Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Is scientific progress reaching its end?

gregxy - 2-7-2011 at 12:13

This is something that I have been thinking about for a while.
By progress I mean major developments that change the way that we live. I am going to argue that it is reaching its end. I hope someone can convince me otherwise.


First no new useful physics has been discovered since the 1930s (I'm guessing on the date). Here useful is Maxwell's equations, Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, relativity and thermodynamics. There have been no new laws found that will let us tunnel through space. The last "surprising" stuff I remember is high temp super conductors. Physics is the backbone of all science. Unfortunately physics does not let us synthesize new ideas, but once an idea has been conceived it lets us quickly optimize it and study its feasibility.

Second science should be progressing exponentially. The reason is that science builds on itself and phenomena that build on themselves progress at an exponential rate x=k*dx/dt has the solution x=e^(t/k). In addition we have more humans available to work on problems. From the 1850s to the 1960s there was very rapid scientific progress. Airplanes, electronics, nuclear energy, medicine, material science, chemistry, space travel. That seems to have
been the exponential period for many fields.

Since the 60s the only field that appears to be expanding exponentially is information technology (which should be driving all scientific progress even faster). Behind info tech. are advances in microelectronics which have been amazing
from 1960 onward. In the next few years we will see if the pace keeps up, clock speeds have stopped increasing and they are starting to stack chips since it is becoming impossible to shrink them further.

Other fields stopped rapid development in the 60s. The last air speed records were set then. The SST was developed and abandoned. Rocket engines are still combustion powered (no ion drives or ???) The Apollo program seems to have been the peak for aeronautics and space travel.

Energy production is the same, we burn fossil fuels. Fission is viable but people are afraid of it. If Fusion were going to work I think it would be working by now. Solar, wind etc are not economically competitive to fossil fuels yet. (But it would be nice if science made them so).

One can argue that if we spent more money there would be more progress. Some fields have had great amounts of money spent:

War fighting: We still shoot guns with bullets. Drop bombs containing explosives invented a hundred years ago. No lasers, force fields etc. Lots of info-tech but the basic weapons are the same since the 1950s.

Medicine: Many new drugs, amazing advances in surgery and a huge increase in understanding of how the body works but lifespan increases were the greatest prior to 1950 in the industrial world and are increasing asymtotically now.
Perhaps the human body is already optimal?

Thoughts?

[Edited on 2-7-2011 by gregxy]

woelen - 2-7-2011 at 13:33

I do not agree with you. Science makes progress in an amazingly fast way. But the nature of the progress is different.

In the 19th and first half of the 20th century we have seen the upcoming of new theories and we have gained a much better understaning of Nature. So, we have learned a lot in all those years and really great discoveries have been made. But an important point is that all these discoveries remained curiosities, food for thought for physiscists and mathematicians and curiousities in well equipped labs all over the world.

It is in the second half of the 20th century and that all this knowledge is made operational in devices which can be used by the general public. This is a tremendous scientific breakthrough. It is one thing to discover a new phenomenon, but it is a totally different matter to exploit that phenomenon so that people can use it in their daily life.

Mathematics has seen tremendous progress in the 1970's and 1980. Data encryption has become feasible and at the same time it has become safe, much safer than any other method used before.
Data compression techniques have been developed in the 1980's and 1990 and have been perfected in the 2000's. Only 20 years ago no one would believe me if I said that digital video can be watched on just a mainstream computer at the image quality we have now. Full HD requires appr. 1 GBit/second of data streaming and this was impossible 20 years ago. With fantastic compression techniques we can bring this back to only 1% or so and have no noticeable loss of image quality.

What to think of mobility? In the 1930's a journy to a city 200 km from home was a world trip. Now we do the same routinely.

And then we see all these new electronic devices. Their operation can only be understood in terms of quantum physics and more and more the theory of quantum physics is exploited to make new devices (e.g. LED's, ultra high speed switching devices). Devices like Android tablets, iPads, smartphones, but also our computers and other digital stuff around us are the result of years of applied science.

I can go on for a while, giving examples of what science has achieved in the last decades. Science in this form is technology, but this technology only is possible due to the perfection of the underlying science.

-------------------------------

Also in the field of more fundamental sciences I think there still are very interesting things to come. Nanotechnology introduces new materials with amazing properties (e.g. clothes which can change color on request, materials which are self-cleaning, distributed altra-micro communication systems which can operate within a body).

Another field will be the understanding of the human mind and the real thruth behind our intelligence. This may lead to artificial intelligences which far outperform human intelligence and which may open up completely new things in reasoning and understanding. Understanding of our brain is a main topic of current research with medical applications in mind, such as curing diseases, but also with artificical applications in mind.

Finally, I also think that we still only understand part of the raw physics at the particle level. What is dark matter? For each kg of "ordionary" matter in our universe (stars, planets, neutron stars, black holes, gases, dust) there are appr. 4 kg of dark matter. No one knows what it is. We know it is there, because of the gravitational effects it has, but otherwise it does not interact with anything, not at all.

How can quantum mechanics be combined with general relativity? I am convinced, that once there is a solution to this problem that a whole bunch of new physics will appear. People already are looking for a solution for 70 years or so and still no answer is found. There are speculative theories, but there simply are too many theories and these theories have too many open/freely choosable parameters. Not satisfying at all. Probably people are thinking in a completely wrong direction and a new 'Einstein' should rise to settle this issue.

