Elite Underproduction

There's a lot of unexplained weird shit today, too, including the arrow of time, turbulence, dark matter, dark energy, "tuning" of physical constants, solar flares, extreme-energy cosmic rays, ball lightning, the unresolved inconsistency between quantum mechanics and special relativity, structures up to the edge of greatness like the Sloan Wall, the bizarrely low-entropy state the universe began in, and consciousness. Short gamma-ray bursts were finally explained in 02017 thanks to LIGO. (The explanation had been hypothesized previously, but Lucretius correctly hypothesized the explanation for Brownian motion, too, 2080 years ago.) You may be interested in my longer overview in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119.

Your list of 6 weird turds unexplained in 01900 is mostly correct, except that #6 was correctly explained by Rayleigh in terms of Maxwellian electrodynamics in 01881, and Fizeau correctly explained the redshift of stellar spectra in terms of the Doppler effect in 01848, though of course not the spectra themselves. We could add, "Why is the Andromeda Nebula's spectrum so smeared out?" (leading to the Shapley-Curtis Great Debate in 01920), "How can the Earth be older than the Sun?", and "What powers Becquerel's uranium rays?"

The quote from Kelvin in this thread turns out to be incorrect (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Thomson#Misattributed https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/physics/lord-kelvin-...) but Albert Michelson did make just such a claim in 01894:

While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.

The curious thing is that Michelson in 01894 already knew about at least four of your five weird pieces of shit (the Schottky diode had been discovered but was not yet well known), as well as numerous others. In fact, he was personally responsible for discovering #2 in 01887.

So how could even Michelson make such a grievous error, the same error you're making now?

Well, I guess he underestimated the importance of the pieces of shit that were unexplained.

However, I think that error is less understandable today, though, since among the things we know we know virtually nothing about are the nature of 95% of the mass in the universe and the bulk dynamics of plasma, the state of matter in which we see 99% of the remaining 5%.

There's still the question of whose coattails we'll be riding in 100 years, assuming we somehow manage to survive. The Nobel Prize is imperfect and backward-looking by nature, but it suggests Ghez and Gensel for discovering Sagittarius A*, Penrose for black hole robustness, Mayor and Queloz for discovering exoplanets, Peebles for physical cosmology stuff including dark matter, Mourou and Strickland for petawatt lasers by chirped pulse amplification, Ashkin for optical tweezers, Barish and Thorne and Weiss for LIGO, Thouless and Haldane and Kosterlitz for topological order in matter, Kajita and McDonald for neutrino oscillations, Nakamarua and Amano and Akasaki for blue LEDs, and Higgs and Englert for explaining why things have mass. Those coattails doesn't seem obviously worse than the list from the corresponding years 100 years earlier: Guillaume for invar, Stark for spectral line splitting, Planck for quantum physics, Barkla for X-ray spectroscopy, the Braggs and Laue for X-ray diffraction, and Onnes for liquid helium.

But you don't yet know, for example, the significance of optical tweezers for submicron 3-D fabrication, of dark matter for interstellar propulsion, or of topological phase transitions for sustaining life in the Degenerate Era. (Of course I don't know them either; I'm not a time traveler.) NOVA hasn't even made an episode about topological order yet, so you don't yet understand that today's physics advances are fully as important as those of a century ago.

Consider the innovations evident in The Atlantic in November 01921: https://archive.org/details/walpolebeauty00beck. The Victrola (Edison, 01877), tires with anti-skid treads (Dunlop and Continental, 01904), chemical weapons (book review of "The Next War", p. 10; in theory Playfair's cacodyl cyanide, 01854, but more realistically the Hague Convention in 01899, and then massively in 01914), air war, pewter, eugenics, silk lampshades, the electric chair, aeronautics (not yet understood theoretically, so we have to credit the Wrights, 01903), Haldane's metaphysical speculations about "relativity", automobiles (arguably the Oshkosh steam car in 01878, the Flocken Electrowagen in 01888, or the second Marcus car in 01875), motion pictures (Muybridge, 01878, or Anschütz, 01894, or Le Prince, 01886, or Dickson and Edison, 01891-4), thermostats from the Minneapolis Heat Regulator Co. (Drebbel, 01620), clamp-on electric lamps (based on Edison's 1880s designs), personalized pencils with erasers (Lipman, 01858), Smith-Corona portable typewriters ("seniors' theses MUST be typewritten") (Rose, 01906), prenatal clinics, the welfare state ("if we can tax so heavily for purposes of war without raising a protest...", "The taking over by towns and states...of the responsibility for the care and prevention of tuberculosis...meant..."), kindergarten, workmen's comp ("greatly increased demand for safety appliances"), Prohibition, the traction plough, the Panama Canal, "The terrible world-upheaval through which we have just passed...the great war", the resulting inflation of the pound, passports, the SS Imperator, the Bolshevik revolution, the "roar of the city", buses, the League of Nations, and so on.

The crucial thing about this litany is that not one of this astounding list of innovations owes anything to Guillaume, Stark, Planck, Barkla, the Braggs, Laue, or Onnes. Then, even more than now, applied science rode on the coat-tails of basic science from generations before.

I mean, anarchy is about removing the central state first and foremost. The economics bit is where these folks differ from the traditional anarchists.

I am one of the people the author talks about. I studied mathematics, then became a programmer (though I never chased 0,01 per cent advantages in stock markets), now I am a writer who also programs something from time to time.

One of the reasons why I didn't stay in science and started doing other things was that most of the fruit seemed to be hanging really high. With the entire humanity doing more and more research for decades, it is much harder to find interesting unsolved problems that aren't devilishly complicated than, say, 70 or 100 years ago.

This is something that the author seems to ignore. Writing a new book or developing a new application or feature is a satisfying feeling, because you gave birth to something complete and beautiful. Discovering a minor property of some algebraic group does not feel anywhere as good, unless you by some chance stumble upon something really unexpected and big. Which most researchers never do.

The second problem is the academia. The academia is beset by weird personal vendettas and vicious fights for relatively small grants. I didn't like that environment.

Rajchman had two students, one of whom (Antoni Zygmund, who also studied under Mazurkiewicz, and founded the Chicago school of analysis) had 40 students, five of whom had over 100 students of their own. 18 of those 40 had at least one student of their own. Consequently Rajchman had 1658 descendants in only a century, a mentorship growth rate of 7.7% per year despite Rajchman himself having his career cut short by being murdered by the Nazis in 01940 and apparently ceasing to mentor anyone officially for the previous 15 years of his career.