Ramón and Cajal, two great thinkers.
If this was a joke, it's a pretty good one
It's probably one of the most widely known jokes in Spain.
The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
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Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#52I do wonder if every generation picks slightly higher hanging fruits in science will there come a time when a single human lifetime won't be enough to digest even the most specialised domain of science in order to build upon it
A sometimes-spoken hope is that the universe is built on relatively simple rules with complex behaviors. If fields grow too complex, they hope to find some underlying principle that explains (away) that complexity.
We started out that way, I dunno if we'll end that way.
And even if it does eventually come down to 30 rules that explain everything? How many rules does Chess have? Way more than Go, and both can take decades to really understand.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
"Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has been thoroughly mastered by many ;) I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science and its applications. In my mind, science is about understanding the world, whereas fields like engineering/medicine are about their practical applications. I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology et…
> "Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has been thoroughly mastered by many ;)
Well done!
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#54Impressive 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…
I am attempting to imagine the horror of wading through all of the pull requests received by, say, the physics department. Requests were awful enough when postage stamps were required. You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math."
>You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math."
You're not wrong, but, it is important to note there also isn't a shortage of great physicist who "just need someone else to work out the math."
For example in 1846, Faraday proposed that visible light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. But because he couldn’t back up the idea with mathematics, his colleagues ignored it. It took 18 years for Maxwell to come along and prove it.
This sentiment about math is so cringe, because it is the same type of prejudice of social class that Faraday himself fought against his whole life being the son of a poor smith. Not to mention physicists such as Carl Sagen, generally held in high esteem within the physics community, always preached of an eventual point in physics that transcends math (i.e. something more fundamental and basic) to describe the universe.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am attempting to imagine the horror of wading through all of the pull requests received by, say, the physics department. Requests were awful enough when postage stamps were required. You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math."
>You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math." You're not wrong, but, it is important to note there also isn't a shortage of great physicist who "just need someone else to work out the math." For example in 1846, Faraday proposed that visible light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. But because he couldn’t back up the idea with mathematics, his c…
It isn't prejudice, or classism, or any -ism, it pure numbers. 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.
Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments. And woe betide those who want to say "by the way, your idea leads to perpetual motion/faster-than-light travel, so I will not bother." I personally have experienced soul-crushing numbers of philosophers who happen to think they've disproven special relativity who are also under the impression that the Michelson-Morley experiment was performed precisely once and everyone just sort of ... ran with it, never looking back.
Who has time to weed through this sort of thing? It isn't ideas that physicists lack for, not in the least.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#56Ramón 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…
This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
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 our understanding of the universe
2. There are lots of things we do not understand at small scales (Casimir effect/vacuum energy relationship, plank scale effects, why the particle soup, gravity on very small scale, reason behind asymmetry in helicity/weak interaction and other parity/symmetry related effects, doing "useful" calculation with renormalization group, etc). Each of those could potentially revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
There is also a lot to be done in our understanding of computing (as in, nature of computation)
1. Computation related problems (Church-Turing thesis, novel algorithmics + computing platforms such as quantum computing). Is approximately correct/probabilistic computing a loophole for getting essentially/mostly correct results in P time for NP-hard problems? Nature of AGI/what enables sapience when doing computing.
Of course as we go into "less fundamental" sciences like chemistry/biology/etc then the amount to be learned is just overwhelming, we truly know very little.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#57Ramón 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…
This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
The origin of life, why life is evolvable, the evolution of the complexity in a eukaryote cell, and multicellular consciousness/intelligence are to me big unanswered questions in science.
Although, life can be reduced to chemistry and chemistry to physics I feel we are missing some high-level self-organizing principle of the universe.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
You don't send a message if the receiver can't understand it.
People need to have a point of contact with that extrapolated future to became a popular science fiction work, even the culture in the far future fiction is usually pretty similar to our own (or at least, the one of the moment where that book was written).
Present works (not the ones with inherited universes from old ones) are updated to our current expectations of the future, so you have sentient computers and other "possible" technology, and probably in 50 years we will have a different set of standards and not something as naive as what used to stand as possible 50 years before.
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has been thoroughly mastered by many ;) I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science and its applications. In my mind, science is about understanding the world, whereas fields like engineering/medicine are about their practical applications. I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology et…
I think the point of the "End of Science" argument is that any discoveries in biology (and physics) will merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles. For example, CRISPR. Many people think that CRISPR was an amazing discovery, but really, it's just a biological system that has existed for a long, long time, where a collection of smart p…
DNA as the molecule of encoding information for heredity is also "merely" a discovery of an ancient biological system. However, it's not as though physics predicts the existence of DNA specifically, or CRISPR, yet these things are important for understanding biology, and in the case of CRISPR it's been turned into a technology that humans can use. Which is why I have a lot of complaints about the commonly held belief such as this one:
> merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles.
This is not a meaningful or thoughtful examination of even chemistry. 3D structure of proteins is "merely" an elaboration of physical properties, yet "physics" doesn't have the tools to make much progress on solving the 3D structure of a sequence of amino acids, despite it being a purely physics process.
Is the world "physical" in the sense that probably don't have new fundamental forces of nature? Of course. That doesn't mean that physics helps understand much of the physical world, because the "elaboration" in the "merely elaboration" has nothing to do what physicists or other scientists consider "physics."
Re: The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)
#60I do wonder if every generation picks slightly higher hanging fruits in science will there come a time when a single human lifetime won't be enough to digest even the most specialised domain of science in order to build upon it
Scientific "unified" models hide this complexity by abstracting it away so we can keep chipping away at the next level. We can navigate this hierarchy, up or down, to understand respectively large- and small-scale behavior, and the hierarchical model makes it so humans can still comprehend at a given level of abstraction.
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