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Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?
An anonymous reader writes "In decades and centuries past, scientific genius was easy to quantify. Those scientists who were able to throw off the yoke of established knowledge and break new ground on their own are revered and respected. But as humanity, as a species, has gotten better at science, and the basics of most fields have been refined over and over, it's become much harder for any one scientist to make a mark on the field. There's still plenty we don't know, but so much of it is highly specialized that many breakthroughs are understood by only a handful. Even now, the latest generation is more likely to be familiar with the great popularizers of science, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Carl Sagan, than of the researchers at the forefront of any particular field. "...most scientific fields aren't in the type of crisis that would enable paradigm shifts, according to Thomas Kuhn's classic view of scientific revolutions. Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways." Will we ever again see a scientist get recognition like Einstein did?"
Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?
No.
Well, this article is right. And will remain right, until the next big breakthrough.
...
At which point, it'll probably be irrelevant, so
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Isn't this like saying we now know everything major, so only minor things are left to discover.
Seems a bit dubious since there are massive voids in our scientific knowledge in many fields.
And, didn't we just find a Higgs Boson(s) recently?
The guy who came up with PCR while driving on the road to Santa Cruz California would make the question in the Title completely silly and irrelevant.
Is slashdot becoming like yahoo or something? Snazzy titles to suck people like me in, but once I consider what the title is saying, it is really just absurd.
There was just a question the other day asking if we were past the age of invention. I believe one of the tags on it was "retarded."
I doubt it because look at the achievements of people like Craig Venter. The importance of his work is still largely unrecognized, as suggested by the fact that he still hasn't received the Nobel prize (and I firmly believe he deserves it). It could be that the impact of their work is still too fresh to be assessed. There are still lots of groundbreaking scientific discoveries waiting out there, like room-temperature superconductors, the cure to cancer, teleportation, tractor beams... Maybe the question will be deemed silly in 50 years. Who knows?
I'm pretty sure whoever figures that one out will be famous.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Is groundbreaking science over? No, not remotely. Is the era where groundbreaking science is publicized and sort of vaguely understood by a lot of non-scientists over? Probably not, but that's at least closer to the truth.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Ask people who are famous scientists, and you'll get Einstein, Newton, and maybe a few modern ones like Watson and Crick, or Stephen Hawking (who incidentally probably IS more famous than any of those listed in the summary, and also has been at the forefront of his field).
So you have two big ones separated by a few centuries, then a scattering of scientists who are in the modern era. Going by that timeframe, we're highly likely to see groundbreaking research by a new famous scientist in the next 300 years.
Also, Edison was a GREAT scientist (j/k, j/k, have mercy, mods!)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The greatest scientists of our generation will not be truly known until many years from now, when we can look back on the contributions with a greater understanding of the truth.
No it wasn't.
No scientist knew if atoms were real or not, and they knew it, and they had no mechanistic explanation for the regularities in the recently understood periodic table, and they knew it. They had no mechanistic quantitative explanation for chemical reactions or reaction rates, and knew it.
Right now, physicists know that they have no good, experimentally confirmed, ideas for explaining
a) dark matter
b) dark energy
c) the variety of arbitrary parameters in the standard model
They have an large selection of theoretical proposals for the above.
Today they do have good knowledge about virtually all materials and energetic processes typically occurring and observable on Earth,
That's a difference from the 19th century.
Is groundbreaking science over? No, not remotely. Is the era where groundbreaking science is publicized and sort of vaguely understood by a lot of non-scientists over? Probably not, but that's at least closer to the truth.
Sorry to self reply, but another thought: the only reason people ask this stupid question or make the implied statement is that there's just do damn much groundbreaking science done today. Yes, it's harder to stand out than it was a couple hundred years ago. No, it's not because progress is slower - it's just ubiquitous. Science is more amazing than ever and in a hundred years it will be more amazing yet.
Shit, I think I'm arguing for the existence of something analogous to Kurzweil's moronic singularity.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
In the late 1990's someone proclaimed that there was nothing more to invent, and he was proven to be very very wrong ...
Now someone is trying the same thing, again, while tweaking the wording a little bit, by adding "groundbreaking" in the proclamation
It gonna be as wrong as that guy in the late 1990's.
Science progresses on.
Groundbreaking or not, that's not the issue.
For new breakthrough in science always "stand" on the shoulders of all the previous scientific findings
Furthermore, how do you define "groundbreaking" ?
Does one actually have to "break some ground" to be groundbreaking ?
How about some new ideas being applied to older subjects, which yield new findings ?
Would that be counted as "groundbreaking" ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There IS ground breaking science. Dark matter, dark energy, experimental measurements of cosmological inflation: our picture of the large scale structure of the universe has changed dramatically. Higgs bosons, neutrino mass: our picture of the microscopic structure of the universe has changed. We've found hundreds of extra-solar planets. We've built giant particle accelerators and telescopes, huge computers and data networks, peta-watt and X-ray lasers. We've sequenced the DNA of many creatures, including some that are extinct - and which we may bring back.We have pictures from the surface of a moon of Saturn, and an car driving around Mars.
Starting next year: Downgrade six planets illegally and you'll get booted off the Internets.
Furthermore, Yes, Virginia, everything that can be invented already has. Close the patent office.
Only if ideas can be patented, in which case, yeah, we might expect science to grind to a halt.
Gee, I thought 'anonymous' only hacked networks.
Who knew you also work on particle physics....
Einstein was famous because his discovered relativity. If he didn't discover it, someone else would have, and they would have been approximately as famous as Einstein.
There are lots of really famous scientists like bohr, heisenberg, feynman, etc. They did amazing groundbreaking work. And that wasn't even too long ago. Some science involves spending billions of dollars on particle accelerators to verify existing hypotheses, but it still takes visionaries (like Peter Higgs) to come up with the ideas worth building an LHC to verify.
To say that no one will ever be as famous as einstein, is to say that there isn't anything else out there that we could learn that would be as mind blowing as relativity. Maybe that's true, but I don't see any reason to believe it is true.
After Newton came up with his laws, I'm sure the scientists of the time felt they'd pretty much figured it out. Sure there was some details that needed filling in, but Newton had hit the nail on the head and it was just a matter of time before everything else fell into place with this new knowledge. Why would anything contradict these laws? They are so perfect!
Well it turns out they weren't so perfect afterall, and observations did contradict Newtons laws that they had to be wrong in some fundamental way. Nothing but a revolutionary theory was going to make sense of it.
We are already in a time when stuff doesn't make sense. Phase 1 complete. All we need is for someone to complete phase 2 and come up with a clean equation (or a crazy dirty one) that explains it all, and phase 3 build a really fucking expensive death ray type device to open a portal into another dimension to verify that it's right. What an exciting time we live in.
When you read about scientific history, it seems like discoveries come so fast because we get to skip all the boring parts. In the present it seems to go so slow because we can't fast forward. But in reality things are going so much faster now. Maybe the next great scientists will be an artificial intelligence that we create.