So, for me, I have the impression that we are living in a very interesting era. Indeed, no tunnels through the stars, but many other things to be discovered and many unanswered questions.

hkparker - 3-7-2011 at 00:16

Quote: Originally posted by woelen  
How can quantum mechanics be combined with general relativity? I am convinced, that once there is a solution to this problem that a whole bunch of new physics will appear.


Agree with woelen, my phhysics teacher had a big talk with us about this and he said its starting to look like there's fundamentally one force and one particle. And we really are only breaking the surface there.

I see what your saying in many respects gregxy but technology ha advanced scary fast. My current graphics card would have probably been considered a super computer in the year 2000. Last year I bought 45nm chip thinking it was sweet, and a 22nm chip is being released next year. With memristor technology we won't even need RAM because we can read from disk faster.

Sure we were discovering those concepts back then but as woelen said, its only now they are being fully implemented.

Mildronate - 3-7-2011 at 00:44

There is no more romantic in research like in good old days :)

hissingnoise - 3-7-2011 at 02:18

Familiarity has bred out romance and science has become jaded for all except those lucky enough to be at the cutting edge . . .


Mildronate - 3-7-2011 at 02:54

If you working in some research, you cant do what you whant, you do what whant your governament or Eropean union or some private enterprise.

hissingnoise - 3-7-2011 at 03:00

Well, that's capitalism for you . . .

Bowdlerize - 3-7-2011 at 05:10

Mankind is creating elements long since decayed on earth. Granted most are short lived but there are a few (eg. Californium) that have fairly long half-lives (on a human scale).

Think of the possibilities of adding just 1 element to the periodic table. I have read that it is likely that as the synthetic elements get heavier they are expected to become more stable. I am no physicist so I have no idea why this may be, I just hope they are right.

Edit: Spelling

[Edited on 4-7-2011 by Bowdlerize]

franklyn - 4-7-2011 at 16:53

40 years ago The periodic table comprised 103 elements. Today 115 elements
have been identified , a reality now that was science fiction back then. In the old
" Outer Limits " TV show , the episode titled " The Special One " 125 elements
were hypothesized but not then actualized. ( you would have to view it to understand )

http://www.tv.com/video/10389112/the-outer-limits-1963--the-...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8pdfn_the-outer-limits-ori...
http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/tv/Outer-Limits/98513/106416614...

The last planet to be discovered was pluto in 1936. It has recently been demoted and
not now classified as such. Other objects more distant still are surmised to be in orbit
around the sun. If there are no more " planets " does this signal an end to astronomy ?
Mature sciences are not all there is , new areas of investigation arise at all times that
are not immediately apparent in significance to expanding knowledge

There is an effect in play also that was not before the second world war. Scientific inquiry
is potentialy dangerous and destabilizing. The potential for example of know how which
has applications for biological weapons of mass destruction for one. There are areas of
investigation which are kept sequestered and not published about.

.

bbartlog - 4-7-2011 at 20:12

There are anomalies in physics that suggest that our models are not so complete as you are making out. Aside from the dark matter, I don't think that the Voyager gravitational anomaly was ever fully explained. There's also unexplained variations in the rates of certain radioactive decay. And that's before you start looking at really fringe, dubious stuff like Podkletnov's research.

woelen - 4-7-2011 at 23:14

There is one big difference between physics nowadays and physics e.g. 200 years ago. At that time people could do astonishing discoveries with equipment which one could have at home and there was no need to specialize into the extreme. Nowadays you need multi-tonne or even multi-million equipment if you want to do bleeding edge research and you have to focus on a very narrow topic in physics.

All low hanging fruits have been picked already in centures past by, nowadays we need to put more and more effort in picking the higher hanging fruits. Unfortunately this makes significant discoveries by amateurs very unlikely.

peach - 5-7-2011 at 00:59

In short, no.

More specifically, if we look back in history, a long way back, technology (and everything related to it) goes through evolutionary and then revolutionary periods.

When printed writing (or writing storage devices like wax pads), dyed cloths, bricks, cements, wind mills and irrigation where introduced, these were the semiconductors of their time and made big changes to people's lives. Allowing them to record results, build nice houses to live in when they did those experiments and free up time spent hand milling grain to do something else instead.

Development then went into a more mundane pattern until the 18th century. Various important technologies and ideas were being worked on. Like the mass production of high strength metals; the idea that using a blast furnace and carefully treating iron would yield steel; which was needed to safely produce pressurised steam. And that steam could be used to power mechanical devices, and that the power plant could be made to do many things by altering how it was attached to something with gears and pulleys, or made to reciprocate.

When all of these technologies reached a usable point in their development, people quickly realised they could be combined to produce something even more impressive. The industrial revolution began and fuel powered mechanisation took over in a monumental way. Churning out cheap cloths for everyone (which is medically beneficial in terms of infection from not changing them), mechanically processing food products (less time farming), sterilising things by heat and pressure, or making things required to produce better and better engineering products, which would all have been too laborious to do by hand. The change was huge! Try making your own cloths, then washing them by hand, and milling your own grain, and see how much spare time and energy you have left for learning.

Then... quiet again, until around the period you've mentioned, when it was then possible to produce the equipment and materials needed to do nuclear research. And produce pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. All products that wouldn't have happened without the industrial revolution.

It has since been in an evolutionary period again. We haven't developed much that is monumentally ground braking for society. A lot of what's been produced has been an evolution of the technology we already have. Transistors have mainly been getting smaller and more efficient for example, but nothing drastic has changed about them in the way that it did going from thermionic valves to silicon.

