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

Post by m463 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:43 AM UTC

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"!

Post by monocasa » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:52 AM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #81

cryptonector wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Post by ibeckermayer » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #15

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…

Ah yes, the old everything-is-broken-and-software-engineering-has-all-the-answers trope.

Post by toasterlovin » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:28 AM UTC

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…

Post by ascar » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #50

nostrademons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.