Slashdot Mirror
Nat Geo Writer: Science Is Running Out of "Great" Things To Discover
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "John Horgan writes in National Geographic that scientists have become victims of their own success and that 'further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns.' The latest evidence is a 'Correspondence' published in the journal Nature that points out that it is taking longer and longer for scientists to receive Nobel Prizes for their work. The trend is strongest in physics. Prior to 1940, only 11 percent of physics prizes were awarded for work more than 20 years old but since 1985, the percentage has risen to 60 percent. If these trends continue, the Nature authors note, by the end of this century no one will live long enough to win a Nobel Prize, which cannot be awarded posthumously and suggest that the Nobel time lag 'seems to confirm the common feeling of an increasing time needed to achieve new discoveries in basic natural sciences—a somewhat worrisome trend.' One explanation for the time lag might be the nature of scientific discoveries in general—as we learn more it takes more time for new discoveries to prove themselves.
Researchers recently announced that observations of gravitational waves provide evidence of inflation, a dramatic theory of cosmic creation. But there are so many different versions of 'inflation' theory that it can 'predict' practically any observation, meaning that it doesn't really predict anything at all. String theory suffers from the same problem. As for multiverse theories, all those hypothetical universes out there are unobservable by definition so it's hard to imagine a better reason to think we may be running out of new things to discover than the fascination of physicists with these highly speculative ideas. According to Keith Simonton of the University of California, 'the core disciplines have accumulated not so much anomalies as mere loose ends that will be tidied up one way or another.'"
Researchers recently announced that observations of gravitational waves provide evidence of inflation, a dramatic theory of cosmic creation. But there are so many different versions of 'inflation' theory that it can 'predict' practically any observation, meaning that it doesn't really predict anything at all. String theory suffers from the same problem. As for multiverse theories, all those hypothetical universes out there are unobservable by definition so it's hard to imagine a better reason to think we may be running out of new things to discover than the fascination of physicists with these highly speculative ideas. According to Keith Simonton of the University of California, 'the core disciplines have accumulated not so much anomalies as mere loose ends that will be tidied up one way or another.'"
Well, I think this might have to do with the level of basic science funding (of course I don"t have any figures to back that). Also, this reminds me of chemists after organic chemistry / atomic physics discoveries saying that basically, science was done. Just in time for quantum physics to be discovered ...
So, that's great : saying this just means that we're on the verge of a big event in science !
Hundreds of years ago, there was a "diminishing return." The Rennaisance led to a bunch of discoveries, followed by a period of "plateau." Then a hundred years ago there was massive explosion in discovery and theory. To think we've discovered it all is naive, like proclaiming after Newton that there is nothing left in Physics to discover. It might take a while before the next Einstein but it will probably happen again.
"Sometimes I really regret that I did not live in those times when there was still so much that was new; to be sure enough much is yet unknown, but I do not think that it will be possible to discover anything easily nowadays that would lead us to revise our entire outlook as radically as was possible in the days when telescopes and microscopes were still new."
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement"
The famous line from the head of the US patent office in 1902:
Or the slightly less famous line from the head of the US patent office in 1843:
Your ad here. Ask me how!
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Attributed to C. H. Duell, Commissioner of US patent office, 1899.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Attributed to Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, DEC, 1977
They might as well start preparing an entry for him in the book of silly predictions.
There is still plenty of physics to figure out. The same with biological systems. Plenty of math to work out too.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
This claim is an over-generalization. Nobel prize does not cover all fields of science. Actually, very few. There is no way to predict that someone will not come along and actually make a finding that does not require huge labs or previous work. Almost sounds like a troll to me.
How many times has this been said before, and proven wrong?
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
- Albert Michelson,1894
This is the biggest nerd-troll article I've seen on /. in a while...
I can't speak for physics and the definition of "great" discoveries is subjective.
But the cost of sequencing a human genome has now fallen to $1,500 (e.g. 30X coverage by Macrogen in Korea). Within the next decade, clinical genome sequencing is going to become routine. There have been a small handful of truly major revolutions in the history of medicine (aseptic surgery, vaccines, antibiotics) and clinical genome sequencing will be such a revolution.
And this is will not just be a medical revolution but also a revolution in our understanding of basic biology. Within a couple decades we're going to have millions of individuals where we know both genotype and phenotype: all their mutations and all their medical conditions. It's likely that within the next couple decades we'll be able to figure out the basic function of all the non-trival proteins in the human proteome.
the field of physics may, or may not, be stuck - but biology is about to explode.
After all, the only thing left to discover after Nanotechnology & Nuclear Fusion is Future Technology. Then what?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Horgan has been going on about stuff like this for years. He wrote a book in 1997 called "The End of Science" which I read and thought was completely ridiculous. My recollection (possibly faulty as it's been quite a few years) is that he came across as very anti-science and wandered off into religion later in that book. It feels to me as though he WANTS science to fail at some point.
I don't know why he seems hell-bent on convincing everyone that we're going to run out of things to discover, but I just don't buy it.