Of coarse, it's not one or two revolutions, there are smaller ones in between, then huge booms. If technology didn't go through the evolutionary (selling, using, refining) period, it would be nigh on impossible for it to ever advanced, as others have to benefit from it and then be able to put money back into it (e.g. new power generation technology goes out to plants, they sell it, the public use it, mine things, make things, then provide them back to the research, even via none tangible materials like money through the tax system, which then goes back out as grants to the universities). Imagine asking someone in ancient Rome to build CERN. He has all the stuff there, buried in the ground. To do it with spades and little wood powered kilns would require the entire planet to get involved and it would likely go wrong, presenting a huge risk of wasting a huge amount of effort.

It's not dead, it's just gone quiet again for a while.

There are many possibilities for what will create that next revolution for us, but some examples are fusion power, high temperature superconductors and mass produced nano engineered materials.

We are struggling with energy problems at the moment. No matter how energy efficient a calculator is made, it requires some package of energy to produce a forced change in the universe, and so it will always need some quantity of energy. The more calculations done, the more refining carried out... there is a fixed penalty on those events that no amount of green protesting can deny. The reason humans aren't rocks is that they manipulate energy to change their environment. The same applies to plants. To produce better things, we need energy. The more remote they become from nature, the more energy is needed; harassing a squid to get dye for clothing uses significantly less energy than does splitting salt to get the sodium for instance. Greenpeace wouldn't have that boat if it wasn't for the industries that they shoot water at.

Everyday in the news I will hear about the energy deficit and rising fuel prices (It's about £5 a gallon of petrol in the UK). To drive technology forwards, we need power (people at CERN need that petrol to literally drive to work). Because it takes power to start up particle accelerators, but so do the mills that produce the steel for them, the refineries for the coils, the liquid air plants for the cryogenics, the diggers that dig the hole in the ground for it to go in and, of coarse, all the staff who need a sandwich every lunch break. Every bit of it counts.

With fusion we'd get a massive boost of energy availability. High temperature superconduction would allow for incredible bits of electronics and mass produced nano engineered materials could make structural surfaces and elements (like tools) orders of magnitude stronger or lighter.

As woelen points out, the demands on experiments are getting big! So it's not as simple as just one person noticing something anymore and suddenly revolutionising science. It wasn't like that even when it happened hundreds of years ago. It was a culmination of events.

Einstein did not revolutionise physics alone. He was working and talking with some of the leading people in physics. He is the person who put it together and down on paper, and the public don't want to bother remembering lots of geeky names, so they go with the professor with the most wacky haircut.

Franklin's wacky kite experiment did little to make it electricity usable by society. But it's much more tangible and memorable for the public than the thermionic emission that also needed developing for their radio to work.

The question is old and the answer obvious. How many people living back in Ancient Rome do you think wondered if they had mastered the world? And when Leonardo was designing flying machines, his friends probably thought he was a bit thick for thinking he could fly. They weren't happy about him cutting up dead pregnant women to draw pictures of them, which are now part of are understanding of anatomy. Semmelweis ended up in the loony bin for suggesting 'invisible life' was the cause of infection. You seriously have to break out of that mindset; science is a process of finding, not ruling out. We have had a few decades of nuclear science and have thus far visited... the moon. The other side of the known universe is 14 billion years away, at the speed of light. Longer than Earth has been in existence for. And yet many new age religious zealots (atheists) are confident we already understand it all.

"What happened before this big bang theory of which ye speak?"
"Nothing."
"What did it expand into?"
"Nothing."
"What's outside of what we can see?"
"Nothing."

This is our state of the art understanding of the universe. It sounds familiar,

"How was the earth made?"
"God."
Quote:
If you working in some research, you cant do what you whant, you do what whant your governament or Eropean union or some private enterprise.


Precisely. Today's version of Leonardo and Semmelweis would be people doing genetic experiments on humans and controversial stem cell experiments. Public don't want it, government doesn't want to upset the public. They didn't want Semmelweis' invisible creatures spreading disease. Now it's the fundamental principle of infection control.
Quote:
Perhaps the human body is already optimal?


I once heard a guy, a scientist, saying "the human brain probably works on quantum mechanics, so we'll never understand consciousness".

Oh dear oh dear...

Keep in mind that LSD (one of the first synthetic, powerful pharmacological products) was discovered less than a century ago. When Albert found it (by chance, randomly scrolling through variants), his fume hood was powered by a burner at the back. And the people at Sandoz thought he'd made a mistake with the amounts because nothing was known of that could produce such a profound affect on the body in such small quantities. He found it because his laboratory and method of working was below what was required to isolate him from it, so he ended up exposed to it, by mistake. He was trying to produce more pharmacologically suitable variants, but no one was expecting that result; they weren't doing much targeting of the work at all.

Things like antibiotics were largely the mass production of natural products in gigantic feed tanks, with a 'suck it and see' approach to development. Which still occurs today (lots of drugs are repurposed when they fail at their specific task and are better for something else, or are rebranded versions of older pharmaceuticals to keep their patents going), but there is now a much stronger R&D period, things are designed specifically for a task and the problems are complex.

With better super computers, calculating protein folding would be quicker. We have 'gene chips' for doing rapid testing. We can perform genetic manipulation, but producing the mutants, scanning their DNA, finding the specific sequences, multiplying, inserting, modifying with primers and testing the results is still an intensive process. Of coarse, that is also an area with a very large potential impact on health.

