Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source?
Book: "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation"
Thanks. Had a hunch that might be it ;-)
Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
121–130 of 241 posts
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
That ignores an enormous about of vehicle safety improvements (roof crush resistance, various collision detection/drift detection, electronic stability control, crumple zones... ad nauseum). That also ignores really impressive improvements in ICE based cars (idle shutdown, cylinder deactivation, reduced pollution). That's not even touching on electric vehicles and self-driving car advances.
The fact that we are still discussing ICE cars proves my poity. The first electric care was built 120 years ago and London had an Electric Bus company (!) in year 1903.
Two inventions were required for BEV's to compete with even 1920's ICE vehicles: the power MOSfet (1970's) and the Lithium-ion battery (1990's).
GM was about to put Lithium-ion batteries in the EV1 when the project was cancelled in 1999. It was less than 10 years later that Tesla introduced it's game changing Roadster. In between Toyota's Hybrid technology both helped and hurt EV development. It helped advance EV tech but reduced commercial and regulatory pressure for pure BEV's.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#123One thing obvious is the breakdown between theory and experiment in physics. Newton's great accomplishment was discovering a link between terrestrial and extraterrestrial physics. Today on the large scale we see it takes multiple kinds of "dark matter" to explain the rotation of galaxies, structure of galaxy clusters, and cosmology. "Dark matter" evades any attempt to detect it on Earth. Einstein's prediction of how…
> the theory for that was developed in 1957 by an Italian physicist who defected to the Soviet Union. (No Nobel Prize!)
This was Bruno Pontecorvo, Enrico Fermi's student and early collaborator. One defected to USSR, another to the USA
> It was Alan Guth's answer to survival in the physics hiring drought of his time.
Credit where credit is due: Andrey Linde's contribution to Inflationary Cosmology cannot be overstated.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#124The entire college phd system is toxic and self serving. At my local college the guy the physic department building was named after was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood and when he died they just mothballed all his "projects" equipment. No one had any idea what it was or what to do with it and it filled a good part of the building. He was not easy to get along with and shot down anything that he…
> was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood Sounds like the beginning of every great scientist's biography.
True, but he died before he ever published anything about it. I was dating a girl that worked there at the time is the only reason I got to see any of this. There were hundreds of these large 6-10ft tall cylinders with lots of science looking stuff in them that were made I guess? for interchanging between some sort of system in a sub zero room full of other equipment. I was kind of impressed at first then more disappointing that literally no one could even tell me what the stuff was or what he was working on. I didn't get to really see what was in the cold room since everything was already disassembled and boxed or piled up in the case where it didn't fit in boxes. Also I don't know what the room is really called but it was made to be cold and was not active at the time I was there.
There were also piles of very expensive scientific machinery that he gutted for single parts. Because apparently simply sourcing the part he needed for say $250k less was beneath his time so since he had tenure and budget he would just order something he already knew had what he wanted and gutted it leaving behind a very expense broken machine/instrument.
He also believed that women brains were incapable of doing science so she didn't really like him much as you could imagine.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
That "lavish funding" era extended largely from WWII, with specific focus on technologies such as radar, fire-control (computers), and the Manhattan Project, was inspired strongly by Vannevar Bush's "Science: The Endless Fronteir" (itself something of an HN perennial), and kicked mightily in the keister by the Sputnik scare and nuclear / missile arms race of the 1960s. By a decade later, numerous factors had taken mu…
I'd add a growing awareness of and concern for the environment. The United States had its "Moore's Law" era for nuclear technology for about 20 years after WW II. After that, concern about weapons test fallout and other environmental releases of radionuclides made experiments much slower and more expensive. To the extent that many ideas never left the drawing board. There are similar stories with chemical technology,…
Oh, absolutely.
I didn't want to head down that rabbit hole, but there are a few lines of argument which lead to the conclusion that the end-stage of most technologies involves both ever-diminishing positive returns and an increased concern in dealing with unintended consequences. I call these "hygiene factors", though environmental concerns would certainly be a prime example.
One framing of this looks at the mechanisms by which technologies achieve results. I've identified nine of these: fuels, materials, energy & power transmission and transformation, technical knowledge ("technology"), causal knowledge ("science"), networks, systems, information, and hygiene. These seem reasonably well-defined.
The area of accelerating rates of returns seems specific to network / dendritic structures (physical, conceptual, or both). Even here, growth ultimately slows, probably best considered governed by a logistic function.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#126The entire college phd system is toxic and self serving. At my local college the guy the physic department building was named after was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood and when he died they just mothballed all his "projects" equipment. No one had any idea what it was or what to do with it and it filled a good part of the building. He was not easy to get along with and shot down anything that he…
Do you really expect useful discussion when you say stuff like this? Normal academia isn't like that.
Then you don't know what normal academia is like.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly because no one has found a modified version of gravity that can explain all of the observed data. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsta.2011...
Why not both? Part of why dark matter is such an attractive explanation is because there are no constraints on it. Unfortunately this seems to have relieved pressure to explore and test modified gravity.
What do you mean there are “no constraints” on dark matter. There are plenty of constraints. I think you just have no idea what you are talking about.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really expect useful discussion when you say stuff like this? Normal academia isn't like that.
Then you don't know what normal academia is like.
I have worked in academia. I can't think of a single prof like that in my department. They exist, but that's not why people choose to spend decades of their life in poor paying jobs.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not both? Part of why dark matter is such an attractive explanation is because there are no constraints on it. Unfortunately this seems to have relieved pressure to explore and test modified gravity.
What do you mean there are “no constraints” on dark matter. There are plenty of constraints. I think you just have no idea what you are talking about.
For example, how much of it there can be or where it comes from. Contrast with Neutrinos.
But you are correct, I don't know what I am talking about which is why my comments were phrased in the form of a question or literally with the words "I don't understand"
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of comments does HN select for?
Shitting on academia is certainly one of them, but lets look at the merit of each comment for themselves. As someone with a lot of friends in academia, but luckily not dependent on it myself, I was quite shocked by the amount of politics, polishing, neck rubbing etc. going on. Scientists present as very clean and orderly to the outside, but the process of writing a paper and getting it published is usually super mess…
I don't want to say of course it is, but of course it is.
It's an environment full of smart and hungry and competitive people. There are politics, yes, but you can damn well choose to avoid them, especially if you offer value.
Nobody in any industry presents all of the warts and difficulties of getting to a solution. If you wanted to hear about six years of failed experiments, I've got lots of time, but I feel like you don't want to hear it and neither do the people reading and writing research papers.
You'll find that outside of the superstar schools, the smaller schools (certain depts) are staffed with brilliant people. They'll tell you about the nuances of academia if you're a normal person but they're not going to show up on HN where people say what they do is worthless, so people get warped views of what the majority of it is.