9 ms·

Ramón Y Cajal was a contrarian when this was written, but he had great timing. In the late 19th century, it was fairly popular to believe that all the laws of p

Ramón Y Cajal was a contrarian when this was written, but he had great timing. In the late 19th century, it was fairly popular to believe that all the laws of physics had already been established—remaining progress would come from improvements in experimental methods. There's a famous "physics is over" quote misattributed to Lord Kelvin (actually said by Michelson, the guy who measured the speed of light). A few years after this was written, Planck proposed energy quanta. And in 1905, Einstein published his four Annus Mirabilis papers, introducing the photoelectric effect (applying quantum), special relativity, and the mass-energy relationship.

DevX101 7y ago
Thanks for the context. Thought that this was contemporary. The language did seem antiquated.
dekhn 7y ago
This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scientific/dp/0465065929 https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
  - dekhn 7y ago
    I just said time machines and faster than light travel are unlikely to ever occur; I do think life extension and AGI are not technically impossible, but rather inevitable (my training is in biology, and I work on machine learning). For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different physics than the current model, while the last two, they seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      A radically different paradigm of physics would result in technologies that can't be imagined in the present paradigm of physics. For example nobody had even remotely guessed that transistors were possible until well in to the development of solid state theory.
      - dekhn 7y ago
        we have plenty of unrealized technologies that can be imagined in the present paradigm but that we're not exploiting yet (see for example recent advances in 2D topological materials). (based on my understanding of transistors, the first ones were conceived before the theory for them existed, and the first ones were built around the same time the quantum theory for them was expressed).
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      The nature of a paradigm shift is that it recasts all the existing laws of nature as special cases of a more powerful, more general model of reality. Who knows, maybe we'll find that we actually are living in a simulation and then figure out how to hack the matrix. The idea of "travel" and "time" would become obsolete then; you'd just poke new values for your wave function into the simulation's RAM.
      - dekhn 7y ago
        This seems implausible for many reasons, it seems more likely that if we're living in a simulation, we'll have trouble figuring out how to proloxify the feeblegarps.
        ascar 7y ago
        > proloxify the feeblegarps Did you just invent these two words? I googled them separately and your comment is litterally the only hit. Chapeau!
        7y ago
  - whack 7y ago
    "Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has been thoroughly mastered by many ;) I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science and its applications. In my mind, science is about understanding the world, whereas fields like engineering/medicine are about their practical applications. I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology etc. But I would draw a distinction between the things that fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs building really cool toys that we would love to have.
    - dekhn 7y ago
      I think the point of the "End of Science" argument is that any discoveries in biology (and physics) will merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles. For example, CRISPR. Many people think that CRISPR was an amazing discovery, but really, it's just a biological system that has existed for a long, long time, where a collection of smart people realized that with some engineering it could be used for effective genetic modifications with high precision and no need for engineering custom proteins to bind specific sequences. That seems fundamentally different from, for example, the experiments that established that DNA is the molecule of heredity when nobody had an idea how DNA could encode information.
      - epistasis 7y ago
        DNA as the molecule of encoding information for heredity is also "merely" a discovery of an ancient biological system. However, it's not as though physics predicts the existence of DNA specifically, or CRISPR, yet these things are important for understanding biology, and in the case of CRISPR it's been turned into a technology that humans can use. Which is why I have a lot of complaints about the commonly held belief such as this one: > merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles. This is not a meaningful or thoughtful examination of even chemistry. 3D structure of proteins is "merely" an elaboration of physical properties, yet "physics" doesn't have the tools to make much progress on solving the 3D structure of a sequence of amino acids, despite it being a purely physics process. Is the world "physical" in the sense that probably don't have new fundamental forces of nature? Of course. That doesn't mean that physics helps understand much of the physical world, because the "elaboration" in the "merely elaboration" has nothing to do what physicists or other scientists consider "physics."