500 years ago: scientific research is done by aristocrats as a self-funded hobby, or sometimes by priests after the Catholic Church got over it's butthurt on heliocentrism. Printing is exorbitantly expensive and education for the general population. There might have been hundreds of Issac Newtons born in a generation, but they ended up working on farms or in the military, not going to an academy.
Now: research is directly sponsored by governments. You don't have to be in the priesthood or be the child of rich parents to go to secondary school anymore - though the latter certainly helps with admissions and student loans. The Mars Rovers were huge government funded, collaborative projects, not a hobby by Bill Gates. And of course the Internet allows sharing of data at a speed and volume that Newton never could have imagined.
You would hope the "anonymous reader" would have thought about this after a couple seconds, and is just posing the question for conversational purposes....
'Big Al' didn't get IP from the 'ergs from mass' thing.
Where's my cold fusion?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
All the low-hanging fruit -- i.e. discoveries -- have mostly been discovered and what remains requires the "big science" projects like CERN that involve hundreds or thousands of scientists. Or... today's scientists just don't measure up to the Einsteins, Bohrs, et al. (OK... I've got on my Nomex longjohns on... fire away.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
" Those scientists who were able to throw off the yoke of established knowledge and break new ground on their own are revered and respected."... many years later. Their contemporaries often criticized and ridiculed them, even threatening excommunication if they didn't recant.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Sure, Einstein was ground breaking, but apart from E=mc^2, how many people know what he did (or even what it means)? How many know of the photoelectric effect? Relativity and quantum mechanics gets thrown around a lot as buzzwords, but most people have no idea what they mean.
So you might consider that Einstein has become a great popularizers of science - unintentionally, but most people know that he was in a physicist, and don't really have a clue what he did.
You seem to want groundbreaking to mean both Famous and Important Contributions. But I'm not sure how long it took for Einstein to become a household name. And you also want it to be One man/woman. That might not be as realistic anymore. Because research in most areas requires lots of equipments and teams (except in a few areas - theoretical mathematics and physics come to mind). But just because it is a team, doesn't make it any less valuable.
In fact, I prefer teams and organizations get recognition. Students and the younger crowd have something concrete to work towards. Not "I want to be the next XYZ", but instead "I want to work at XYZ". They might have a hero-worship of the organization, but will still work hard towards something measurable.
If time travel ever is discoverable, where are all the time travelers?
Similar with FTL - where are all the aliens (and, again, time travelers)?
There are some fundamentals like the arrow of time and the absolute barrier of c that seems inviolate, as otherwise we would have seen evidence that we just don't see.
Sure, there is lots more to discover, but discovering limits is also discovery.
The book I'm reading at the moment, The God Problem, has a nice theory* replacing dark energy with gravity by proposing the shape of our universe as a 3D torus (or bagel as described in the book). I'm only about 10% of the way through, pretty big book, but finding it entertaining so far and if it continues to hold up in the face of verifiable data it would change our entire view of the universe. It's even calculated the potential end of the universe, when it annihilates with it's anti-matter cousin, as being under 2 billion years away and back to a cyclical pattern, which I find comforting compared to the deep freeze!
*It's not a new theory as the torus hypothesis has been around for awhile, but the data matching up with the shape does lend more creditability.
Many seem to be declaring that a new breakthrough is right around the corner. But I suspect they don't realize how successful our current theories already are. In fundamental physics, we simply can't find anything that deviates from our current theories at scales smaller than a galaxy and at energies small enough to be relevant to anything except the big bang and future particle colliders. What would a breakthrough in fundamental physics look like? Maybe someone finds a supersymmetric particle that guides us to a theory uniting general relativity and quantum mechanics. Our understanding would advance, but what practical effect would it have? Our theories already predict the behavior of matter and energy at the scales relevant to human life in our corner of the galaxy very accurately. It would be at best a minor correction to precision measurements. (And eventually in thousands of years when humans start travelling across the galaxy there might be some practical relevance for understanding dark matter etc.) The important revolutions to come in science are not in fundamental physics. They are in learning how to apply the known laws of physics to the behavior of the human brain, the global climate, ecosystems on earth, etc. And these problems are much less amenable to solution by a single genius like Einstein. They are more likely to fall to large group efforts coupling massive computational resources with experiments and multi-scale theoretical models.
Let's take Stephen Hawking as an example. He is thought to be one of the biggest geniuses nowadays. But if you ask common public member, what did he discover, most people won't be able to say a single thing. He published many books for general public, which made him good PR, he is disabled, which is good for such image too. The media think, that he is current Albert Einstein and hence the general public does.
To be sure somebody doesn't take me wrong, I took S.H. just as an example, I'm not by any means questioning his work.
Answer any of the following and you too can win a Nobel prize...
1. What is a magnetic field?
2. What is a electric field?
3. What is gravity?
4. Do tachyons exist?
5. Does the Higgs Boson exist?
6. Does matter decay?
7. Is a magnetic field really a field or is it just another property of space-time?
8. In how any dimensions does the Universe or multiverse exist? (The basic question of string theory)
9. Can magnetic and electric fields be quantized or are they continuous?
10. Can time and space be quantized or is it continuous?
11. Why can't we all just get along?
12. Is the universe a giant predetermined simulation playing out or do we have free will.
We are a species that just recently wandered in off the Sahara. We know a lot about a little. Our knowledge is like Swiss cheese, full of holes, gaps, and inconsistencies. There are things we observe but can't explain and things we can explain but can't observe. Go watch this video from Fenyman...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI
The people you are thinking of are Lord Kelvin and Michelson. Michelson quoted lord Kelvin as saying all future science is in the 5th decimal place. But, as Michelson went on to explain, he didn't mean everthing left was about dotting i's and crossing t's. He meant it was unlikely that classica physics was profoundly wrong in the realms we observe and inhabit but there could be great physics out there. It just had to be lurking in the shadows-- out in the 5th decimal place. And sure enough it was. ANd still is. Just the other day someone measured the radius of a proton using muons instead of the usual electrons and it was wrong by 4%. That's absurdly huge. COuld be some new physcis is about to move into the light.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Today they do have good knowledge about virtually all materials and energetic processes typically occurring and observable on Earth,
That's a difference from the 19th century.
Derived consequence: progress will be slow until we'll see a jump at least one order of magnitude (if not more) in either:
1. energies available to use during an experiment; or
2. capacity to sense and sift the irrelevant from what the universe throws at us
Without the above to confirm/falsify the theories, everything is a matter of "scientific faith" (the "church of strings", the "congregation of super-string", the "church of the standard model")
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Some things never change. Stupid gimboids complaining that everything has been invented and lamenting that all the groundbreaking science has been done is probably one of the few immutable things one can count on (like taxes).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
That is all.
Some fields where there is growth and potential for breakthrough will include the field of statistics proper and fields that rely heavily on it. The revolution in information technology has enabled growth in the field of statistics because it has allowed the investigation of theoretical questions that could not be tested before cheap and powerful computational facility came before. CART and Random Forest algorithms, for example, were made possible by the IT revolution. Fields like genetics (obviously) and sociology and psychology (less obviously) will grow because of this.