Even if we manage to get to the "bottom" of Physics some day that's cool and all but it's hardly the end of much. The biology of even simple cells is fantastically complex and there's lifetimes worth of discovery left there. Also even if some day we we know most or all of the "rules", the possible applications of these simple rules are virtually infinite, so no scientists or technologists or explorers are likely to be unemployed any time soon.
Every time humanity thinks it knows everything, someone thinks up a clever new idea for measuring things and boom, a whole new world of complexity opens up. There might be an end to the turtles at some point, but I'm not worried :)
G.
Instead of saying that science is running out of interesting stuff to find out I could say that scientists are simply too concerned in publishing meaningless articles to stride forward and find the "great" stuff.
Or that we hit a point in our natural science studies that does not offer that many opportunities for major applications.
Other way to look at this is that with so much information available scientists can exchange more information and many people works in smaller fractions of the same problem and help each other in a more predictable way. There is no huge, instantaneous development, or said development takes time to become really meaningful on that area.
But in the end here is my opinion: Here in /. I find, every week, things that are truly amazing scientific developments. Maybe the writer is just numb due to so many incredible discoveries.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
This hoohah even managed to drag me and my BS detector back from Soylent.
(I'm blatantly stealing this quote from one Robert A. Nelson, but it sums up my point quite well.)
In 1894, Albert A. Michelson remarked that in physics there were no more fundamental discoveries to be made. Quoting Lord Kelvin, he continued, âoeAn eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.â
A few short years later, physics was grappling with two tiny details called quantum mechanics and special relativity.
I just got back from a talk outlining the unbelievable complexity involved in the assembly of fleeting RNA and protein complexes that are crucial in translating DNA to protein in our cells. What they are doing and how they do it is not at all well understood, regardless that our lives and that of all cellular/multicellular life depend critically on it.
Three weeks ago BICEP2 gave fair evidence of beyond standard model physics (How else can you characterize amplified quantum fluctuations in the field of gravity?). This is something that only happens at many many orders of magnitude greater energy than we've ever observed before.
And you propose to tell me that science is mostly finished but for tidying up "minor details"?
That's spelled "horseshit" where I come from.
It's 60 m/s
rewriting history since 2109
One thing I do think there is a possibility of is that further advances will be more difficult. We'll need to build bigger telescopes, higher powered accelerators, etc. at increasing costs.
Hopefully though increasing economic productivity will be able to pay for this.
We are not out of physics - still lots of big mysteries: Dark matter, dark energy, unification, quantum gravity etc. It is possible though that we are running out of small scale experiments and future ones will on average become more expensive and take longer. Bigger accelerators. Bigger telescopes etc.
I hope this isn't true and that people can become more clever, but it might be.
Considering that less than 20 years ago there were no known extrasolar planets, no one had ever even thought up of the Holographic universe theory, or debated the existence (and implications) of a firewall around blackholes, not to mention the so dark we still can't find it Dark Matter... I mean - we haven't even made enough discoveries to start making theories yet with Exoplanets (gaseous Super Earths are brand new in the past year, I believe), and cosmology has huge areas to explore and craft experiments around that are literally brand new.
I think we're going to be just fine in the theory and spectacular discovery department.
In his "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Thomas Kuhn argues that our abilities are limited by the current "template" of thinking - before you have the language of formal logic, for example, you can't argue that something seems "logical" or deducible from the facts available. Science progresses so far within a particular paradigm and then leaps forward with another - Newtonian mechanics, relativity, string theory. Maybe we are due for a new "episodic spasm" into a new paradigm?
If you take the Nobel prize evidence as having fundamental meaning (and I'm not sure it does), what it seems to suggest is not that we have only loose ends to tie up. It is pretty obvious that there are still big mysteries left to solve. However, it may be the the remaining mysteries just too difficult to solve within a human lifetime. If the easy problems are solved first and the remaining puzzles become progressively more difficult then, without some sort of intelligence expansion, the inevitable result is that problems can no longer be solved by any sort of directed action. Rather, generations work on a problem until someone randomly stumbles on a solution. Eventually, solutions can not be recognized or understood, even when found and progress stops. The universe might still have mysteries but none remain that we have the capacity to solve.
"scientists have become victims of their own success."
Translation: We have dull and feeble people working in areas of science because we have an educational system which is dogmatic and proudly proclaims it know everything and nothing of interest remains.
While in reality, the real people, scientists who would be our best and brightest are probably sitting in a hut in Africa somewhere because the institutions of economic, political and educational power don't like competition.
What complete crap.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I think ``ironic science'' is a useful concept. However, this particular article is a bit strange. The title has ``Science running out...'' but in the body of the article he almost solely talks about physics. How about molecular biology? No hope for great discoveries? And pure mathematics? Maybe, he does not think mathematics is a science...
As for physics, it does indeed appear to be in crisis. It seems that physics is running out of fundamental problems which can be approached within its traditional methodology. But at the same time, this methodology is extremely valuable. Perhaps the right solution is to go towards becoming a ``multidisciplinary environment''. That is, to inject the methodology of physics into other fields of science. For example, many ideas of modern mathematics were inspired by string theory. This is a manifestation of the usefulness of the physicist's way of thinking.