  - gooseus 7y ago
    Why not better understanding of complexity and complex systems? The assumption that any of these new technologies would be desirable and create a net positive effect in the world sounds very naive after seeing the results of something as simple as "connecting the world". We need to have a better understanding of how new technologies interact with our existing technologies (including institutions and communities) and our environment, or else we risk (further) destabilizing everything that has allowed us to get this far.
    - dekhn 7y ago
      personally I believe that improving the techniques we use to study complexity is the most important thing in science today. In many fields we are now drowned in tons of high quality data, yet scientists struggle to store, process, and turn that data into knowledge.
    - iCodeSometime 7y ago
      nah
  - gmuslera 7y ago
    You don't send a message if the receiver can't understand it. People need to have a point of contact with that extrapolated future to became a popular science fiction work, even the culture in the far future fiction is usually pretty similar to our own (or at least, the one of the moment where that book was written). Present works (not the ones with inherited universes from old ones) are updated to our current expectations of the future, so you have sentient computers and other "possible" technology, and probably in 50 years we will have a different set of standards and not something as naive as what used to stand as possible 50 years before.
  - m463 7y ago
    I recently watched the Back to the Future series and remember this scene where Doc Brown is musing on time travel. "But time travelling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe..." (looks upwards at the stars) "women."
- LiquidSky 7y ago
  This seems like the kind of thing people a hundred years from now will point at and laugh about how quaint our time was.
- ivalm 7y ago
  And like all such books, almost certainly it is wrong. Backwards time travel or FTL are not measure of progress. Even with the field of "fundamental" physics: 1. There are lots of things we do not understand in cosmology (cosmological constant, nature of dark matter, matter/antimatter asymmetry, force unification at very high energy scales, gravity at high energies, etc). Each of those could potentially revolutionize our understanding of the universe 2. There are lots of things we do not understand at small scales (Casimir effect/vacuum energy relationship, plank scale effects, why the particle soup, gravity on very small scale, reason behind asymmetry in helicity/weak interaction and other parity/symmetry related effects, doing "useful" calculation with renormalization group, etc). Each of those could potentially revolutionize our understanding of the universe. There is also a lot to be done in our understanding of computing (as in, nature of computation) 1. Computation related problems (Church-Turing thesis, novel algorithmics + computing platforms such as quantum computing). Is approximately correct/probabilistic computing a loophole for getting essentially/mostly correct results in P time for NP-hard problems? Nature of AGI/what enables sapience when doing computing. Of course as we go into "less fundamental" sciences like chemistry/biology/etc then the amount to be learned is just overwhelming, we truly know very little.
  - HenryKissinger 7y ago
    The difference between the problems physicists were tackling at the turn of the 20th century and the ones we're trying to tackle today is that we don't have the technology or the resources required to build the kind of experiments that would allow us to study these phenomena at a meaningful scale and test out our hypotheses. E.g. https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and-space-if-we-ha-1829207595 https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and... "We Could Solve the Mysteries of Time and Space—If We Had a Particle Accelerator the Size of the Solar System" That's the problem. Our collective civilization will need to move a few levels forward before we can afford to tackle these problems.
    - cosmodisk 7y ago
      But the same was 100,200,300 and so years ago. Thete were always some sort of limitations, mostly technological. I'm not saying that we'll build solar system size colliders any time soon, however 50-100 more years and we should be much much more sophisticated in terms of what we can do in space and back on the earth.