Note that in these last two fields (sociology, psychology), there have in the last 100 years been no breakthroughs that are the equivalent of a heart-transplant or splitting the atom. So, there is indeed room for growth in these fields.
That said, along with information technology, fields in the humanistic sciences will still probably be constrained by the ability to reliably a) observe phenomena, and b) account for a vast number of hidden variables. So advances there will be the result of revolutions in ability to observe human phenomena.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, so how does gravity work again? We don't know Jack!
mbkennel is right. Before the quantum revolution there were a few people who declared that they understood almost everything (Michelson's quote is famous), but the wiser ones clearly knew that they could not explain many properties of matter including discrete spectra, heat capacities, and most of chemistry. Check a biography of Lord Kelvin to note how early these problems were clearly appreciated. The three mysteries s/he cites are a good summary. Note how huge the difference is between today and the 19th century. The first two mysteries have no currently observable effects on scales much smaller than a galaxy. And the third is a 'we don't know why the universe has a specific set of parameters' question. Answering it will be extremely interesting, but there are not a bunch of practically important unexplained phenomena waiting to be united with our deeper understanding if it arrives.
My brain hurts just trying to parse what you said. I think it would be better if you put it in whatever your native language is and we let google translate it into English. It certainly couldn't be any worse.
Until half of interior designers are male, interior design remains sexist. Lets break some ground and get more gents in there.
Because #Bluntness
p.s. the reason there are more females in interior design is that more females enjoy that kind of work/challenge.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Did you ever think about Pluto and Goofy? I mean - Goofy is Mickey's peer, and Pluto is his slave. Like Ferengi women, he's not allowed to wear clothing. Not very politically correct of Disney.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Cold Fusion does not necessarily break the laws of thermodynamics.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
If time travel ever is discoverable, where are all the time travelers?
Perhaps they vanished in a parallel reality? If you travel to the past, you will change the future. Like a butterfly causing a storm, a single breath will change the future, and your future you will not be yourself anymore, which imply that you are not you anymore.
For example, some people say physicist Ed Witten is greater than Einstein or Newton. In any case, there are probably more super geniuses working on science than ever. Maybe there are fewer breakthroughs from genius, precisely because science has become professionalized and there are already many geniuses working on the big problems. In such an environment, the huge breakthroughs and paradigm shifts just aren't left waiting around to be found.
I'm sure there will be breakthroughs and paradigm shifts in the future, it would be silly to argue otherwise. However, maybe science has become so advanced that even the great geniuses only make incremental advances.
In physics for example, the breakthrough wanting to happen is String Theory. Who is the man behind String Theory? Well, there isn't one man. String theory is hard. If it takes shape and takes hold, it won't be a "breakthrough." It will have been a long, hard slog with a tough problem that no single genius could solve.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
if time travel is possible at all, it stands to reason that our descendants are not in fact in posession of divine levels of self control and either
the future is predetermined and mankind is doomed before we ever discover time travel
or b)time travel requires some sort of anchor or beacon point to carry out and thus can't really travel back prior to the first time travel machines
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
As far as I know, Vernor Vinge, not Kurzweil, started talking about the "singularity" before anyone else (in the early 1980s).
"p.s. the reason there are more females in interior design is that more females enjoy that kind of work/challenge." I don't understand why more people don't accept this. Why is thinking that their is a fundamental difference between the sexes and that they are better suited for different hobbies/challenges/activities so wrong? Why do we push for equality for equality's sake? You are seeing this with video games recently and the complaints that the video game industry is sexist, there aren't enough women in the industry, games are not made equally for men and women, etc. Why is it not okay to just accept that video games are a hobby that have a special appeal for males? The same thing applies to science. No one is saying women can't be scientists, it's just that the male gender is more likely to be better suited for the role of a scientist. It doesn't mean women are stupider or worse than men, it just means they think differently. Why is difference such a bad thing?
While it may take more scientists, and more and grander hardware (like the LHC) there's still plenty of cool shit left to be discovered. Also some of it will likely have some amazing practical applications.
For example: Some day we may truly decode DNA. I don't mean just sequence it, I mean understand how it works, what it says, completely. Be able to read, and perhaps write, the code of life in a complete and precise fashion. Well that has a hell of a lot of implications as to what one could do with it, it isn't just cool science.
Because we all want hot smart sexy geeky gamer scientist girlfriends?
Lets face it, normal girls are boring. Really boring.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Groundbreaking science is not happening right now, but it is necessary for future expansions of science.
Right now, I feel like we're in the period between the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's Special Relativity. We're 99% sure of everything we know, but there's a last 1% that doesn't quite add up. Little oddities, like nobody having a good idea as to why inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same. And once some actual genius figures out the key, "breaks the ground" as it were, that 1% will bloom into entire new fields of science. To keep up the relativity metaphor, nobody in the 1890s had any concept of quantum physics, which is now a massive field with sub-branches that you can get a doctorate in.
Soon - probably within a few decades - someone will discover something groundbreaking, which in turn will trigger off more new discoveries. Science tends to work like that - once a critical mass of knowledge is reached in an area, it grows explosively until we near the limits of the field. Electricity is a great example. Dozens, even hundreds, of groundbreaking scientists and engineers, making their mark in electric science in a very short period of time. There were similar bursts for aeronautics, computer science, nearly any field.
As for what this groundbreaking new field of science will be? No idea. The sci-fi nerd in me would like it to be some sort of hyperspace, to let us explore the stars in reasonable timespans, but that's no likelier than any other thing.
But the reason Einstein could gain such a recognition in the general society is that up to his day the fundamental principles of physics were eminently understandable, but he introduced Weirdness, and his Weirdness was soon confirmed by observations, so the High Priests of physics (gradually) told the public that this Weirdness was right. Thanks to Einstein's own popularization, the public was exposed to an exposition that was largely understandable on a step by step basis, even if when rounding it all up at the end it was incomprehensible to most. Today the fundamental principles are incomprehensible from the very beginning, and they have been that way for some time. Anyone that makes similar breakthroughs at the fundamental level as Einstein did, will likely be perceived as someone who just replaces a book of incomprehensible mathematical formulas for another equally incomprehensible. There will be streams of articles in Scientific American, New Scientist, etc, but these articles will simply not make much sense. Al this makes i tharder to gain a similar recognition as Einstein had.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
Until half of scientists are female, science remains fundamentally sexist.
Let's break some ground, and get more ladies in there.
Because #Fairness.
As a single male scientist, I approve of this message.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Think. You could either go and spend your life in your attempt to invent something, break your financial security and health (think of Mr. Goodyear, sure everyone knows his name now but he was poor most of his life). And in this time and age, chances are good that as soon as you actually have something worthwhile, some shyster will come along with some hare brained patent and rob you.
Or you could hope onto the latest fad bandwagon and try to mooch yourself.
