.

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