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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)

#151

Post by earlINmeyerkeg »

taneq wrote: post #103
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…

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.

I mean we could hash out all hypothetical all day. I'm just saying that the needs of the economy would shift to that where a PhD basically becomes the new High School Diploma. In essence, entry level jobs would be stuff that today would legitimately require a masters or higher.

I'm not saying that 100% of that 50% will be employable in this world. I'm saying that over time that 50% will inevitably become that bare minimum. The way I see it is 150 years ago, your idea would be that we couldn't possibly get all children to become educated at an 8th grade level, yet here we are, even making an HSD the bare minimum.

Eventually your masters thesis will be an area for you to study and pursue to make an attempt at furthering society.

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

#152

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

dekhn wrote: post #142
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I'm filling in the blanks here correctly, what we're still far away from is determining the folded configuration of an arbitrary polypeptide. Is that correct? Or has there been real breakthroughs there? 10 years ago when I last checked in with some folk I knew from EMBL, this still seemed to be a complete pipedream.

Is there a paper that describes the parameters of the peptide structure that go into the "physics do the folding" part? When I was at EMBL, I was focused on using local hydrophobicity to see how predictive it was (not at all). Is the physics model operating at this level, above it, or below it?

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

#153

Post by mikorym »

sabas123 wrote: post #139
mikorym wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that successful theorists are exactly those who discover phenomena. Saunders Mac Lane is perhaps the epitome in mathematics of someone who was guided by phenomena. This is why category theory was not discovered, it was reverse engineered! The reverse engineering steps were: 3. Natural transformations 2. Functors 1. Categories Edit: Of course, when he said theorist I think he meant people who don't experim…

Can't you similarly say that category theory is just us abstracting previously known knowledge like we do with software?

Yes, but that would be a more generic description. All of mathematics abstracts previously partially known knowledge.

When we went from 1 coconut -> the set {1}, then we were being really abstract for the times.

But I think your point is that category theory synthesises group theory, linear algrebra, topology, etc. into one concept, which was very much the spirit of the origins of category theory. However, Mac Lane and Eilenberg thought that their diagrams were just an aid to mathematics (much like a Venn diagram, Cayley diagram or a Feynman diagram). But when they realised that natural transformations are so ubiquitous and fundamental, then they realised that their graphs were not just a useful shorthand, but in fact would lead to a whole new type of mathematics. When people thought (not Mac Lane though) category theory was "abstract nonsense" they were making this mistake of thinking that the diagrams are illustrations rather than concrete mathematics.

In the same way, you might thing that {1,2,3} is just an illustration, but in fact it is a rigorous shorthand for a very specific set.

The real meat behind category theory are things like natural transformations and adjunctions. But to get to category theory from there, you do a kind of reverse engineering.

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

#154

Post by breck »

at_a_remove wrote: post #150
throwaway_tech wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 s…

Is there perhaps a way to separate the behavior of someone from your term for them in general? There could be "cranky behavior", but perhaps these are otherwise normal people who are just amateurs in the field of physics (or other subject) who don't yet know their hand from their foot.

Might there be a constructive way to benefit from the comments provided by cranky behavior? I'm not suggesting taking direction from folks with no experience, but perhaps cataloging the comments on this IRC channel to see what the distribution is.

Perhaps don't think too hard about the solutions proposed in these comments, but instead what problem areas do they fall into. And then from that perhaps there's an opportunity, if not for new research, for creating some better synthesized educational resource that might help people get up to speed faster.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by at_a_remove »

breck wrote: post #154
at_a_remove wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Is there perhaps a way to separate the behavior of someone from your term for them in general? There could be "cranky behavior", but perhaps these are otherwise normal people who are just amateurs in the field of physics (or other subject) who don't yet know their hand from their foot. Might there be a constructive way to benefit from the comments provided by cranky behavior? I'm not suggesting taking direction from…

That will not help. I am talking about people who refused to draw even the most basic diagrams or perform high school algebra. Also, any result or experiment leading to their pet idea not working was immediately rejected. It's little more than "someone else needs to do the heavy lifting to prove me right." They aren't going to do anything more than restate their idea, again and again, and then be angry that nobody is rushing to have large universities working on prototypes.

John Baez has a lovely "Crackpot Index" that is an excellent jumping off point for a description of your average crank contact. It would be different for IRC but not dissimilar.

I know you're trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, but experience hasn't shown that it is worth it or even feasible.

As I said before, even the patent office has given up on perpetual motion machines.

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