Look around you and tell me which is it if you just want money. Because, essentially, that's what drives invention today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not only every breakthrough that could be made has already been made, it gets worse for the liberal arts. All the Great American Novels that could be written has already been written. Same with great poems, great opera, great screen plays and great musicals. Nothing more to invent. That is all folks. The last guy to leave please turn off the switch.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Approaching this empirically, with a couple of 50-year intervals:
1912-1962 general relativity, discovery of DNA, yada yada
1963-2013 quantum chromodynamics, I grant you that... and supersymmetry or some such shit, various biotech engineering feats working out the details
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries#20th_century
There does seem to be a trend towards application of established theories (essentially an engineering exercise) as opposed to new fundamental discoveries.
"p.s. the reason there are more females in interior design is that more females enjoy that kind of work/challenge." I don't understand why more people don't accept this. Why is thinking that their is a fundamental difference between the sexes and that they are better suited for different hobbies/challenges/activities so wrong? Why do we push for equality for equality's sake?
Because historically, the differences between people have been an excuse to oppress many of them. And it's not the people who are suited to the hobbies but the other way 'round.
You are seeing this with video games recently and the complaints that the video game industry is sexist, there aren't enough women in the industry, games are not made equally for men and women, etc. Why is it not okay to just accept that video games are a hobby that have a special appeal for males? The same thing applies to science. No one is saying women can't be scientists, it's just that the male gender is more likely to be better suited for the role of a scientist. It doesn't mean women are stupider or worse than men, it just means they think differently. Why is difference such a bad thing?
It's the stereotyping that is a bad thing. It prevents people from having the opportunities that their abilities and interests should naturally afford them.
The modern epistemic culture of research, like all cultures, is the apex of the form and cannot be improved upon &tc. From this glorious pinnacle surely there could be no blind spots, epistemological or actual. Everything I see through the perfect lens of the culture I belong to belongs to the culture I belong to, from which even an illiterate buffoon could extrapolate .... a swan.
You are after increases in our experimental capabilities, but mbkennel is talking about something else. The materials and processes relevant to our lives on earth are largely understood at a fundamental level. That is a major difference that isn't going to be changed by more precise experiments. Say we can measure collisions at 500 TeV rather than 8 TeV currently. It may produce a breakthrough in particle physics. But what materials and processes relevant to our lives will be revolutionized? (Now of course we can't predict the behavior of many things relevant to our lives, and there are major breakthroughs available there, but it won't be in fundamental physics).
Ah, I see... we are squabbling over the groundbreaking advances (your position: we know enough about them) or groundshattering (my position: there's more than what we have on Earth).
As for how much would the later influence our life, I'm a lot more optimistic than you... say for example, as the result of a correct ToE, the teleportation is shown as possible and feasible... it wouldn't be long until we would stop worrying about NK experimenting with rockets (one less worry, a happier life <grin>).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
No it wasn't.
No scientist knew if atoms were real or not, and they knew it, and they had no mechanistic explanation for the regularities in the recently understood periodic table, and they knew it. They had no mechanistic quantitative explanation for chemical reactions or reaction rates, and knew it.
Right now, physicists know that they have no good, experimentally confirmed, ideas for explaining
a) dark matter b) dark energy c) the variety of arbitrary parameters in the standard model
They have an large selection of theoretical proposals for the above.
Today they do have good knowledge about virtually all materials and energetic processes typically occurring and observable on Earth, That's a difference from the 19th century.
And that's just physics. There are similar lists in biology, genetics, pscychology. sociology, economics, chemistry...
You realize that discoveries like his only come very rarely as he discussed new areas of science. How many other physicists out there were around Einstein's time?
I'll mention an invention that is "ground breaking" and done in my lifetime.
100Gb Ethernet.
Growing up, I had access to a 300baud modem. That's 300 tones per second. So if one "tone" equated to a bit, then this modem could send 300 bits per second.
100Gb is 107,374,182,400 bits.
or the equivalent of 357,913,942 300baud modems or more modems than the population of the United States (~313m).
Someone had to discover the technologies and methods required to be able to transmit multiple signals at 12.5Gb/sec, and how to transmit multiple wavelengths down the same copper cable or optical fibre without interference...
Hard drive technology? When I graduated from college, the disk arrays I worked on had 9, 18 and 36GB drives in them. So a TB was a lot of storage. Now with advances in hard drive technology like GMR we have multi Terabyte hard drives in our laptops.
Go back and read the newspapers on microfiche of when Einstein made his discoveries. I doubt people were throwing parades in his honor.
Broaden your scope into what areas you're looking at for "discoveries".
Other well known "inventors":
Werner VonBraun / Robert Goddard
Jonas Salk - discovered the cure for Polio
Stephen Hawking...
Edward Jenner -- Discovered vaccinations...
The number of topical new discoveries that I can imagine putting "i" in front of, or Android versions of, is amazing. Or the other way, imagine a Johnny Cash song about it. The "ground" is every direction from the obvious. If "groundbreaking" means "outside the expected", the capacity of Mankind to anticipate only the obvious is enormous.
Gently reply
Why, just the other day I had ten guys with shovels on one group, and ten guys without shovels in another for a control group, and I ran an experiment on groundbreaking. Amazingly, the guys with shovels consistently did better. I expect to publish in Nature shortly, as soon as they it through peer review. I controlled for sleep, nutrition, and recent sexual activity. Because it is, after all, dirty work.
Groundbreaking science lives on. Can you dig it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It bugs the crap outta me when people start equating flying cars to breaking science. Science is the fundamental stuff like the physics or biology. Engineering is the practical application of science and building things. 10-gig ethernet is the application of existing scientific principles. Now a flying car could be a scientific breakthrough if it involves a new anti-gravity module but not if it's just a small plane.
I forsee new breakthroughs in materials science as we are starting to understand material properties in new ways (the science) and learning how to manufacture new materials with unique properties (the engineering side of the equation).
Not quite. There are some things still not quite understood...for example, there are exceptions in the periodic table that have not been solved by QM...
I'd do s/all/most on your post. Besides that, you're right.
Why does anything exist? Physicists talk about vacuum energy and quantum fluctuations, but why? You answer a question and always there's another.
Is the universe digital? A sort of computer? Is there anything in the universe that can be identified as a real number (a true smooth curve for example? I think the relativity depends on 'smoothness' doesn't it?) or is every measurable thing expressible as rationals and therefore computable?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
As long as science fiction exists as a category, there will be room for invention. Genetics, space, energy, human-machine interaction, soylent green...
I was teaching a physics lab section at a major university. A wide-eyed undergraduate in my class realized that I was a graduate student in physics, and she asked me in a fully earnest way, "What is there left to know? Hasn't everything already been discovered?" I think the premise of the post is ridiculous on its face. Yes, there are lots of people doing research now; more than ever before, and in some ways the boundaries of the known world keep expanding. But any good scientist will tell you form personal experience that the more we learn, the more we see hoe little we know. You can understand some basic systems very well, and there are some you can master. You can even scratch the surface of complexity, but there's an infinite variety to the world, there are new phenomena being discovered every day. The one thing you cannot know is what the future holds.
There's still plenty we don't know, but so much of it is highly specialized that many breakthroughs are understood by only a handful.
