The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897) • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by ivalm » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

ramblerman wrote: post #133

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…

> gravity at high energies Not a physicist so excuse the ignorance, but do we understand gravity at all? I mean afaik we can observe and predict it's behaviors but do we understand what underlying force causes it, and if it potentially has a counter force.

Well, at sufficiently low energies and sufficiently large length scales we can say gravity is how space time curves under the influence of energy (principly from gravitational mass; another mystery, why gravitational and inertial masses proportional to each other). This picture is called general relativity and it works very well in a wide range of regimes (from motion of planets and galaxies to merger of black holes). However, there should be an exchange of force carrier description (quantums of graviton) at small enough scales or very large energy densities where we fail to make the math work (because we expect certain properties/symmetries from gravitons).

So the word "understand" is a bit loaded. GR is a certain understanding of how gravity works, but it is not a "quantum mechanical" understanding.

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

#142

Post by dekhn » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #118

dekhn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

If we can simulate protein folding well enough, why was the Google announcement last year such a big deal? I worked in protein folding over 30 years ago at EMBL, and have loosely followed it since. I could easily have been led astray, but I was absolutely not under the impression that we can do this even close to "well enough".

I work at Google and did protein folding before the Deepmind (not Google) announcement.

The CASP results weren't really a big deal. It was a modest advancement using techniques that were already spreading throughout the community, coupled with a skilled team that understood the score metric very well.

Two state folders can be reversibly folded using empirically determined force fields (two state folders basically go from "any totally unfolded configuration" to "fully folded single structure" in milliseconds); we can just run simulations and let the (quantum-inspired, classically embedded) physics do the folding, or we can use other techniques, like Rosetta (monte carlo plus lots of empirical data from known structures), or evolutionary data-based techniques (like Deepmind and others used).

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

#143

Post by nabnob » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

bobajeff wrote: post #132

behringer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There have also been serious doubts over that discovery: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032022-600-exclusiv...

So their method for finding the signal was to calculate the signal, then subtract it from the data and see if the residual noise looks like noise...how is that good science? It seems like it would be too easy to make your data fit the theory.

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

#144

Post by bordercases » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #119

bordercases wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Computation is not slow. Operating systems might be slow. Applications might be slow. SaaS might be slow. But computation is not slow, and if you care about speed, you do computation in a context where the aforementioned issues are not issues.

Negate the operating environments that calculations are made in and the operating environments are not an issue, alright.

There definitely is a lot of bloat in the software world, but even large bioninformatics organizations have their own data-pipeline management teams to keep these issues in spec.

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

#145

Post by toasterlovin » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #136

toasterlovin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fertility is heritable. Population will probably continue to rise.

And yet, basically every developed country is below the replacement rate.

Below replacement fertility is a recent phenomenon (last couple of generations). Evolution works in multiples of generations. We’re at the very beginning of evolving resistance to modernity.

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

#146

Post by toasterlovin » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

morog wrote: post #130

toasterlovin wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am inclined to say the real problem is that smart people don’t have kids. But we’ll probably figure out how to make all babies intelligent before that becomes a problem. Incidentally, the problem you mention will also be solved in the same way.

genuine question - what do you mean by smart people? High IQ? Deep knowledge about mankind's place in the Universe / natural order? or their ability to maximise their own personal happiness over their lifetime? If the last point, then personal experience would suggest that having kids makes you happier person (once they are sleeping through the night)YMMV

High IQ.

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

#147

Post by dekhn » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

ascar wrote: post #129

dekhn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> proloxify the feeblegarps Did you just invent these two words? I googled them separately and your comment is litterally the only hit. Chapeau!

Yes. The idea is that if we "break out" of whatever simulation we purportedly exist within, none of the concepts in the enclosing universe would make any sense to us.

(I happened to be watching How A Plumbus is Made when I wrote the comment, btw).

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

#148

Post by throwaway_tech » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:00 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #89

throwaway_tech wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/dispro…

No, it is not classism, it is finiteness of resources. The constraining factor is the number of experiments we can perform based on what we have. Those accelerators do not just whiff themselves into existence as fast as people have ideas. We could wave our CRISPR wand and produce an army of geniuses, we would still need those experimental setups to test out the ideas, and those costs both money and time. Cranks are c…

>No, it is not classism, it is finiteness of resources.

Education is not a finite resource (I think you know that and hence you changed the goal post from math to experiments).

Nevertheless, when those that have the resources look down on those without (calling them cranks), based not on the merit of their ideas but based on the lack of resources to prove the ideas...that is classism.

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

#149

Post by seedie » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #146

morog wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuine question - what do you mean by smart people? High IQ? Deep knowledge about mankind's place in the Universe / natural order? or their ability to maximise their own personal happiness over their lifetime? If the last point, then personal experience would suggest that having kids makes you happier person (once they are sleeping through the night)YMMV

High IQ.

The criticisms section in the Fertility and intelligence article on Wikipedia is interesting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#C...

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

#150

Post by at_a_remove » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

throwaway_tech wrote: post #148

at_a_remove wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not classism, it is finiteness of resources. The constraining factor is the number of experiments we can perform based on what we have. Those accelerators do not just whiff themselves into existence as fast as people have ideas. We could wave our CRISPR wand and produce an army of geniuses, we would still need those experimental setups to test out the ideas, and those costs both money and time. Cranks are c…

>No, it is not classism, it is finiteness of resources. Education is not a finite resource (I think you know that and hence you changed the goal post from math to experiments). Nevertheless, when those that have the resources look down on those without (calling them cranks), based not on the merit of their ideas but based on the lack of resources to prove the ideas...that is classism.

You cannot do the experiments without math. We both know this. We must have a predicted value for an experiment. We must use math to create the experimental apparatus. We must use math to examine our results and to look for acceptable error bars.

Education is absolutely a finite resource. We have finite universities and finite educators. The lifetime required to attain an education is also a finite resource, as you simply cannot have a workable society while also requiring that everyone get a PhD in anything they have an "idea" about.

Limitations about. We must make choices against them. We could do quite a lot of particle research should we decide to disassemble the solar system and re-purpose it into an accelerator, yet I will gently suggest that this proposal will not achieve much traction.

However, knock yourself out. You can manage to join IRC and fight against classism by spending your time working to support the ideas of people whom you will not call cranks. Prove me wrong by doing it for the next ten years. Time isn't a finite resource, right?

You still will not engage with the most basic thrust of this: we cannot entertain everyone's ideas simultaneously and decisions must be made as to which are examined first. Anything but that is some form of -ism because you have a selection criteria that might ignore an idea.

So we are left having to come up with some kind of heuristic to examine some ideas and not others. This is the scientific method. Is your idea testable? And if you claim it is, what values will we measure that are different from what currently exists?

Propose your alternate method. Then, tell me how you are going to exclude the people who, say, want to glue crystals to engine exteriors to improve the combustion efficiency, without anything seeming even a trifle discriminatory.