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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)

#101

Post by ethbro »

Koshkin wrote: post #90
cosmodisk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Linear extrapolation is not always adequate. I tend to agree with GP that we may be close to a saturation point.

We're possibly within a few orders of magnitude of the saturation point, wielding the resources of a single planet.

Which leaves the obvious path forward...

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

#102

Post by krastanov »

ethbro wrote: post #100
earlINmeyerkeg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty much any study of the past century and any projection from reputable sources says that populations reach equilibrium and stop growing as the level of education, in particular education of women, rises.

This is a non-problem that has always taken care of itself in any developed country and we have no reason to believe it will not take care of itself in the developing world as well.

The UN for instance does not believe there will be 10 billion humans on earth ever (where "ever" means "as long as projections have any value").

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

#103

Post by taneq »

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…

The 50% of the population who are blue collar workers aren’t going to retrain as particle physicist or theoretical computer scientists one they get their UBI.

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

#104

Post by ethbro »

krastanov wrote: post #102
ethbro wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does population control enter into this hypothetical? Because that's the only way you get to post-scarcity.

Pretty much any study of the past century and any projection from reputable sources says that populations reach equilibrium and stop growing as the level of education, in particular education of women, rises. This is a non-problem that has always taken care of itself in any developed country and we have no reason to believe it will not take care of itself in the developing world as well. The UN for instance does not…

The belief that world population will self-level at some point does not mean that it will self-level prior to resource exhaustion.

The fact that we're cooking the planet with ~8B does not bode well for what even 10B looks like.

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

#105

Post by taneq »

ethbro wrote: post #100
earlINmeyerkeg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Education, quality of life and equal opportunities for women. As these increase, the birth rate goes down. Most countries that score highly in these areas actually have below replacement birth rates and only grow in population due to immigration.

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

#106

Post by jonshariat »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #21
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

Right now, science has an emphasis on causal discovery. Showing that X is a mechanism by which Y happens. That includes finding the different X's for a Y and finding evidence for the relationship between a given X and Y. Once you know how a thing works, that doesn't necessarily make it easy to work with it. For example in quantum mechanics, a common phrase is "shut up and calculate" because the mental models are all…

Ever since I saw this animation [1] of the difference between a heliocentric vs geocentric view of the planets, I always see complexity in a new light. The geocentric movements are all technically correct (thats how they move in relation to the earth) but once the true state is discovered it becomes so much more simple.

1. http://www.malinc.se/math/trigonometry/geocentrismen.php

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

#107

Post by wasdfff »

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

I don’t think thats a huge worry. Science is pretty much like that now—no one is a walking encyclopedia. Studying all of known physics top to bottom would probably take you a few lifetimes.

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

#108

Post by dcow »

dumbfounder wrote: post #72
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.

Until we can create a copy of our own universe, I don’t think people will stop. It’s possible that in this pursuit we’ll keep discovering higher and levels of understanding or in other words that more answers will always lead to more questions.

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

#109

Post by bordercases »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #21
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

Right now, science has an emphasis on causal discovery. Showing that X is a mechanism by which Y happens. That includes finding the different X's for a Y and finding evidence for the relationship between a given X and Y. Once you know how a thing works, that doesn't necessarily make it easy to work with it. For example in quantum mechanics, a common phrase is "shut up and calculate" because the mental models are all…

> Meanwhile, maybe we get smarter and live longer. The calculations involved with many areas of modern science have already outpaced what we can do by hand, but we invented computers, so I can take the mean of a zillion numbers without much effort and spend my time elsewhere.

With software being as slow as it is despite massive speedups, and even despite despite massive speedups, we really are still not good enough at using our computers to their fullest capacity which still means getting insights into complexity before crunching the numbers.

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

#110

Post by simonh »

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.

Without the theory, how well do you think the funding submission for the experiment would have gone? Two laser interferometers a couple of kilometres long in specially built tunnels, with super sensitive custom equipment costing millions of dollars running for years just on the off chance? Sure, here’s the cheque!
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