Spare a thought for poor Charles Darwin. He published Origin Of The Species in 1859 and, over a century and a half later, only 39% of Americans fully believe it.
At least Samuel Pierpoint Langley, Svante Arrhenius and Arvid Högbom have managed to convince 63% that global climate change is real and they've only been going since the 1890s.
Still, could be worse: Galileo was imprisoned for the remainder of his life and his writing banned in 1618. The establishment (Catholic Church) didn't lift that interdiction on heliocentrism until 1822. Darwin's got another half century before he reaches Galileo's 204 years.
Physics has gotten a lot of attention in response to this question, but what about Neuroscience? As a field of science, the study of the human brain really only picked up speed about 100 years ago. And, that was more so in the hands of neuro-philosophy and psychology (Freud, Bergson, etc). Neuroscience only very recently began looking like what it does today; we have only just touched the surface of answering meaningful questions about consciousness, memory, thought, pattern recognition, emotion, perception. We have only just begun to realistically pose these questions in the context of science, as opposed to a context of philosophy of the mind. We may even find, once our understanding of our brains progresses, that we weren't even asking the right questions about these subjects to begin with. The one consistency about humanity's relationship with any field of science throughout history has been that, over and over again, we think we have figured mostly everything out and all that's left is the grunt work. But every time we reach that conclusion, the next generation of scientific progression flips it on its head. Humanity as a collection of thinks will always believe it knows more than it doesn't know and it will always be sheepishly mistaken. It may be the case that we are capable of answering most of the questions we know to ask (though I doubt this as well), but the bigger truth is that we haven't yet thought to ask the questions most worth asking.
With any luck no one will be able to gather the money or political will to build a larger particle physics accelerator than the LHC. And thanks to the sequester cuts, all the string theorists can be dispersed to the four winds. Those two steps will save taxpayers plenty.
We live in one of eight planets of a solar system. We have not yet visited any of these, but merely our moon. We have not even significantly probed any of them. And you say that there is no more groundbreaking science to be made?
You could have said the same in Einstein's day. You could have said there was no way to measure the speed of light. That we'll never know much about particles we can't see with our strongest optical microscopes. That the atmosphere places fundamental limitations on out ability to observe the stars, and that we'll never be able to detect exoplanets until we build a horking huge telescope that's physically impossible to construct.
Geniuses don't come along very often. It may just be that we haven't seen a true scientific genius in a few generations. Or that people who are capable of earth-shattering discoveries were lured away from science and into investment banking.
If kids would turn off the video games and go explore the world. Clock's ticking, assholes. I want my hover-board.
Work Safe Porn
Two days ago the entry on a physicist, who I thought came accross something pretty profound, was deemed not noteworthy by Wikipedia. I was originally prompted to create a biographical stub on him because they have articles on two rugby players by the same name. But it seems Wikipedia has more in common with highschool than I realized: The jocks get more attention.
Anyhow, this dude from down under found a pretty astounding approach to the correspondence principle (i.e. how QM gives rise) to classical mechanics in a mathematical framework originally developed by Steven Weinberg. Something the latter astoundingly overlooked. The talkback page on this math can be found here. The article itself meanwhile has been deleted. Please note: Not because the math is wrong, but because the citation record has been deemed to be too low by the editors.
There's a blog post with links to his recovered papers (most follow up papers on this were actually lost for a while a never published). So if you have a physics background you can form your own opinion.
To me this is a pretty good example of how really interesting findings can simply be washed away in the avalanche of mediocre papers that get produced every day.
Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?
No (by virtue of Betteridge's law of headlines.) I have a dream, that someday /. posters wise the f* up and stop creating headlines that end with a question mark.
>
Anyway, "weirdness" you are talking about is about Quantum Mechanics. Einstein didn't like Quantum Mechanics. Today we know we was wrong by saying "god doesn't play dice".
Time slowing the faster you go is weird. Matter and energy being the same is weird. Gravity warping space and slowing time is weird. Plenty of weird stuff came from Einstein.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I'd never really thought of point b before, that's interesting.
Slightly off-topic, but I just rethought of this. It's something that always annoying me about people using wormholes to time travel. If wormholes existed beaming light and matter from elsewhere in spacetime, that we would have seen the openings.
Anyone who thinks ground breaking has been done has simply not understood the problem: many current paradigms are loaded with cruft. One important aspect of round breaking is de-crufting how we formulate knowledge. Newton, for example.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
It is hard to have your creativity crushed, correctly, for years and not let it stifle your drive to test the walls of the box. In today's world of mature sciences nobody could make a great leap without knowing a great deal that couldn't be leaped over and where their attempts to leap failed. The people who can do it will be rarer still than in the past and in a time and place to succeed in that leap even more rarely but it will still happen eventually.
I actually think that aside from the base knowledge needed complexity and everyone having thought of everything has nothing to do with it. Great leaps are always simple seeming after discovered and even simpler in the minds of the men who discover them.
Einstein was such a man in a world that appeared to be filled with mature science to those of the day. It all began with a mind who could visualize things others found vastly complex as simple abstractions. Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had.
Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it.
Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed. But they will come. Probably several in a fairly short period of time.
Mark my worlds most of the things we think are impossible today will be possible later. FTL travel? It won't be found by someone trying to travel FTL but by someone who doesn't see the universe in terms of space and travel at all. Twenty or even a hundred years later people will be amazed at how advanced they are, making progressive discoveries that stem from that man's simple perspective. Almost none of them will intuitive see things in that simple way though. They will be smarter men capable of harassing and riding all the complexity of utilizing the model without that simple understanding. Fundamental advancements require thinking in a fundamental way.
How about Tesla? I dare say we have more data and analysis of electricity and magnetism than he did. Probably a much more detailed and complex understanding of even Tesla's own inventions. In fact we tend to think we know all about it. Yet, I have no doubt that were the man alive today he would be doing things that are fundamental progressions of his intuitive mental model on these topics but revealed fundamental and groundbreaking new ideas to everyone else. He could probably explain the entire topic fully in three sentences and nobody would get it. They would just think he was simplifying great complexity for minds simpler than his own.
Challenge accepted!
We are still waiting for our hoverboard
> Why is thinking that their is a fundamental difference between the sexes and that they are better suited for different hobbies/challenges/activities so wrong?
Because as soon as you do that, you a) start to view all of X as Y and encourage the rest of society to do the same; b) almost incidentally piss on the hopes and dreams of all those X who *aren't* Y and c) begin to look like the kind of drooling fuckwit who views life in black and white.
Screw you for needing to have this pointed out,
And the same is true for normal guys - I'm assuming you missed this because you've never wanted to date them. If that assumption is unwarranted, please accept my apologies.
The article points out that the science popularizers are more well-known now. Maybe it's just me but I'd place Stephen Hawking as the single most identifiable physicist right now. I'm not really sure I agree with the points made in this article. I just don't see it that way.
Until half of interior designers are male, interior design remains sexist. Lets break some ground and get more gents in there.