- AareyBaba 7y ago
  The origin of life, why life is evolvable, the evolution of the complexity in a eukaryote cell, and multicellular consciousness/intelligence are to me big unanswered questions in science. Although, life can be reduced to chemistry and chemistry to physics I feel we are missing some high-level self-organizing principle of the universe.
  - ggggtez 7y ago
    >why life is evolvable Sorry, could you explain why you think life is not evolvable exactly? Assuming you take the existence of a single celled organism with DNA as a given (we still don't know the origin of life), evolution gets you the rest of the way rather nicely. Notably, "life" usually contains the assumption that it is evolvable as part of the definition. If the children of the organism can't adapt to the environment, we don't consider those things to be "alive" (e.g. a 3d printer that can print a copy of itself isn't alive). As for the origin of life, all serious scientists are onboard with abiogenesis, though we don't know the mechanism. Every year, new science comes out showing how microfluid droplets with organic compounds + the natural environment, can result in behavior that looks similar to a cell. For example, this one shows fairly interesting "cell like" movement without any life, and there was another last year that proposed a possible abiogenesis of cell walls through evaporation and organic compounds that suck up large molecules into the interior when evaporated. https://qz.com/487712/why-these-colored-water-droplets-seem-to-be-alive/ https://qz.com/487712/why-these-colored-water-droplets-seem-...
    - AareyBaba 7y ago
      We know that life is evolvable because life exists and we know the biochemical mechanisms involved (DNA + cellular biochemistry). Evolution implies a relatively smooth path through "DNA space" from, say for example, an early single cell eukaryote to a mushroom. However the search space is enormous. Even if we account for billions of years of evolution and a trillions of evolutionary experiments each year, a simple random walk with selection through DNA space should go nowhere because of the numbers involved. The curse of dimensionality[0] means there has to be some other principle of nature to make the search space yield a path from one viable life form to another. The search space of life would have to be 'smooth' in some sense. That 'smoothness' is something we don't understand. If DNA space is just 256 bits (as a dramatic simplification), then 2^256 is a very very big space to search just by chance [1]. Now imagine a space orders of magnitude bigger. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality [1] https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?t=22 https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?t=22 (3Blue1Browns wonderful illustration of how large 2^256 is)
- ggggtez 7y ago
  Physics might be bumping up against limits of knowledge, but I think it's quite short sighted to claim that this means all of Science is bumping up against fundamental limits. Just because many of the questions we want to solve today are of practical significance (inventing new medicines, perhaps) doesn't make it any less scientific. Indeed, almost 20 years after the Human Genome Project, we have only scratched the surface on how to understand what any particular genes are doing, and are very far from doing anything more than "hacking" on existing genes, let alone writing a biological program from the ground up.
jhbadger 7y ago
As typical with contrarians, Ramón y Cajal said some things that held up well and others that didn't. In the same book "Advice for a Young Investigator" that this excerpt is from he also gave his view of theorists: "Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one because it is easier to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon"!
- glial 7y ago
  At least in the psychological sciences, he's not wrong.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cryptonector 7y ago
  How is that wrong? Clearly anyone who says that is being somewhat facetious / comedic.
  - jonny_eh 7y ago
    > Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one Tell that to Einstein.
    - behringer 7y ago
      Didn't we recently confirm gravitational waves by checking out a couple interacting black holes, originally theorized by Einstein 100 years ago? I think even Einstein would agree that it was much harder to discover it than to theorize it.
      - ISL 7y ago
        The experiment would never have been done without the theory, and a long line of experiments suggesting that Nature and the theory had a lot to do with one another, first. We knew that gravitational waves, or something very much like them, happened due to the binary pulsar work by Hulse and Taylor in 1974. Einstein's advance was quite spectacular, and early. Source: Am gravitational experimentalist.