Cancer, aids, neural plaques, dying. These would all be optimal performance with which we should be content? :D

I tease. As you can see above, I agree with your points and realise the question was to start discussion, not a statement.
Quote:

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

- Arthur C. Clarke



[Edited on 5-7-2011 by peach]

497 - 5-7-2011 at 15:53

Probably not.
I'd say research into novel psychoactive compounds is still an area where amateurs are able to advance albeit at a slower pace without supercomputers to model it and kilos of LiAlH4 on the shelf like the big corporate outfits. I wouldn't call Shulgin an amateur, but he sure wasn't big pharma either..

jamit - 5-7-2011 at 22:50

To think that scientific progress has reached an end is stupid. Like Woelen's last post mentions, metaphorically speaking, the fruit of scientific progress is now higher up the tree and so beyond the reach of most of us, except those who specializes and have the resources. There is so much to know and learn about the wonders of our universe to think that scientific achievement has come to an end. No my friend, think and dream bigger.

I'm waiting... though most likely won't happen in my time, for the day when space travel will be a regular reality both technologically and economically... a day when we will discover the cure of AIDS, etc.

Hardly, it just keeps getting bigger

franklyn - 27-1-2015 at 06:16

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCounW3VO0&feature=youtu...

neptunium - 27-1-2015 at 07:01

dont forget time ... simple and everybody knows what it does and we live our entire life in it ... but who could truely explain what it actually is? part of space ? (which can also be hard to impossible to explain)

Bert - 27-1-2015 at 07:23

History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Leavitt_Ellsworth
Quote:

A comment by Ellsworth about the increased workload at the patent office, taken out of context and embellished, was apparently the source of an urban legend that a patent office official (Charles H. Duell in some versions) claimed that everything which could be invented had already been invented.[15] In his 1843 report to Congress, Ellsworth stated: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." The report then lists a record number of patents, implying his comment was intended to be humorous.[16]
Quote:

From Ellsworth's exposure to the West and knowledge of inventions, he prophesied late in life that the lands of the West would be cultivated by means of steam plows. This prophecy was introduced in the probate of his will in an attempt to prove that he was of unsound mind.

macckone - 27-1-2015 at 10:06

As others have pointed out, the existence of dark matter and dark
energy would tend to indicate our understanding of the laws of
nature are incomplete. Discovery of new ideas about the nature
of matter and energy are sure to follow.

But I also think it is fair to say, as others have pointed out, the
low hanging fruit has been plucked. But that doesn't mean progress
will stop. Occasionally amateurs discover something profound even
in todays world. Perhaps someone experimenting with new recreational
drugs will discover something that cures alzheimer's purely by accident.
By the same token, fusion will change the world in ways we cannot
imagine. If lockheed martin has really made the breakthrough they
claim, in 15 years the world will be unrecognizable.

Imagine being able to make methanol from carbon dioxide and
hydrogen. Most will say that the reactions required take too much
energy, but with energy from fusion being basically free compared to
modern energy the reaction would probably be the new basis
of the chemical industry.

Imagine sky scrapers that are now powered by their own fusion
reactors and use hydroponic gardens. Small haber plants produce
ammonia for the crops. Human waste is sterilized with heat and
reprocessed in the buildings gardens. Micro chemical plants could
produce plastics with carbon and hydrogen as raw materials.

All of these things that are too inefficient on a small scale suddenly
become practical. This even leads to the possibility of star trek
like replicators. We are already going there with plastics, metals,
and even food being 'printed'.

This even leads to the possibility of large scale plants to produce
rare elements by collider induced fusion. Normally the power would
be too great but now you have basically free energy.

Another problem is fresh water. Distilling water takes huge amounts
of energy. But with cheaper power, you can now have fresh water
in huge quantities in plants that can be built much more cheaply than
modern desalination plants. You no longer need complex filter systems.

Space travel becomes much easier to imagine given efficient fusion
system. Almost all science fiction books have efficient fusion at the
core of their economies.

Given cheap enough power carbohydrates can be synthesized rather
than grown.

All of this based on a single breakthrough that isn't even 'fundamental'.

Other recent breakthroughs that have a huge impact on society:
A potential cure for many forms of autism
The ability to lengthen telomeres
Drano for arteries (although several drugs of this type are in various
stages of development, the most promising actually being discovered
in a population of people in Italy.)
Improvements in cancer survival
Production of new organs (literally printed from organic cells).
Quantum entanglement communication

The list goes on and on.

The reality is that einstein developed the theory of relativity while
he was working at the swiss patent office. And that work was mostly
theoretical. He obviously tweaked it later but the 'great idea' was
just a thought experiment and really had no practical application at
the time.

Similar advances are happening in quantum computing that could
revolutionize that field. We don't have a quantum computer but
we can theorize how algorithms could be implemented.

Anyone can work on physics theory and tweak the standard model with
their ideas and see if the existing data matches their tweaks.

The really big ideas like relativity and gravitation are usually done
with math. These theories are produced with math either well before
there are experiments or try to match a theory to the data.

Anyway, no science is not dead. The march of progress continues on
until mankind has a nuclear or biological war, or nature decides that
the herd needs to be thinned with a novel virus.

careysub - 27-1-2015 at 11:08

Quote: Originally posted by woelen  
There is one big difference between physics nowadays and physics e.g. 200 years ago. At that time people could do astonishing discoveries with equipment which one could have at home and there was no need to specialize into the extreme. Nowadays you need multi-tonne or even multi-million equipment if you want to do bleeding edge research and you have to focus on a very narrow topic in physics.