It would be a pity if physics dies, or even worse goes into that undead state which Horgan calls ``ironic science''.
It's not there are less things to discover, but the reason NatGeo exists. As a Fox property, it need to help the bottom line: hence, sensational science is what they are looking for.
In this world of 10sec blog explanations of DNA formation, 1min youtube videos describing string theory and watered down Odyssey's (I'm talking to you Cosmos, Seth and Neil). There are more science discoveries out there... only if reporters take a little more time than glancing at their smart phone to write up the next science story based on some VC's press release of some cool silicon valley startup using science.
In my opinion this is a bit like sitting in your backyard with a telescope opining that there are no new planets left to discover in the solar system while people are out paving the way to actually visit them.
The work being done right now is monumental. Science is progressing faster than it ever has been. But great and fundamental insights are obviously going to be clustered around paradigm shifts. Newton gave us classical mechanics in the 17th century. It took another two hundred years before quantum mechanics displaced it. And then there was lots of room for different scientists to establish the ground rules and get their names in textbooks. But keep in mind that the discovery of quantum mechanics was not the result of people constantly hunting for a way to overthrow Newton. Scientists explored all Newton had to offer, eventually found places where he came up short, and trying to extend Newton is what eventually lead to the knowledge which justified quantum mechanics.
Nobel prizes are awarded for major effects on a field. When there's been a lot of branching off you try to look back to one of the initial branches and credit that with spawning the others. That's obviously going to favor older work as time goes on (keep in mind how nascent our recent understanding is). But that's a bit like crediting Adam and Eve. It's a pretty simplististic way of establishing a hierarchy of importance.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
What we know about the universe is a tiny drop in a potentially infinite ocean of ignorance. The fact that scientists, like everyone else, have picked the lowest-hanging fruit bare does not mean that they have made a dent in the boundless orchard of knowledge of the natural world.
Is some genius working in a patent office or holed up in a dormitory at Cambridge, without the aid of even a scientific calculator going to discover anything as fantastic as relativistic mechanics or Newtonian mechanics? Probably not. A lot of big science requires teams of really smart people, trillions of man hour equivalents of supercomputer time, and perhaps, one day, particle accelerators the length of Pluto's orbit. But all that knowledge is still out there for the taking. When we only have a vague idea of what dark matter or dark energy might be, when we really do not understand the brain on a biochemical level, when we really have no understanding about they WHY of quantum physics or how to reconcile it with gravity, there is certainly a lot of big questions left unanswered, and those are just the questions we know to ask.
There's a comment that's been attributed to Lord Kelvin in 1900 (although there's apparently a good chance it may be apocryphal): "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." That was just prior to Einstein's 1905 publications.
Like we know everything. Or even anything much at all. In terms of understanding the nature of the world. we have only scratched the barest surface. Immense depths lay undiscovered.
Let's go!
I looked at the article and the author is focused on advances in physics, where he may actually have a point.
He doesn't seem to be aware of some of the stuff being done in neuroscience, nanotechnology, and structural biology, to name a few.
We've come so far in getting more insight into the biological and electrical nature of the brain in just a few years and the idea of a connectome (that we can actually map in principle) is a huge breakthrough that will lead to fantastic new technologies.
When one field plateaus, another explodes. Look up epigenetics and CRISPRs and prepare to blow your mind. To say we are near the end of science is crazy.
Also, this author doesn't seem to know about Occam's Razor. There are many explanations for why Nobel Prizes are taking longer to get awarded than any concept of science slowing down.
Or we are growing less intelligent or less curious... More content with our media and day to day malaise. Couple of outstanding areas still worth checking pursuing...like what is Gravity, is there other life in the Universe ?, can we prevent death ?, you know 'small' things like that...
I think that's where "law of diminishing returns" comes into play. The things you're discussing are wonderful and fascinating and have plenty of implications in science. However, researching exoplanets is only possible with orbiting telescopes or the VLA or Arecebo...the kinds of things that can find stuff, but "bigger than that" will be required to find the next thing.
The first telescopes used a pair of lenses, then mirrors, then finely-created mirrors, then a high quantity of parabolic radio dishes, then really really really big mirrors - launched into orbit. Two lenses were (roughly) affordable by the common man. Mirrors, also affordable by the common man who had a tax return. Then a wealthy hobbyist or dedicated scientist, then a research lab, then a country.
The difference between "how much it costs for the stuff to find new stuff" and "how much new stuff that really expensive stuff will be found" are the questions at hand. We live in an infinite universe, so there's an infinite number of discoveries to be made. It just starts to cost impractical amounts of money after a while.
(and yes, I'm aware that my history of the telescope is grossly oversimplified and incredibly glazed over. This is a Slashdot post, not a thesis.)
That's right, Max, there's nothing big left to discover. It's better that you don't study physics. We've got it pretty much all sorted.
It's not like you'll revolutionize everything and get a unit named after you or something.