Because #Bluntness
p.s. the reason there are more females in interior design is that more females enjoy that kind of work/challenge.
Oh wow, Dr. Fonik-Sonik, I'd love to see your research article showing how innate gender differences lead to disparate occupational outcomes! I'm sorry, did I lay that on too thick?
The fact that this comment was rated as insightful boggles my mind. I would posit a far more likely hypothesis: Interior designers are more likely to be females than males (and more likely to be homosexual males than heterosexual males) because that is what the gender norms in our culture suggest. A man who while young has an interest in topics relating to interior design will get any number of social cues to stay away and focus on other topics, the same way girls get such cues to do poorly in math and science. Cultural effects on gender are pretty huge. There may well be some innate features at play for all I know, but the point is I don't know and I'm not going to just assume it.
Also, I would kindly request you stop using your "#Bluntness" or other related phrases one might use in its place such as "I'm gonna just play devil's advocate here", "Let's be honest...", or "I'm not racist/sexist/etcist but...". You should feel free to be blunt, be a devil's advocate, attempt to have an honest conversation, and so on, but don't use those phrases as a way to get out of being responsible for poor or even damaging ideas and positions. In short, have a little bit of humility, especially when you're not an expert. It turns out you aren't superior just because you pulled some BS out of your butt.
Imho it seems like the lack of publicity is the reason leads people to believe that there is nothing groundbreaking happening / nothing groundbreaking has happened recently. The media just doesn't broadcast and glorify scientific achievements like it's supposed to. All we ever hear about on TV is about misery and deceit with a few sprinkles of "miracles" / serendipitious happenings here and there.
Sure there are some broadcasts here and there, some websites that do a good job, but ask any person unaffiliated with science ( scientific/engineering career) which ones they know and I bet they'd come up empty.
It is partly the media's fault, but scientific minds are to blame for not being able to make findings in their field interesting enough to present to the common people. It would be in all our interest for the media and science dudes and gals to work together and make science presentable and interesting (without twisting or destroying some facts).
tl;dr fuck that headline; it's wrong
I'm surprised yours is the only mention of "low hanging fruit" in this thread. When we didn't have engines, coming up with steam, stirling, and internal combustion, among others, was relatively easy because the goal was simple and the field wide open. Now, we have a number of engines: can we come up with something completely new and unforeseen? Or will it just be refinements and efficiency improvements on the existing models?
The problem with this is that it is completely wrong.
It's solely determined by culture which roles are considered suitable for men and women. I could watch the effect in real life, when former Eastern Europe went from communism to capitalism. The comp science at my local university was quite equally distributed male and female until 1990. And then came the end of the soviet dominated block, and inscriptions of female students plummeted. There were the same females than before, they even went through the same schools than before, just the last few years, when the career gets determined, were different. Suddenly business schools had a majority of female students, and comp science went to a 50:1 ratio of males and females.
If all it takes to change the ratio of males and females interested in a subject is a change of the environment, then it's completely unacceptable to describe differences in the preferences without referring to the environment which determines the differences.
Meh, those are more engineering than science. But I think there are a lot more opportunities for groundbreaking engineering at this point.
To add some more practical things to your list:
Robotic Cars
Cheap, sustainable houses (there's a LOT of improvement we could still stand to have there)
Asteroid mining
Optimized education (still a LOT of improvement to be made here, and not by just throwing computing devices at it)
Gene therapy (since human evolution has pretty much stopped since there aren't any selective pressures)
Which is stupid, and is just a blatant illustration of the author's lack of vision and understanding of the world and of history.
Actually I would say it is pretty much to be expected. We don't really know what the major, ground breaking discoveries are today which will have a major impact on peoples lives 50 years from now. So I think it would be quite normal for a non-scientist to look around and not understand or see how todays discoveries might affect them in several decades time. In fact I don't even think us scientists can do that either - at least with any degree of accuracy.
The result is that when you look back with hindsight you see the "big breakthroughs" for what they really are but this is only possible with hind sight. Who knew that the transistor would revolutionize almost every aspect of day to day life when it was invented?
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard and there may be many others but they haven't been discovered.
The process of civilization is self-destructive for two reasons.
First, any civilization develops rules and methods and eventually uses those to the exclusion of anything else.
Second, any civilization creates a "system" which must be manipulated by individuals to achieve success.
Both of these remove people from contact with raw reality.
Eventually, people recognize success only within what the civilization already recognizes as important, which excludes any ideas that are actually new.
Worse, the civilization produces its own form of "innovation" which consists of re-applying its principles in new combinations. These innovations take precedence because they are recognized by the audience, since they are based on previously approved ideas within both the system and the rules.
In other words, the problem of civilization is that it re-targets our goals from pure engineering (adapt to reality) toward social goals (adapt to civilization's expectations).
Social goals are expressed through the utilitarian mode of what most individuals approve of. This in turn is based on what the average person can expect based on past successes in the system, and what they can recognize as building on that past.
In short, everything that civilization does is against innovation and more importantly, independent leadership. Civilization forces self-referentiality on its citizens and thus constrains them to its current direction, which is like a kind of super-inertia.
It is for this reason that screwballs such as myself exist. We don't trust existing frameworks, and build our own from scratch. Not only does this mean ditching Ruby on Rails for Perl wildcoding, but also, wildcoding in philosophy and politics so that future generations don't have to suffer under the mistakes of the past.
Futurist Traditionalism
I've often wondered similar things. While science is still being done and many people are arguing that, the level of accomplishments haven't yielded nearly the same results for the average individual compared to what happened in the last century or further. I blame this on society and mainly on capitalism, which only looks to fuel profitable endeavors and people are only looking for the cheapest means to stay alive, or how to make the most money in life.
Space, deep sea, nuclear... general exploration and development as a country has ground to a halt. Instead we're focusing on wars in countries we have no reason of fighting for and patents... then exploiting them. Our country may not be dying, but it's march forward has definitely slowed down. Everyone is out to make as much money as possible. Exploration and being adventurous is no longer part of American lifestyle. It's all about being safe and living as long as humanely possible.
No one takes big risks anymore, it's all about small calculated decisions (mainly decided by a machine), which we bet on which will show income. Even the space industry has somehow ended up in the hands of the private sector, which may seem great, but wont work in our favor down the line when everyone depends on them for their services and the government can't take over because that would be unAmerican.
Our country is totally mismanaged. Our society is bombarded constantly by capitalist propaganda (buy this and you'll be happy, take this and you'll be healthy) and shows designed to placate the mind. Our education system is starting to break down as the less intelligent take over and see fit to destroy something because it doesn't provide instant, easily quantifiable results.
Capitalism may have founded this country, but we've gotten to a point where we've outgrown it. Perhaps not completely... but we have to a point where it's started to hinder development outside of how to shake the most pennies out of the average citizen. This is a time when we actually need a leader to step up and push big businesses out of the picture and actually plot a direction for the country. Sadly, we haven't seen a president like that in many years... or a country that's willing to accept him.
My feeling is, we don't see easily novelties because they are buried into much more data that what the previous centuries' people were used to analyze.