All low hanging fruits have been picked already in centures past by, nowadays we need to put more and more effort in picking the higher hanging fruits. Unfortunately this makes significant discoveries by amateurs very unlikely.


Funny thing though - fullerenes could have been discovered by an amateur working at home.

A carbon arc in a reduced pressure inert atmosphere is all that is required to produce them. And extracting the soot with any of several common aromatic solvents would produce a fairly pure solution of C60 and C70 fullerenes that is a colorful magenta. Simple chromatography will separate pure samples.

This wasn't how they were discovered, but it could have been.

Are there any other opportunities out there like that?

Funny thing about chemistry. Despite all the tens of millions of molecules that have been cataloged, the universe of possible compounds has barely been scratched. It is entirely feasible for a sophisticated amateur to produce compounds no one has ever made before.

[Edited on 27-1-2015 by careysub]

IrC - 27-1-2015 at 17:05

Quote: Originally posted by gregxy  
This is something that I have been thinking about for a while. By progress I mean major developments that change the way that we live. I am going to argue that it is reaching its end. I hope someone can convince me otherwise.


All one need do is watch and live long enough to see the endless advances that make the fears of gregxy unfounded.

With never ending advances in computers and simulation software the words of careysub have never been more true.

careysub "It is entirely feasible for a sophisticated amateur to produce compounds no one has ever made before."

What makes the point even more amazing is the fact that the amateur is now able to accomplish such feats while sitting at home in their underwear.

Pasrules - 27-1-2015 at 17:43

I think i can best this thread (no pun intended) by saying how long is a piece of string?

For those unfamiliar with this remark try writing 1/3 as a decimal, sounds easy right? i'll do the first 2 places 0.3

Problems like these lead us to
"2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2"

Just think in another couple decades 32-bit computers will run out of size to continue counting from the start date in 1970.

My question to you:
Why improve the standard of living when you can already sell the current standard to everyone, companies don't like paying for upgrades which return the same margins as their previous products? (answers must contain enthusiasm)



Drop bombs containing explosives invented a hundred years ago?

Take a look at the new CL-20 High density explosive, it has an amazing crystal structure for those energetics who may be reading.

IrC - 27-1-2015 at 18:19

Goes without saying: the next great new advance in science will be made by someone applying coherent thought to the subject.

halogen - 27-1-2015 at 19:48

Yes. Science is nearing the end of progress.

The written word originated from trade in Sumer and the Indus. An accounting of which goods were exchanged to compare with the norm, and to enforce agreements in the future. Compare with scientific "conservation law". Children were taught previously the entire known history and the reader may be aware of the terrifying capacity and accuracy this is known to have achieved. But from that moment slabs of papyrus became the extension of the organism. The accumulation of knowledge became easier. Instead of Socrates passing his collected works to his son, and from son to son, whose son would have refused and joined a rock band, and poof! no more Socrates, we have his works and many others on paper.

Many primitive languages, whose societies subsisted comfortably, lack numbers beyond the pair and the triple. All else was "many". Aborigines, amazon tribes. Because of trade WE have them, and it turns out are integral to science - at least as it has been done in the past few centuries. And because those methods are essentially non-human, they escape and fulfill our demands and there will be nothing left. Take for instance breakfast cereal. You can not improve it: it conforms to the senses wholly, because we have crossed a barrier, as humans, where we can design things with atoms. Toilet paper will not change in our lifetime. There IS A massive industry where sensations are created: chemically, analogs of MSG are in development, and flavor science mimics the outward appearance of every fruit and substance in nature that grew in concert with our ancestors to improve our frame. Visually, graphic designers and psychologists, and artists, painters, etc. exist. Even intellectually, the mind is taken over for profit, where historically only by kings and aristocrats by clumsy and successful means did, but now by plentiful hordes of novelists and artists, politicians, myth-makers, hucksters, intelligentsia, and the news media, a self perpetuating organism. And psychologists. Not only mimicking the pleasure response to historically beneficent stimulus, but also exploiting the "glitches" with their "hacks". To do??

As trade drove science, and still is at it's heart, the quest for knowledge will be, and I believe this isn't only a danger but a near certainty of doom that with only the most tremendous earnest effort can be overcome, ended by satisfaction. Lorem ipsum...

Still, ya gotta live you're life.

First post in thread lays it all out. With a few exceptions, like theory and computational methods in fluid dynamics, theoretical unifications (which may have astounding implications, or, may not. As Feynman said, maybe we'll find the universe is like an onion, there's more layers the deeper we look, and eventually we just get tired of peeling. Or, there could be more to experience than the scientific method, as yet, can possibly be relevant to. I would suggest it.) etc.

All discoveries will be limited to those things that could be worked out mathematically, but would be easier just to do and fail, or at least to test experimentally. Chemistry is like that as a whole!

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jhet.5570090409/a...

One thing that could be worth doing is work on anti-microbial substances. William Fenical says we've about run out. So he's looking in the ocean. "Despite all the tens of millions of molecules that have been cataloged, the universe of possible compounds has barely been scratched. It is entirely feasible for a sophisticated amateur to produce compounds no one has ever made before." attributed to careysub.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQZPA0Kn_A0

[Edited on 28-1-2015 by halogen]

[Edited on 28-1-2015 by halogen]

Bert - 27-1-2015 at 20:33

At some point, the process of combining our individual processing capabilities that began with spoken communication, was amplified with the written word transcending the immediate moment and spatial range of an individual's voice, then exponentially amplified by various media rangeing from the printing press to the medium you are seeing this writing on- Will culminate in the conversion of our species to the equivalent of a massive parallel processor.