(More seriously: Doesn't the author understand science? That's not how it works.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
Students were advised not to go into Physics as a career, as there were only two unsolved problems in Classical Physics -- that of the photoelectric effect, and the advance of the perihelion of Mercury.
Einstein addressed both problems in 1905, and changed the world.
What will the current set of "little problems" and inconsistencies in Physics lead to?
The first telescopes used a pair of lenses, then mirrors, then finely-created mirrors, then a high quantity of parabolic radio dishes, then really really really big mirrors - launched into orbit. Two lenses were (roughly) affordable by the common man. Mirrors, also affordable by the common man who had a tax return. Then a wealthy hobbyist or dedicated scientist, then a research lab, then a country.
The difference between "how much it costs for the stuff to find new stuff" and "how much new stuff that really expensive stuff will be found" are the questions at hand. We live in an infinite universe, so there's an infinite number of discoveries to be made. It just starts to cost impractical amounts of money after a while.
Her'es a picture of the telescope used for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has mapped a substantial fraction of the observable universe:
http://www.hextek.com/wp-conte...
A two-meter instrument. Much of the innovation in modern cosmology is coming from data processing, not just building bigger and bigger mirrors. People are actually pretty clever, and can work around boundaries in surprising ways.
Considering that less than 20 years ago there were no known extrasolar planets, no one had ever even thought up of the Holographic universe theory, or debated the existence (and implications) of a firewall around blackholes, not to mention the so dark we still can't find it Dark Matter... I mean - we haven't even made enough discoveries to start making theories yet with Exoplanets (gaseous Super Earths are brand new in the past year, I believe), and cosmology has huge areas to explore and craft experiments around that are literally brand new.
I think we're going to be just fine in the theory and spectacular discovery department.
The fact that science is focused on such esoteric stuff that is so far removed from relevance to the human condition was a big part of his point.
These things are interesting, but it doesn't really matter too much if we discover them or not, in the grand scheme of things.
Like I've said before, people who think science is the right tool for every problem domain are not as smart as they think they are.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
...in his first lecture on physics. "The really interesting things in physics are where we thought we understood how things work, yet something new and not part of the known rules happens." He used chess as an analogy with the observation of how pawns rooks, bishops, knights queens and kings all move, and you watch for a while, think you have a good grasp of what's happening, and all of a sudden a pawn disappears from a square, and nothing replaces it, and you learn about 'en passant.' (sp?) You watch for a while, and all of a sudden a pawn reaches the far side of the board and is replaced with another piece and behaves according to that pieces rules. Or suddenly the rook and a king both move during a move.
We're pretty much at the level of understanding how most of the pieces of physics move under most circumstances, and have only the faintest of understanding of some of the special cases. (though a few of the others we understand reasonably well.)
The thing is, some of the special cases may provide some extremely useful solutions to what seem at the moment to be insurmountable problems. Whether they make it possible to implement warp drives, or macro scale teleportation, we don't know, because we don't know what those rules are yet. Though it's almost a trivial prediction to state that it's likely that whatever such rules are found to be usable, we'll probably find a way to make use of the rule in the form of a weapon.
You never know...
Save the banana
Better way to fight disease/ provide vaccinations
Cure cancer
Cure AIDS
Cure other uncurable diseases, there are hundreds or thousands
Much faster space travel
Terraforming
Food/water for all people of the world
More efficient ways to generate renewable energy
It took me 2 minutes to write this. I'm sure there's enough to keep humanity busy for at least another hundred years.
These are all problems that may be solved with technology, not science. Design, not discovery.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
people who think science is the right tool for every problem domain are not as smart as they think they are.
Very true. Science only has an advantage when reality is involved.
About every decade somebody makes the same basic prediction/declaration.
This has been going on for more than a century and a half.
(It could be a lot longer, but it's not like I've seen a lot of pointless stupid statements that were quickly proven wrong in most historical documentations.)
From what I can remember, in the early 1900's, physics only had a few loose ends to go before 'everything' was discovered and known.
Then Einstein explained the photoelectric effect, and the rest, they say, is history.
For all we know, one of these 'loose ends' may end up rewriting physics as we know it. Again.
It aint over until the fat lady sings.
"Physics" is a fairly artificial concept of separation of knowledge - after all, knowledge is just one. Our brains, on the other hand, are too tiny to fit all of it in. We started learning about surroundings "midway", e.g. F=ma - basic physical phenomenon, and from there started moving towards the very small (quarks), very large (galaxies), and much more complex - chemistry, biology. I think the discoveries tend to go in waves, and when there is an imbalance of knowledge, the area at the bottom shoots up. For example - enough data accumulated and enough mathematical tools were developed to boost physics and chemistry, which helped with computers, which in turn boosted biology. Next step - exact predictions of social sciences, terraforming, ... Time to travel far far away.
P.S. Even though I couldn't find who was the original author, my physics teacher once told me that when governor visited Franklin's lab, and was shown all the electrical research, he wondered what was the purpose... to which Franklin replied "Physicists will tinker with it for a bit, and later you will start taxing it". It might have been someone else of course, but does not change the point - something gets discovered, and later it becomes ubiquitous in our everyday life.