I am aware that this edges to that atrocious Pandora box currently called, 'Big Data', forgive me.
But still, that we don't see innovations as easily as before don't means there aren't.
Even at 'big data' level: 2012 saw the apparition of electoral statistical proofs: for instance, it has been demonstrated that Poutine cheated, and vastly, in his last two elections. There is a math proof, easy to verify, based on stats* --and indeed nobody denegated it.
In a world where 'big data' generally looks rather like 'big brother' or 'FBI knows everything from you', I find it very refreshing that indeed, 2012 big data novelty was the discovery that electoral cheating now can be mathematically demonstrated.
You'll see, some day, one country will set this kind if check inside its law. This, is a scientific novelty if not an 'invention'.
H.
(*) www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1210722109
Herve S.
"Gene therapy (since human evolution has pretty much stopped since there aren't any selective pressures)"
Where are you getting the idea from the genetics no longer has any bearing on reproductive success from?
Well get more women to become scientists. There is nothing stopping them.
groudn breaking science happen by quantic leap. You can't forsee in advance that looking at small effect will yield in a ground breaking effect. Furthermore you can't tell if the ground breaking effect will yield commercial application (maybe not at all!) whereas a small imporvement would yield incredible application (think safe battery capacity increase). That#s why the article / summary are laughable.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Out of interest, do you think any of the advances will be in the area of time cubes once the nuking is over?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Groundbreaking science isn't over until the Death Star we build blows up a planet.
I was actually talking about this with a friend, the fact is stuff that years ago I would have consider groundbreaking are discovered left and right.
The problem is people these days are desensitized to such things, not that I blame them.
Can you imagine trying to explain to someone 20 years ago that you have a device in your pocket that lets you, just about anywhere, access all the world's knowledge?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Maybe someone should read a few science blogs every now and then.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Because the education system is now efficiently set up to weed out an Einstein long before he could ever get to theorizing.
E Proelio Veritas.
... in a hundred years it will be more amazing yet.
No, by then we should be done.
Or at least that's what some journalist on Mars will be saying...
Just Planck and Einstein published their disruptive papers. Plenty of "Blck Swans" left in Nature.
It seems a lot of people are obsessing over physics when medicine has had the most profound "groundbreaking" advances in human history, and it seems every week there is a new breakthrough.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Not in genetics or pschychology. There is lacking a lot on those fields, yet.
EM is pretty well exlained by quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has gone a lot further than worrying about wave/particle duality. The details are rather mathematical (usually involving infinite-dimensional state spaces) and have the effect that under some situations things behave like particles, under others like waves. "Particles" and "Waves" are useful words because of the way we think about things in the everyday world; they fit our perception and psychology rather than the actual physics.
And as for Quantum mechanics and gravity being interexplainable or not, Ravelli has found a way to quantize the general relativistic gravitational field equations (the hard part was to formulate them independent of the concepts of space and time). Calculating the results is still ridiculously hard, but his work does seem to indicate that the quantum eigenstates for gravity are quanta space (at something like a googol of them being in the sugar I put in my tea).
Things are a lot weirder if you try to explain the universe in terms of classical physics.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Exactly. When pay was not determined by what your career, there was equal interest in the two. Once money was taken into account, then females went for the money, while males stuck with what they enjoyed. So all we need to do to get more females into science is pay them better?
The next idea to blow the mind of every man, woman, and child, will be introduced by someone who has access to a great artificial intelligence and probably wont understand the science.
I have two points to back up my answer.....
1. We are living in the most peaceful period in the entire history. As much as I hate to say this... I am in the opinion "War accelerates innovation". Let's face it, without wars such as WW2 and cold war, most technologies would've either never evolve into the sophisticated stage there right now, or never would've thought of. Until another major war dawns upon us, where contemporary weapons are inadequate for one party to dominate... most technologies will evolve at a slower pace. (at least that's my prediction).
2. Academic research now rewards people who write more papers, not people do genuinely innovative work. I've been in academic research, and I have first hand experience on "publish-or-perish". Most academics I see today, they do research with the mindset "Save my career, family and future first", rather with the noble intention of serving the knowledge sphere. Most research now-a-days geared towards "publication generating exercise"... rather true down-to-earth investigations. I don't think we will return to golden age of research, where funding doesn't demand things like "X number of publications", "Y number of patents" and "business plan to sell million units".
Okay, so we should ignore our differences? I can tell you that physiologically, woman have evolved to be better nurturers of baby's then men. Heck, I can't produce milk! I demand equal right to milk production! Wishing away our differences doesn't make them go away. Does that mean we should carry over those stereotypes into other area? Heck NO! Just because "women" are more nurturing than "men" doesn't mean that an individual "woman" is more nurturing than a "man". Recognizing that difference is important. Also, should we have all athletes compete together? I mean, we're being sexist by creating separate leagues for women and men, right? (tbh, women can compete in many men's leagues if they make the qualifiers, but not vice versa). We should just get rid of sex based sports all together and just have leagues dependent on how good you are. I'm quite fine with this.
I guess my point is this. Recognizing differences and telling someone they aren't good enough are two completely different things. I can say that you are part of a population that is better suited at lifting weights than another segment of the population. That isn't really useful information in determining how good you are at weight-lifting. You could be the worst of both segments. But it does help when looking across the population at trends, and doing marketing, etc.
On a related note: My high-school had to conform to title 9 which meant sports that women wouldn't join (american football, they were allowed in, but wouldn't join) had to be offset by sports that men couldn't play (volleyball, which I wanted to play), we had a petition to open up men's or co-ed volleyball, but it didn't go anywhere because there were already all the women sports the girls had interest in.
Rovelli seems to have gotten past the renormalizability issues of GR.
I admit I've only got through part of his Quantum Gravity book so far, though.
Natural selection, how does it work?
Sure, every once in a while, someone wins a Darwin Award for doing something stupid. But by and large, aside from some reproductive defects, just about everyone has a shot at keeping their broken code in the gene pool.
So unless someone wants to try their hand at widespread artificial selection again, the next best thing would be to learn how to treat the deficiencies caused by broken genetic code. And maybe even eventually figure out how to grow humans with better vision, bigger brains, etc., once we get over parts of the GMO debate.
With all the talks about fracking and shale gas, it looks like a lot of literally groundbreaking science is going on right now.
The reason why the US isnt't doing big science projects is because doesn't have the Soviet Union to play catchup with. The way they fund "innovation" is bass-ackward and will only do so if it is profitable and is "sure to work". As a result we get new electronic gizmos that is basically micronization of older tech and nothing fundamentally radical. David Graeber talks about this in some of his lectures regarding why we don't have robot factories and all the whiz bang tech we were expected to have by now. It's bureaucracy, hierarchy, and how we tend to fund things as a society.
At this time, China isn't really outcompeting the US on any technological strategic front, and the Europeans are more or less on the same squad as the US. If ever the case the Chinese decide to go to Mars, invented a teleporter, or presented a serious strategic threat to the US that may change, but by then it will be too late. I predict that the people to beat in this era will still be the Europeans even in this time of austerity.