Mission acomplished. Whose mission was it, though?

gregxy - 29-1-2015 at 12:10

Here is an interesting article, some really smart people are worried about artificial intelligence leading to the end of mankind (like Terminator)

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/ai-arrived-really-worries-world...

It's also disappointing in a way if all that intelligence turn out to be is fitting a non-linear equation to a bunch of points and then using the equation to extrapolate....

I also remember reading that scientists were "disappointed" at how well the current set of theories fit the experimental results for the Higgs particle. Disappointed because there was no new anomaly to investigate, which could lead to new theories.

Chemosynthesis - 29-1-2015 at 13:05

I would argue that plenty of physics has advanced since the 80's, as has biology, chemistry, and multidisciplinary fields such as neuroscience (and the BRAIN initiative) and continue to advance to this day.

morganbw - 28-2-2015 at 20:06

Quote: Originally posted by woelen  
There is one big difference between physics nowadays and physics e.g. 200 years ago. At that time people could do astonishing discoveries with equipment which one could have at home and there was no need to specialize into the extreme. Nowadays you need multi-tonne or even multi-million equipment if you want to do bleeding edge research and you have to focus on a very narrow topic in physics.

All low hanging fruits have been picked already in centures past by, nowadays we need to put more and more effort in picking the higher hanging fruits. Unfortunately this makes significant discoveries by amateurs very unlikely.


Einstein used mostly thought experiments and then searched for mathematical models to fit.

Personally I think that their still might be some fruit to pluck.

careysub - 1-3-2015 at 07:39

Quote: Originally posted by gregxy  
Here is an interesting article, some really smart people are worried about artificial intelligence leading to the end of mankind (like Terminator)

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/ai-arrived-really-worries-world...

It's also disappointing in a way if all that intelligence turn out to be is fitting a non-linear equation to a bunch of points and then using the equation to extrapolate....

I also remember reading that scientists were "disappointed" at how well the current set of theories fit the experimental results for the Higgs particle. Disappointed because there was no new anomaly to investigate, which could lead to new theories.


I am an applied AI guy from way back, also very interested in real studies of intelligence - natural neural systems - and I can tell you that the powerful AI of today is not like "real" intelligence at all.

AI systems are increasingly powerful pattern matching systems, that can automate work that used to be done only by natural pattern matching systems, i.e. humans. Many tasks that have in the past been impossible to automate are now falling to this technology, and will continue to do so, and with it a lot of jobs - white collar jobs this time.

But these systems aren't capable of reasoning anything like any natural brain, even simple ones. Even the impressive performance of Watson is simply a data-base driven question answering system tuned by humans.

As an example consider one of the simplest model neural systems used by science, the marine flatworm Caenorhabditis elegans. It has 302 neurons - we have counted them all, identified all of the neuron-to-neuron interconnections, the interconnection type, and we know how the entire system develops from the original single germ cell, every cell division that occurs, the whole lineage of descent.

With such complete knowledge of the layout and organization of the neural system, and the ability to dissect at will, we must be able to build a computer version of the C. elegans nervous system, right?

Hah! We cannot even model one individual neuron accurately.

We are still in the early stages of learning how to study complex systems of all types, and neural systems are the most complex we know of. Studies of complexity is an essentially unlimited space of scientific inquiry we are just starting to address.

About this business of "no new physics since...":
In every decade so far we have had fundamental breakthroughs in physics, even if it is the cosmologists showing us that there is new physics we do not understand.

Recently:

Neutrino mass violated the "standard model" in 1998.

Cosmic acceleration and dark energy (also 1998), something we are entirely clueless about to this day. We don't even know what questions to ask.

Even in ordinary prosaic normal matter at STP - we discovered topological insulators in 2006, a new phase of condensed matter.

You want physics from pure thought (similar to Einstein's Gedenken experiments?) We have Shor's algorithm for quantum computing (1994) and in the same vein more recently quantum error correction. Perhaps even more fundamental is gauge/gravity duality ("Maldacena duality") in 1997.

Evidence for the existence of dark matter has been developing since the 1930s(!) but all we have are a batch of unconfirmed theories at this point. All attempts to detect the supposed particles have failed so far.

Considering that matter than we "see" and understand only constitutes 4% of the material in the Universe, and we have no clue what the rest of it is, there is obviously a lot of physics we are ignorant of.

And of course we know that we do not know the relationship between quantum physics and gravity.

Even with 'expected' physics, denying progress when we actually produce theoretical objects in the lab for study, like Bose-Einstein condensates, seems short sighted.

In the area of complex systems understanding and physics we have Chaos Theory developed since the 1970s. In this area discoveries about chaotic physical systems continue, and can still be made with materials no more exotic than piles of sand.

[Edited on 1-3-2015 by careysub]

Fulmen - 1-3-2015 at 11:33

Quote: Originally posted by morganbw  

Einstein used mostly thought experiments


That's not entirely accurate. While Einstein wasn't an experimental physicist he did rely on the available observations at the time. Without experiments like Michelson & Morleys he wouldn't have anything to work with.

blogfast25 - 1-3-2015 at 11:41

Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
That's not entirely accurate. While Einstein wasn't an experimental physicist he did rely on the available observations at the time. Without experiments like Michelson & Morleys he wouldn't have anything to work with.


I'm fairly sure he was unaware of that 'failed' experiment and the Lorentz Transformation.

The second search result here, a *.pdf, argues kind of both ways:

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=einstein+michelson+mo...