The true business of mankind is knowledge. Using economics to subvert that is making economics into a God that we must serve, instead of using it as a tool to serve us.
What relevance did relativity have, when it was discovered? And yet it's used today for GPS. Who saw that, in 1905?
The author argues that it's taking longer for physicists to receive Nobel Prizes. Maybe it's the Nobel Prize process that's slowing down! Maybe the Nobel Prize committee no longer knows what they are looking for! Maybe the Nobel Prize committee is hamstrung by political correctness. Whatever the reason, how does the length of time it takes to award a Nobel Prize, have anything to do with the actual progress of science???
but the low hanging fruit is getting pretty thin, so if your in it to win a trophy and not actually DO great things, then this is a GOOD thing
I say the notion that there is little left for science to discover or invent is a bunch of hogwash. Perhaps we have been moving at such a rapid pace in recent decades that it has just become more difficult to envision a future different from the present. Thus we have a hard time seeing what direction future advances may come from and how they will impact our lives. If we take a humble perspective on the science behind us it is more clear that we really have no idea what is in store for us, and there is no reason to believe that science will not continue to advance in dramatic and unexpected ways. Perhaps we have not even begun to scratch the surface of the developments and technologies that will shape the next century, or two, or three, or...
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Yeah, the guy is full of bull-pucky.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Science Is Running Out of "Great" Things To Discover.
National Geographic is running out of "great" things to discover.
Tat Tvam Asi
I'd like to quote the opening introduction to a book by Richard Feynman I've just started reading called 'There's plenty of room left at the bottom" that seems relevant;
"I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature physics, which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down. Such a man is then a leader and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure. Percy Bridgeman, in designing a way to obtain higher temperatures, opened up another new field and was able to move into it and to lead us all along. The development of ever higher vacuum was a continuing development of the same kind. I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as others in that it will not tell us much of the fundamental physics (in the sense of, "What are the strange particles?") but it is more like a solid-state physics in the sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is more important is that it would have enormous number of technical applications. What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale."
Nanotechnology! The very notion that we're running out of Science to do is utterly ridiculous. Due to the nature of scientific revolutions involving paradigm shifts in understanding there are no doubt many 'easy' things still left to discover that have been hiding right under our noses all along and all it takes is another Einstein coming along to shake things up.
Oh? Scientists are taking longer and longer to get Nobel Prizes, meanwhile our President got one just for being elected! Never mind the more competent and capable black fellow who Obama got redistricted out of office to begin his ascent... maybe Gerrymandering is a feat worth a "Nobel" prize? Ah, wait, now I remember, these prizes are just political bullshit, who gives a fuck about them? I don't.
Neurology is unlocking the mystery of the mind and Cybernetics provides models for the creation of new mental latices so that minds may escape their bodies. Information theory gives us insight into the quantification of cognition and its unification with mathematics. Philosophy may soon have epistemology verifiable through quantum physics and ethics based on rigorously provable physics equations. The theory of expansion says there are multiverses and we haven't even colonized the moon let alone been to the nearest planet in person not to mention the nearest star or galaxy... and these fuckers want to claim science is winding down? Sounds like some Grade A+ Christian Fundamentalist Pandering to me: "Science is almost dead! See, it didn't have all the answers. Yaaaay God!"
Hell, I can barely keep up with feeding my distributed neural network experiments ever more precessing power due to the exponential increase in cheap computation complexity. For the first time on this planet a species stands poised to intelligently design and manufacture the biogenesis of a completely new form of life, and some idiots are saying we've reached the end of the road in science? Fuck that. If PCs continue their progress then by 2050 the machine intelligences in my server racks alone will have many times more computation power than a human head does, to say nothing of the Internet as a whole. We just began 3D printing new organs and regenerating existing organs too. We're making ARTIFICIAL EYES and we can even cure deafness. We've got artificial brain implants restoring and repairing the functionality of minds, we even have the first ever telepathy by way of copying the thoughts and memories of one mouse into another. We may not only colonize the asteroid belt, but even create self assembling minds the size of small planets with electromagnetic brain waves so powerful they can shape reality itself concentrating energy matter at a whim, like the most powerful coherent beams on Earth crudely do now. Science killed the old gods, deprecating the term by defining new ones like Alien Intelligence. Now we are closer than ever to creating god-like beings or becoming like gods ourselves, at the very least immortal, and yet science is "running out" of great things to discover? Really?
I could go on about discoveries and achievements to be made in every field from education to material science, from grief counseling to artificial flavoring, from textiles to construction there is not a single area of research that doesn't stand to make revolutionary advances for humanity in everything from self healing metals and glass to houses that think to transforming electro-chemically powered clothing to vegetables and meats that grow in your fridge to environmentally friendly cellularly engineered organically grown building construction or even just candy that repairs and prevents cavities.
It would take a really small minded and ignorant fool to claim science is running out of achievements or advancements. Try peering out from under a rock some time. With each new technology the door opens to even more progress. Just compare the last century to the century before that to refute the bullshit claim; Try it with millenniums to get a real grasp on progress. Machines have developed capabilities in a few short decades that took organic life billions of years to emerge. All observational evidence proves such nonsensical statements as in TFA ill-informed at best, and an indication of brain damage at worse.