If you want innovation, you give a group of smart people who work well together some resources and leave them alone to weave their tapestry of dreams, not regiment them to what bureaucrats think they should be working on or some idiotic timetable.
Point well taken, but I I think it's sidestepping a deeper issue. You're right, men and women are different. Looking at physical atributes - height, weight, strength - and it's pretty obvious: both men and women lie along bell curves, and the curves are not identical. To use a specific example, the average woman is going to be shorter and weaker than the average man. But the curves also overlap, so that there are specific men who may be shorter than specific women or specific women who are stronger than specific men. Saying "All men are taller than all women" would be pretty stupid. So would saying "All women are better interior decorators than all men." (I don't think this is what you were saying, I'm just using your example.)
All that means that, in my mind, the goal of reducing gender disparity in STEM fields should not be to ensure a 50/50 split between men and women. Such a 50/50 split may not be realistic for the same reason that expecting a 50/50 split between men and women in a breastfeeding competition is unrealistic: men and women are different. Rather, reducing gender disparity in STEM fields should be about reducing any artificial barriers - of education, socialization, institutional sexism, and outright discrimination - that keep out women who might otherwise love to be scientists. Likewise, we should move to reduce any similar artificial barriers that keep out men who might otherwise love to be interior decorators.
A real-world example: Recently, the US military said it would be allowing women to serve in combat roles. I don't expect that this will result in gender equality in combat roles, nor do I think it should. But It will remove an artificial barrier that prevented women from participating in an area where some might want to be (even if it's at a lower percentage than men).
As a side note, I think one of the major historic failings of feminism (something feminists like myself try to call out) is that sexism limits options for men, too. Sexism isn't just about women, nor is feminism.
The problem is that determining what those barriers are is difficult. Likewise, it may be impossible to objectively determine the 'natural' gender disparity in STEM fields or in interior decorating. A goal of a 50/50 split is easier to understand and can be applied indiscriminately to any situation, which is why I think it comes up so much. Then, it gets labeled as foolish, and rightly so, but without any discussion of the deeper underlying issues. Hopefully, though, we can move forward as a society to a point where there's just as much cultural and social support for a woman to be a scientist as there is for a man, or for a man to be an interior decorator as there is for a woman. At that point, maybe we can be OK with a 9/10 or 60/40 split, or whatever it turns out to be, because we'll be confident the people who want to be there can be there, and do well.
You raise a number of points, some of which I think are valid, and some of which I think are problematic. I'll try to respond where I can.
As I said in a previous post, I think the problem is artificial barriers to entry in a field/hobby/whatever. If someone wants to participate in activity/field/hobby/etc outside of their normal gender roles, I think they should be allowed to without getting shit for stepping outside of societal expectations. As a female gamer, my problem isn't as much with a lack of female game designers (although I'll talk about that in a minute) as much as the fact that men often scoff at me for attempting to participate in this 'male' realm. I don't need you (hypotehtical male, not you, np2392) to explain console difference or the history of Diablo when I've been playing video games longer than you've been alive. That's what pisses me off, not that I might be in a situation where, out of 15 gamers, only one or two others are women. I'd love to see more female gamers, because I do think many of the barriers are artificial and not actually having to do with gendered differences, but I don't pretend a 50/50 split is realistic or even desirable.
This is where you being to lose me. I think, in this context, "sexist" has come to mean two things: The gender split isn't exactly 50/50 (what I just discussed) and larger false and unnecessary institutional and societal differences in the treatment of men and women. Take Mass Effect. I played through it as femShep and was able to have a lesbian relationship. I played through as femShep and was able to have a straight relationship. I played through as male Sheppard and was able to have a straight relationship. I played through as male Sheppard and was not able to have a gay relationship. That's more homophobia than sexism, but is an example of what I mean: an artificial difference in how characters are presented.
Lets use armor in fantasy games as another example. I have no problem with scantily glad women if the men are also dressed in silly and objectifying costumes. But if the least-revealing outfit selection for a male character includes a full suit of armor and the least-revealing outfit selection for a female character is a corset, that's a problem. That's where I'd say the video game industry is sexist.
I think you're honestly on the right track, but that the problem is pinning down how to carry out abstract ideals. We shouldn't ignore our differences, and (as I said in a previous post) a goal of exact and numerical gender equity in science or sports or video games or interior design is both futile and counterproductive. I suspect the desire for a 50/50 split comes out of gains in women's rights over the last century: as women's voices have been heard more and more in decision making processes, it seemed "natural" to try and go for a 50/50 split. But you're right, in many situations a 50/50 split isn't "natural." The problem is that a goal of anything other than 50/50 runs the risk of playing into cultural/institutional/social/etc sexism (or racism, or whatever bigotry is under discussion).
Now, just because it's difficult to figure out a proper gender split doesn't mean we shouldn't try. ("Proper" meaning "what would happen in the absence of cultural/institutional/social/etc sexism and false social pressures pushing people toward or away from certain activities.") I don't pretend do know how to do that, but making sure that there's equal representation in a decision making process - and honest discussions about how and why gender disparities happen - seems like a good start.
One more thing...
This may be picking hairs, but I think recognizing differences and telling someone they aren't good enough are different things, and yet not completely different things. What I mean is that saying "men and women are different" has - historically - often led to "...and men are smarter and better." That's why I think many feminists - myself included - are skeptical of sentences beginning with "men and women are different." It's not because we pretend men and women are identical. (Well, some so-called feminists do, but I think they're wrong.) It's because we think men and women should be afforded the same opportunities. Noting differences is often (although certainly not always) a precursor to trying to enforce such differences, even when it's not warranted. I think that's why some people immediately try to squash any real and legitimate discussions of differences, and where the "everyone must be treated exactly the same" movement came from. That concept is in the right place, just with the wrong tactics.
Does that help explain why someone like VoidCrow might react so negatively to a claim that men and women are "just different?"
I think Jeff Hawkins' theory of the neocortex qualifies as being groundbreaking. He was able to assimilate all the multitudes of neuroanatomical and physiological data into a theoretical framework. I am fairly certain most /. readers are aware of this research but it must not be forgotten as an area of research where revolutionary discoveries are being made. Algorithms are already highly developed, and I believe this is the most promising project on approaching 'strong AI.'
I find the new problems will relate to the problem of scale. Large scale, such as that in relationship to entropy. We think today's speak of scale, from biological systems, to CERN data results to the Internet architecture, is complex/hard. We have just scratch the surface of what's to come. And that's coming from a trained physicist.
What we see today, inventions are not science, but that of exploitation of science. With the popularity of "making money" (capitalism is just one of many methods of), we are in the age of science exploitation. That's why the current attitude is that "we're done"... and the result? Social technologies....
creativity is mostly being used to create connections and products and not explain nature. That's not right or wrong, but just the facts.
http://www.just-think-it.com/sal_08.htm
I come here for the love
is not a scientist, and a scientist tries to create hypothesis while challenging his own.
These are not characteristics of the current bastardization of science most people are familiar with.