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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)

#81

Post by jonny_eh »

cryptonector wrote: post #78
jhbadger wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As typical with contrarians, Ramón y Cajal said some things that held up well and others that didn't. In the same book "Advice for a Young Investigator" that this excerpt is from he also gave his view of theorists: "Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one because it is easier to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon"!

How is that wrong? Clearly anyone who says that is being somewhat facetious / comedic.

> Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one

Tell that to Einstein.

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

#83

Post by behringer »

jonny_eh wrote: post #81
cryptonector wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that wrong? Clearly anyone who says that is being somewhat facetious / comedic.

> Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one Tell that to Einstein.

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.

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

#84

Post by jhbadger »

cryptonector wrote: post #78
jhbadger wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As typical with contrarians, Ramón y Cajal said some things that held up well and others that didn't. In the same book "Advice for a Young Investigator" that this excerpt is from he also gave his view of theorists: "Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one because it is easier to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon"!

How is that wrong? Clearly anyone who says that is being somewhat facetious / comedic.

Well, it's true that we can't really tell how serious he was being. And it is worth remembering he was a neuroscientist who studied neurons. He was probably thinking of people who made complex theories about "how the brain works" without ever designing experiments to test them, not physics theorists.

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

#85

Post by scottlocklin »

enriquto wrote: post #26
scottlocklin wrote: post #5

One of the great Spanish thinkers, criminally underrated in Anglo countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal

I'd rather say he's criminally underrated in Spain. It is definitely easier to hear casually about Ramon y Cajal in "anglo countries" than in Spain. For example, I have spent my childhood in the spanish state, and I first heard about Ramon y Cajal during the first conference that I attended, in Switzerland, from a lovely presentation by an English professor. One of the dramatically few spanish first-rate scientists,…

I learned about him talking to a Spanish plumber while eating a bocadillo.

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

#86

Post by clSTophEjUdRanu »

sadmann1 wrote: post #2

I 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

Doubtful. Just look at computer science. How many people actually grasp what the computer is doing at the lowest level? Relatively few compared to the number of developers there are.

Abstractions are the key.

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

#87

Post by AareyBaba »

ggggtez wrote: post #65
AareyBaba wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>why life is evolvable Sorry, could you explain why you think life is not evolvable exactly? Assuming you take the existence of a single celled organism with DNA as a given (we still don't know the origin of life), evolution gets you the rest of the way rather nicely. Notably, "life" usually contains the assumption that it is evolvable as part of the definition. If the children of the organism can't adapt to the envi…

We know that life is evolvable because life exists and we know the biochemical mechanisms involved (DNA + cellular biochemistry).

Evolution implies a relatively smooth path through "DNA space" from, say for example, an early single cell eukaryote to a mushroom. However the search space is enormous. Even if we account for billions of years of evolution and a trillions of evolutionary experiments each year, a simple random walk with selection through DNA space should go nowhere because of the numbers involved. The curse of dimensionality[0] means there has to be some other principle of nature to make the search space yield a path from one viable life form to another. The search space of life would have to be 'smooth' in some sense. That 'smoothness' is something we don't understand.

If DNA space is just 256 bits (as a dramatic simplification), then 2^256 is a very very big space to search just by chance [1]. Now imagine a space orders of magnitude bigger.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality

[1] https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?t=22 (3Blue1Browns wonderful illustration of how large 2^256 is)

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

#88

Post by cs02rm0 »

breck wrote: post #8

Impressive 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…

Wikipedia?

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

#89

Post by at_a_remove »

throwaway_tech wrote: post #75
at_a_remove wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

>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 cranks. I will most definitely call them that and continue to do so. I no longer camp out like that because I could not bear it any longer. If you would like to spend your life attempting to work out the particulars of some FTL drive that supposedly works by repeatedly raising magnets above the Curie temperature and then lowering them back under it, have at it. Fire up IRC. I suspect you will spend much time laboring to support the ideas of cranks because it simply is not a good use of your time. It was a good use not of my time, either.

That's all it is -- efficient allocation of limited resources. My time, your time, someone else's time. How are these decisions made? How do we decide which of the ideas do we examine first?

If it is "possible greatest payout," then we would spend all of our collective time on perpetual motion devices. They would, after all, be the greatest payout. And yet the patent office won't even look at them.

No, our first filter is: can this be tested? And to test, we must measure. To measure, we must calculate. And there is our math.

Good ideas will bubble up from the bottom, and more than one person will have a good idea. If one of those people does not have the math and another does, then science will eventually get around to the person who has the math.

What's your algorithm for deciding whose ideas get worked on? I bet that it has some kind of criteria attached to it. I doubt you are suggesting selecting humans from across the planet purely at random and asking for their scientific ideas.

Simply put, this is the scientific method. Make a new, better scientific method if you have a better (by whose standards?) algorithm for deciding whose ideas are worth examining first.

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

#90

Post by Koshkin »

cosmodisk wrote: post #79
HenryKissinger wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between the problems physicists were tackling at the turn of the 20th century and the ones we're trying to tackle today is that we don't have the technology or the resources required to build the kind of experiments that would allow us to study these phenomena at a meaningful scale and test out our hypotheses. E.g. https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and... "We Could Solve the Myst…

But the same was 100,200,300 and so years ago. Thete were always some sort of limitations, mostly technological. I'm not saying that we'll build solar system size colliders any time soon, however 50-100 more years and we should be much much more sophisticated in terms of what we can do in space and back on the earth.

Linear extrapolation is not always adequate. I tend to agree with GP that we may be close to a saturation point.
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