The article is sensationalists anti-science garbage. Nature will grant the same fate to troglodytes as trilobites. If you lack adequate awareness, you become a fossil. Adapt or become extinct.
It's not that there's not more to discover, it's that the cost and effort for major discoveries has gone up. This is especially true in high-energy physics, where each generation of accelerators is far more expensive than the previous one. On the other hand, there's been lots of discovery in low-energy physics in recent decades. Exploring physics around absolute zero has been very productive and not hugely expensive. Semiconductor device physics continues to make progress. Lots of low-energy effects once thought useless, like the Hall effect, turn out to have practical applications.
But the return on investment for basic research really has decreased. That's why big corporate research labs have disappeared in the US. AT&T and IBM used to do basic research in physics, and out of that came the transistor and the high density disk drive. Few companies do that today. Even pharma research is very product-focused.
How about breakthroughs in understanding how consciousness emerges
How about breakthroughs in understanding IF consciousness emerges?
or the achievement of strong AI/the singularity?
Pure religious fantasy. It's not the 1970's anymore. That silly belief cannot be defended.
Required reading for internet skeptics
You don't know what a great discovery is until it has been discovered.
Some discoveries are done purely by accident.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Hogwash. Complete hogwash. 10 years ago we thought we were the only solar system with planets. What about the LHC? Every few years someone complains we have discovered all there is to discover. And this in a nearly infinite universe. We are primitive being just beginning to learn how to think. Oh, we are far from being the gods of our domain. - Proudly Anonymous Coward and one of the ignorant apes who knows we don't know all we think we know. Arrogance.
This idiot journalist has been peddling this line of bullshit since 1993 and take a look at what progress there has been in science since then.
As for nothing to discover - we don't even really know for sure why we sleep and how we think. We know what gravity does but not why, which suggests interesting implications if we can work out how to manipulate it. There seems to be a hell of a lot of matter out there that has mass but we can't see it. The list is long.
There will be big moments again in science once more scientist will work on interdisciplinary research. There are huge possibilities. Anyway that article is FUD.
If you watch the last century, we added limitation to the world instead of removing them. Back to newton : infinite speed possible infinite acceleration possible and while the greek had a concept of the non divisible (atoms), there was no theoretical "limit" on isntrumentation ,it was still thought you could transmute stuff into other other stuff in the middle age. And the unvierse could go on forever. Nowadays we know that inifnite speed is not possible, infinite acceleration is not possible, there is a limit on what you can measure (uncertaintly principle), transmutation is an energy expansive process, the universe will wind down forever, and there is a maximum limit on how much energy can be extracted, and do not get me started on "you can't win , you can't get out of the game etc...". From all point of view, we discovered new phenomenon, but all those resulted in imposing limitation on everything everywhere. We have discovered new phenomena, but each refined our understanding and added new limitation on what is possible. I'll grant you we have open point as we cannot go smoothly from infinitely small to infinitely big.
Although I would not bet the house on it, I contend that it is entirely possible that we have discovered the rough outline of most laws which drive the universe, and that warp drive and worm hole are stuff of the imagination which have no place whatsoever here. And that in future we might discover refinement and new phenomenon, but none which breaks utterly all those intrinsic limitation, they might even impose on us even *more* limitation on what is doable.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Wow, total fail. You should probably learn a tiny bit about science.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Science is hard, and we figured out the easy stuff like how to bang the rocks together first.
The latest evidence is a 'Correspondence' published in the journal Nature
That's not evidence that we're running out of things to discover.
seems to confirm the common feeling of an increasing time needed to achieve new discoveries in basic natural sciences—a somewhat worrisome trend
What's worrisome about it? It's awesome that a hairless ape has come so far in understanding how the universe works for little more than the sheer pleasure of understanding*.
*also, patent royalties.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
When they discover Warp Drive, True AI, and immortality, then they can run out of new discoveries.
Exactly, you'd better pick a profession with an actual future in it, like patent clerk or something.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Science runs out of things to discover all the time. The last big point when everybody thought that now "everything is understood" was in the middle of the 19th century. Mathematics was developed enough to descibe that classical non-relativistic point-mechanics world well enough. Everything seemed fine.
Then came relativity and quantum mechanics, and in the wave understanding all these phenomena there was an time when the theories could be used verified (with the "low hanging fruit" first). Fact is, building technology from a theory is the last step in using the theory. This step happens now for QM with the coherent of single quantum controls. Only when you have such technology, you can actually test the limits. I should remind here that, at the time of implementation the Michelson-Morely experiment was absolutely state of the art, using all understanding in the design and the newest technology.
Now we are at a similar point. We need extremly complicate technology (Quantum Computer, Gravitational wave detectors) to bring the experiments to the limits. Absolutely nobody nowadays can tell if QC will work (i am a former QC researcher). If the interpolation between the "macroscopic/collective" Quantumphenomena and the few quantum entangled systems indeed will exist is something which we expect, but it is an *unproven Hypothesis*, a test of a theory in limit which was never tested before.