[Edited on 1-3-2015 by blogfast25]

Fulmen - 1-3-2015 at 12:31

I know there is some controversy around this, but let's be honest. The experiment was done 20 years before his publication and even if he wasn't directly aware of it it's still likely that the results shaped the debate at the time.

careysub - 1-3-2015 at 12:58

Quote: Originally posted by blogfast25  
Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
That's not entirely accurate. While Einstein wasn't an experimental physicist he did rely on the available observations at the time. Without experiments like Michelson & Morleys he wouldn't have anything to work with.


I'm fairly sure he was unaware of that 'failed' experiment and the Lorentz Transformation.

The second search result here, a *.pdf, argues kind of both ways:

https://www.google.co.uk/gws_rd=ssl#q=einstein+michelson+mor...

[Edited on 1-3-2015 by blogfast25]


I understand the problem of getting publications out, and the need to make them significant, but this guy is trying too hard to create some problem to be solved.

The actual direct evidence he cites is that Einstein wrote in a letter as a student that he read a review article, which we known contains a summary of 12 experiments including M&M. If we assume that he really read it, then he did run across a description of it, as one might expect a physics student to do. Even if we didn't have this mention, it would a likely hypothesis that he did.

But the fact that he nevers mentions the experiment must account against the idea that it was playing a significant role in his thoughts at the time.

The attempt to make this is some sort of refutation of his later statements that it did not play a major role in the formation of his ideas seems overdoing it.

But - yeah, he was studying the experimental literature and thus the prior experimental work was forming his thoughts in a general way.




[Edited on 1-3-2015 by careysub]

Fulmen - 1-3-2015 at 13:58

Quote: Originally posted by careysub  

But - yeah, he was studying the experimental literature and thus the prior experimental work was forming his thoughts in a general way.

Exactly. You don't get anywhere with spinning theories not supported by evidence. That's why there were so many silly ideas in ancient Greece.

Everything we know is derived from the observed. Now Einstein didn't do any experiments, what he did was by reason alone. That was an incredible achievement, but it was based on observations and experiments.

Science IS observation. It's just a point well worth repeating now and again.

aga - 1-3-2015 at 14:48

All things are Born, Live then Die : a Self-Evident Truth, however i don't think we're there yet.

OK. So Science isn't discovering stuff as fast as you'd like.

No new shiny sparkly stuff for a while.

The Sheer effort required to research stuff, work out a new hypothesis, do endless experiments to prove/disprove the hypotheses etc causes a delay in Proven Knowledge to accumulate.

Back when 'The Melting Points of Metals' was being Scientifically researched, there were dozens of Discoveries each month.

What is now being researched is somewhat more complicated, and takes more Time.

Eventually there will be Step Change, after which the young scientists of that day will say much the same as now, just the Language will change:

'Scientific Discovery has ended : we can never get faster than 149.37 kilolights with a Plate Class Cruiser'

blogfast25 - 1-3-2015 at 16:05

Quote: Originally posted by careysub  
I understand the problem of getting publications out, and the need to make them significant, but this guy is trying too hard to create some problem to be solved.



That's quite a bit of ad hom blahdiblah you've got there.
Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  

Science IS observation. It's just a point well worth repeating now and again.


That's so reductionist I wouldn't even know where to begin to refute it.
Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
Exactly. You don't get anywhere with spinning theories not supported by evidence. That's why there were so many silly ideas in ancient Greece.


Dear G-d. So many of their ideas survive to this day. Many the result of Pure Reason.

[Edited on 2-3-2015 by blogfast25]

Fulmen - 2-3-2015 at 01:01

Of course science is more than just observation, but you cannot have science without it.

As for the old Greeks I don't deny that they got some (a lot) right as well. But we also tend to ignore what they got wrong.

blogfast25 - 2-3-2015 at 06:00

Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
But we also tend to ignore what they got wrong.


No one serious does that. What HAS happened is that modern science (17th, 18th century) has 'borrowed' from what went before, w/o providing much by way of references.

"The Story of 1"

http://youtu.be/RSpadYjnYl8

13th century Chinese mathematicians mastered Horner's method (polynomial division, simply put) and much more. Had their society not stagnated and gone into decline, they might have developed Limit theory, calculus and guided missiles and we might all have Mandarin as a second language. ;)

=====================

Trying to separate Empiricism, Rationalism (and Historicism) from each other in science is like trying to unscramble a scrambled egg.

See e.g. Schrödinger's heuristic derivation of his famous equation.


[Edited on 2-3-2015 by blogfast25]

Fulmen - 2-3-2015 at 08:07

I agree my statement is simplified, and maybe I'm riding empiricism too hard, but this wasn't intended as a complete thesis ;)
But even within math and logic observations of some sort are used either as a starting point or as a test of it's validity. While the deduction of Homer's method might be considered a purely intellectual exercise, what use would it have if it couldn't solve real world problems? How would you even know if it works if you can't check it against anything?

Of course you don't necessarily need new observations, what Newton did was basically combining Galileo's model of gravity with Kepler's rules for planetary motion and realizing that they were one and the same. Same with Einstein, his work was based on existing observations.

