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gregxy
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Is scientific progress reaching its end?
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]
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woelen
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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.
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hkparker
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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.
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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.
My YouTube Channel
"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature." -Michael Faraday
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Mildronate
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There is no more romantic in research like in good old days 
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hissingnoise
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Familiarity has bred out romance and science has become jaded for all except those lucky enough to be at the cutting edge . . .
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Mildronate
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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.
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hissingnoise
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Well, that's capitalism for you . . .
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Bowdlerize
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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]
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franklyn
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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.
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bbartlog
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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.
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woelen
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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.
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peach
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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.
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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? 
I tease. As you can see above, I agree with your points and realise the question was to start discussion, not a statement.
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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]
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497
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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..
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jamit
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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.
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franklyn
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Hardly, it just keeps getting bigger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCounW3VO0&feature=youtu...
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neptunium
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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)
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Bert
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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]
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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.
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Rapopart’s Rules for critical commentary:
1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it
that way.”
2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
Anatol Rapoport was a Russian-born American mathematical psychologist (1911-2007).
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macckone
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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.
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careysub
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| 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]
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IrC
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| 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.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" Richard Feynman
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Pasrules
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Mood: Lacking an S orbital
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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.
Atropine, Bicarb, Calcium.
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IrC
International Hazard
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Location: Eureka
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Mood: Discovering
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Goes without saying: the next great new advance in science will be made by someone applying coherent thought to the subject.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" Richard Feynman
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halogen
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Registered: 18-4-2004
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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]
F. de Lalande and M. Prud'homme showed that a mixture of boric oxide and sodium chloride is decomposed in a stream of dry air or oxygen at a red heat
with the evolution of chlorine.
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Bert
Super Administrator
Posts: 2821
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Mood: " I think we are all going to die. I think that love is an illusion. We are flawed, my darling".
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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?
Rapopart’s Rules for critical commentary:
1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it
that way.”
2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
Anatol Rapoport was a Russian-born American mathematical psychologist (1911-2007).
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gregxy
Hazard to Others
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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.
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