Maybe everything works out according to theory, but possibly not. The same is true for Gravitation.
Science has always been mostly incremental improvements. For every world changing paper
there have been thousands of minor ones.I guess it's just time for the nobel committee to stop expecting grandiose stuff.
In the 1800's the US Patent office was almost closed because people running it thought just about everything had been invented already. The problem with non-scientists or anti-scientists is that they don't have any vision, they can't see the big things that -could- be discovered. Lets leave the predictions about what can and cannot be discovered up to the people at the sharp end of science. And the rest of us who do not have closed minds can make our outlandish and wild suggestions and inspire them with great ideas. People who wouldn't know what a good idea looks like and only want to sell their book should be roundly ignored.
"Is the Chief Priest an Offlian? Do dragons explode in the wood?"
The assumption that science needs taxpayer support is a very modern belief, one that working scientists love to live by, but one that seldom justifies itself!
Engineering isn't going to overcome the EPR Paradox. There's plenty of FTL discoveries in that corner alone to keep humanity busy for hundreds of years, if not more.
To quote a statement apocryphally attributed to Lord Kelvin: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement" And then came Quantum mechanics, Relativity... don't worry... there's heaps to play around with
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I think Horgan isnt considering that most of our so called discoveries are still theoretical.
The real trick is finding hard evidence. I can appreciate that we CAN operate on and continue science on a boat made of theory, but, Im tired of bailing for all the leaks. We havent wiped out far too many diseases, gas still costs too much, food is too expensive and lacks nutrition, graduates grow stupider by the year, we havent eliminated the need for politicians and my beer isnt strong enough.
Horgan needs to quit daydreaming, strap on a lab coat and get to crackin, not smoking crack.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Others did have "those insights". Poincare & Lorentz, for example. Einstein just never credited them. Prompting E.T. Whittaker to not give Einstein any credit.
I come here for the love
Especially when it's in a magnetic field. That's not a loose end, that's a black void. So far nobody has any good idea how to predict the behaviour of something as simple as a gas after electrons have been separated from the nucleii. Dito neural networks. And that's the just the two things that come to my mind immediately.
Patents are slowing down innovation.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The subject of the likelihood of future breakthroughs in basic science is very important. But Horgan is not very good at articulating the main issues. Much better is Sean Carroll's blog: http://www.preposterousunivers...
To simplify the situation to make it comprehensible, consider two hypotheses about the future of science. (1) Science will have an eternal sequence of groundbreaking discoveries/paradigm shifts. (2) The highly successful models we currently use are so accurate that they will continue to be used forever.
The first hypothesis is beloved by scientists in search of funding and by sociologists of science who wish to treat science as merely a social construct. It really is a strange alliance, but a common cause can make strange bedfellows. The second hypothesis is much less widely defended. Partly because it is clearly false in a fundamental sense...we know that current models don't describe dark matter for example, and so they have to be wrong and are likely to be replaced. But the weight of the second hypothesis is on the 'accuracy' of our current models of fundamental physics. As Carroll clearly argues, there is nothing of practical importance in everyday life that we can show to be in violation of the current laws of physics. Of course there will be major breakthroughs in applied physics...major things like figuring out how atoms and cells form brains and intelligence or discovering how to compute solutions of quantum many body systems. But if we are forced to choose between the two hypotheses, I think the evidence leans toward Carroll's side: the fundamental physics of everyday phenomena does not deviate in any significant ways from known physics.
Many people can't seem to see the vast gulf that exists between the discoveries of Maxwell's equations or quantum mechanics (which are necessary to describe matter and light, fundamental aspects of our lives) and current work on dark matter and primordial gravitational waves (which require precision detectors observing things from outside our galaxy). Also, before you dismiss (2) with references to late 19th century quotes about the end of physics, take a few minutes and look at the history beyond the quotes. Those quotes were mined for science funding publicity. Many scientists in the late 19th century knew that they couldn't explain atomic spectra...Kelvin even worked on vortex models of atoms. And if you focus your attention on 'practical' physics, the claims that late 19th century physics was nearly complete turn out not to be too far off...engineers spend almost no time studying quantum mechanics or relativity. It might be 1 or 2 courses out of 20 that cover physics that was discovered since the end of the 19th century. In mechanical engineering there are typically zero courses on quantum mechanics or relativity.
Cheese.
How about breakthroughs in understanding how consciousness emerges
How about breakthroughs in understanding IF consciousness emerges?
Exactly. The mind is still a field of unknowns, even the working of the basic elements aren't known fully.
or the achievement of strong AI/the singularity?
Pure religious fantasy. It's not the 1970's anymore. That silly belief cannot be defended.
I'll agree with the religiosity of "the singularity" but strong AI could be possible. Perhaps. We still are a long way from even approaching the complexities of fruit fly brains.
>> "10 years ago we thought we were the only solar system with planets."
> What?
Yeah I knew that there were planets outside the solar system around a quarter century ago, when I read the quote below
"Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute. " - Baha'u'llah
It was a joke then....