Take the case of the luminiferous aether. It was basically a postulated substance based on the fact that light was a wave, and we only knew waves as a propagation process within a medium. Yet as experiment after experiment failed to prove it's existence it wasn't until Einstein came along that we realized we could do without it. There was never any proof of it, yet people could not rid themselves of the notion. I often wonder how physics would have evolved if the concept had been dismissed at an earlier time.
Yet now we see the concept reemerging as the Dark Fluid-model to explain the mystery of dark mass and energy.

blogfast25 - 2-3-2015 at 08:22

Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
I agree my statement is simplified, and maybe I'm riding empiricism too hard, but this wasn't intended as a complete thesis ;)
But even within math and logic observations of some sort are used either as a starting point or as a test of it's validity. While the deduction of Homer's method might be considered a purely intellectual exercise, what use would it have if it couldn't solve real world problems? How would you even know if it works if you can't check it against anything?


Don't over estimate the importance of "checking it against anything". Quantum chemistry clearly 'works', yet discussions about what it means have never gone away and are again in the ascent. See 'many worlds interpretation', for instance.

Glimpsing the Real is seriously hard.

==========

Going back to Einstein's Special Relativity, assume for argument's sake that he knew and USED the Michelson - Morley data, as well as the Lorentz Transformation. The Rationalist 'added value' would remain nonetheless tremendous.

[Edited on 2-3-2015 by blogfast25]

Fulmen - 2-3-2015 at 08:56

Aren't we saying the same thing here? It's the fact that quantum chemistry works is what guides the work on the theory.

As for the notion of "real" I think it's a dangerous line of thinking. What is "real"? All we really know is what we can sense, so we naturally try to view everything in terms that resemble the world that we experience. We can describe a photon as both a particle and a wave, but it's not a "real" particle like a marble. You can't hold a photon in your hand and study it's surface. Nor can we see it move like an ocean wave. So what does a photon really look like? The question doesn't make much sense.

As for Einsteins work I agree. Knowing of M&M's work does not in any way reduce the importance or value of his work. A lot of very intelligent people knew of this experiment and still got it wrong.

[Edited on 2-3-15 by Fulmen]

blogfast25 - 2-3-2015 at 09:06

Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
As for the notion of "real" I think it's a dangerous line of thinking. What is "real"?


Whoopy, an entire school of philosophical thinking (from ancient to contemporary) dismissed as 'dangerous'! Never mind, I like 'dangerous' thinking! :D

You might want to read a decent book on science and philosophy. And notice how the question of the Real touches on both of them.

Fulmen - 2-3-2015 at 09:53

I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it can be "dangerous" and misleading. It's very easy to try to translate everything into something that resembles the macroscopic world we experience with our primary senses, as if this is more "real" in some way. Just as when people grapple with the concept of the particle/wave-duality by imagining it as a marble moving up and down...

I must admit that long texts on philosophy tend to either piss me off or give me a headache. But I do respect it as a field even if I happen to disagree with many philosophies. Personally I find positivism most useful.

blogfast25 - 2-3-2015 at 11:20

Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
It's very easy to try to translate everything into something that resembles the macroscopic world we experience with our primary senses, as if this is more "real" in some way.


Funny that, to me that's what positivism does!

As regards 'dangerous ideas', that's precisely what the establishment thought of Darwin and why he kept putting off publishing 'Origins'.

[Edited on 2-3-2015 by blogfast25]

careysub - 2-3-2015 at 11:21

Quote: Originally posted by blogfast25  
Quote: Originally posted by careysub  
I understand the problem of getting publications out, and the need to make them significant, but this guy is trying too hard to create some problem to be solved.



That's quite a bit of ad hom blahdiblah you've got there.


Au contraire - no "ad hominem" at all (if that is what "ad hom blahdiblah" means).

"Ad hominem" refers to 'attacking a person's character, rather than the content of their arguments'.

I was critiquing the actual content of his arguments but offering a sympathetic comment about why some one would go to print with a weak argument like that.


Fulmen - 2-3-2015 at 12:02

Quote: Originally posted by blogfast25  
Funny that, to me that's what positivism does!

Then we have a difference on what positivism means. That's fine by me.
The way I understand it positivism focuses on falsifiability rather than verifiability. Also it supports the idea of absolute truth, although it can never be known with absolute certainty.

As for dangerous ideas, I'm not talking about politically dangerous but rather misleading.

blogfast25 - 2-3-2015 at 16:04

Quote: Originally posted by careysub  


Au contraire - no "ad hominem" at all (if that is what "ad hom blahdiblah" means).


In that first line you played the man, not the ball. It's always done to try and mollify the opponent's argument but invariably ends up weakening the attacker's argument.
Quote:
I understand the problem of getting publications out, [...]
for instance is purely subjective as you don't know how hard it was for the author to get this (or any of his other) publications out.

[Edited on 3-3-2015 by blogfast25]

blogfast25 - 2-3-2015 at 16:20

Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
As for dangerous ideas, I'm not talking about politically dangerous but rather misleading.


It's naïve to try and make that distinction. Repressors of ideas (scientific or other) for political reasons often claim that these ideas are 'misleading'. In fact, they nearly always do!

The reason why I reject your kind of positivism is that when all is done and dusted I believe there's a kernel of reality that resists being modelled, symbolised etc.

Positivism is itself 'misleading' in that it can create the illusion that we know all there is to know about, say 'copper'.

Fulmen - 2-3-2015 at 16:38

I think you're reading more into this than what I've said. Of course an idea can be politically dangerous, I'm talking only in the sense that it can be dangerous or misleading when it comes to understanding it. As for "knowing everything", positivism is based on falsification which never assumes anything to be the absolute truth. That only leaves us with the theories (I prefer the term model) to the extent that we have found them valid.

Edit: This is perhaps postpositivism, I'm not a philosophy-buff so I might get the names wrong sometimes.