* incorrectly attributed to Charles H. Duell, commissioner of US patent office in 1899
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Just off the top of my head, we can reasonably expect (meaning, we're still short of) fundamental discoveries and/or basic technological developments in) artificial intelligence, mind download/upload to any degree, human augmentation (bio, mechanical, information processing, communications), animal augmentation, medicine of all kinds (in the areas of "how we work" and "how to keep us working" almost *everything* remains to be discovered), life extension, genetics, space drives, fusion technology, 3D printing / assemblers, nanotechnology, energy storage (ultracaps etc.), long baseline observing tech, canned learning, synthetic meats, holography, gravity...
And that's just a few of the areas we know about. No one knows what new things may be discovered by further exploration of space and the solar system, the sea floor, the earth beneath us, the various and sundry signals and noises that we can detect from elsewhere, and the ideas that spring solely from thinking about what we already know or suspect...
From my POV, both fundamental and technological development has usually seemed to manifest in a pyramidal fashion; one develops at least part of one level before you get to work on the next. With that in mind, I'd venture that we won't slow down either discovery or invention of things new until we cease discovery and invention among things known. And I don't think that's anywhere in sight.
But... then there are all those ideas in the SF lexicon, at least some of which are no doubt going to show up, either in the manner imagined or via some other mechanism. Frederick Pohl's "Joymaker" basically predicted the modern smartphone (except his device did some extra things we can't duplicate yet... like keep your up-to-date mind on file elsewhere as a backup); Arthur Clark nailed the whole geostationary communications satellite thing, William Gibson gave us a vision of networks that we still haven't even come close to (and I sure wish we would); Robert Heinlein came up with the waldo. There are plenty of ideas that seem like they *ought* to be possible, too, but don't appear to be so as imagined -- but that doesn't mean there isn't another way to get to those goals. Transporters, effectively FTL transport, levitation, etc.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The existence of the LHC, as well as the type of discoveries made due to the LHC, in no way preclude discoveries elsewhere.
And as they would be discoveries, there's no saying if some are, or aren't, going to occur.
Inasmuch as cosmological theory is in complete disarray at this time -- "dark this" and "dark that", no certain knowledge of how the universe started -- added to which the fact that we can't yet see other worlds (but the tech to do that is approachable, given the appropriate industrial base), I think it's more than a bit premature to declare things like the LHC the last bastion of physics discoveries.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Strong AI is possible, guaranteed. You're one example of it. The word "artificial" is utterly misleading. All it really says is "we know it exists in animals, and we choose to call any other example artificial, even if we're emulating the biological example."
There's nothing magical about the brain or brainops, superstition notwithstanding. It's just physics like everything else. Technology will get there, it's as inevitable as any other technology already invented, only more so, due to the immense potential for advancement on every front.
Presuming, of course, that we don't destroy ourselves before we get there. Sigh.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
FTFY
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Science doesn't work like economics. More to the point, science actually works, quite unlike economics beyond the utterly simplistic. So as it turns out, past performance is an indicator of future performance in the case of science.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's called ignorance and it's always the starting point for new discoveries. I'm sure there were people claiming there was nothing left to discover/invent 200 years ago. Look how right they were.
No doubt that you (or any one of us) can point to things we already know about - and there is indeed no shortage and, you can argue, are a moral imperative to solve, rather than counting angels on pinheads. To that extent, I agree with you. But Kuhn's point is that some things are unsolvable (if not unimaginable) without a methodology: the "scientific method" of hypothesis, test, assertion, rinse, repeat, is relatively recent and itself led to major revolutions in thinking. Causality in an epoch where religion and divine intervention reigns? Inconceivable. Curved space and time? Inconceivable within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. There are many things inconceivable within our current reference, that is all that I'm saying
We are nearing the limit of what our current technology can discover.
There are MILLIONS, if not BILLIONS, of questions to be answered--most of which, we don't even know how to ask yet.
You cant be wrong quoting Feynman ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Who could add more?
For example, the revolutionary work on the human microbiome / microbiota has the potential to revolutionize modern medicine.
The world in on the verge of a global economic revolution, the old ideas and old politics are all that's really in the way.
Recognizing the obstetricals is just one step, figuring out how to get around them is the next. The things that make it possible for humans to discover intense interests in looking creatively and differently at how things are interconnected and interdependent are what matters.
If "science" seems to have stagnated, it's because we've created a situation where kids don't have the access to play with the really cool things they used to play with. Really cool chemistry sets, really cool model rockets, exciting and stimulating stuff that runs contrary to sitting with your face glued to a screen all damn day...
A leading contender for the Francis Fukuyama Award For Public Fatuousness.
the LHC people have reported compelling evidence for 4-quark bosons, one more than everybody has grown comfortable with.
Naw, nothing new going on.
--
Intelligence is realizing that nobody knows what they're talking about. Wisdom is realizing that you don't, either.
What makes it a "crackpot" physics web site? The fact that it has a theory different than your own?
One of the greatest pains to human nature
is the pain of a new idea.
- Walter Bagehot
I come here for the love