DevX101 7y ago

Thanks for the context. Thought that this was contemporary. The language did seem antiquated.

dekhn 7y ago

This book tries to argue that we've got as close to objective truth about the universe as we'll ever do: https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scientific/dp/0465065929 https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scient... and that most remaining science is just find of filling in the tiny bits. I personally don't expect anything that will change with respect to backwards time travel or faster than light travel.

whatshisface 7y ago
Why are time machines and Starship Enterprises a good standard of scientific progress? Why not immorality, sentient computers, and stuff like that, which is equally science-fictiony but possible?
- dekhn 7y ago
  I just said time machines and faster than light travel are unlikely to ever occur; I do think life extension and AGI are not technically impossible, but rather inevitable (my training is in biology, and I work on machine learning). For the first two, we'd need to have a radically different physics than the current model, while the last two, they seem like reasonable extrapolations from modern technology.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    A radically different paradigm of physics would result in technologies that can't be imagined in the present paradigm of physics. For example nobody had even remotely guessed that transistors were possible until well in to the development of solid state theory.
    - dekhn 7y ago
      we have plenty of unrealized technologies that can be imagined in the present paradigm but that we're not exploiting yet (see for example recent advances in 2D topological materials). (based on my understanding of transistors, the first ones were conceived before the theory for them existed, and the first ones were built around the same time the quantum theory for them was expressed).
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    The nature of a paradigm shift is that it recasts all the existing laws of nature as special cases of a more powerful, more general model of reality. Who knows, maybe we'll find that we actually are living in a simulation and then figure out how to hack the matrix. The idea of "travel" and "time" would become obsolete then; you'd just poke new values for your wave function into the simulation's RAM.
    - dekhn 7y ago
      This seems implausible for many reasons, it seems more likely that if we're living in a simulation, we'll have trouble figuring out how to proloxify the feeblegarps.
      - ascar 7y ago
        > proloxify the feeblegarps Did you just invent these two words? I googled them separately and your comment is litterally the only hit. Chapeau!
        7y ago
- whack 7y ago
  "Immorality" is not only theoretically possible, it has been thoroughly mastered by many ;) I think there's a noteworthy distinction between science and its applications. In my mind, science is about understanding the world, whereas fields like engineering/medicine are about their practical applications. I do think that there's a tremendous amount of progress that could be made in sciences like Biology, Psychology etc. But I would draw a distinction between the things that fundamentally change the way we understand the world, vs building really cool toys that we would love to have.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    I think the point of the "End of Science" argument is that any discoveries in biology (and physics) will merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles. For example, CRISPR. Many people think that CRISPR was an amazing discovery, but really, it's just a biological system that has existed for a long, long time, where a collection of smart people realized that with some engineering it could be used for effective genetic modifications with high precision and no need for engineering custom proteins to bind specific sequences. That seems fundamentally different from, for example, the experiments that established that DNA is the molecule of heredity when nobody had an idea how DNA could encode information.
    - epistasis 7y ago
      DNA as the molecule of encoding information for heredity is also "merely" a discovery of an ancient biological system. However, it's not as though physics predicts the existence of DNA specifically, or CRISPR, yet these things are important for understanding biology, and in the case of CRISPR it's been turned into a technology that humans can use. Which is why I have a lot of complaints about the commonly held belief such as this one: > merely be elaborations of basic principles that already exist, rather than elucidations of any as-yet undiscovered principles. This is not a meaningful or thoughtful examination of even chemistry. 3D structure of proteins is "merely" an elaboration of physical properties, yet "physics" doesn't have the tools to make much progress on solving the 3D structure of a sequence of amino acids, despite it being a purely physics process. Is the world "physical" in the sense that probably don't have new fundamental forces of nature? Of course. That doesn't mean that physics helps understand much of the physical world, because the "elaboration" in the "merely elaboration" has nothing to do what physicists or other scientists consider "physics."
- gooseus 7y ago
  Why not better understanding of complexity and complex systems? The assumption that any of these new technologies would be desirable and create a net positive effect in the world sounds very naive after seeing the results of something as simple as "connecting the world". We need to have a better understanding of how new technologies interact with our existing technologies (including institutions and communities) and our environment, or else we risk (further) destabilizing everything that has allowed us to get this far.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    personally I believe that improving the techniques we use to study complexity is the most important thing in science today. In many fields we are now drowned in tons of high quality data, yet scientists struggle to store, process, and turn that data into knowledge.
  - iCodeSometime 7y ago
    nah
- gmuslera 7y ago
  You don't send a message if the receiver can't understand it. People need to have a point of contact with that extrapolated future to became a popular science fiction work, even the culture in the far future fiction is usually pretty similar to our own (or at least, the one of the moment where that book was written). Present works (not the ones with inherited universes from old ones) are updated to our current expectations of the future, so you have sentient computers and other "possible" technology, and probably in 50 years we will have a different set of standards and not something as naive as what used to stand as possible 50 years before.
- m463 7y ago
  I recently watched the Back to the Future series and remember this scene where Doc Brown is musing on time travel. "But time travelling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe..." (looks upwards at the stars) "women."
LiquidSky 7y ago
This seems like the kind of thing people a hundred years from now will point at and laugh about how quaint our time was.
ivalm 7y ago
And like all such books, almost certainly it is wrong. Backwards time travel or FTL are not measure of progress. Even with the field of "fundamental" physics: 1. There are lots of things we do not understand in cosmology (cosmological constant, nature of dark matter, matter/antimatter asymmetry, force unification at very high energy scales, gravity at high energies, etc). Each of those could potentially revolutionize our understanding of the universe 2. There are lots of things we do not understand at small scales (Casimir effect/vacuum energy relationship, plank scale effects, why the particle soup, gravity on very small scale, reason behind asymmetry in helicity/weak interaction and other parity/symmetry related effects, doing "useful" calculation with renormalization group, etc). Each of those could potentially revolutionize our understanding of the universe. There is also a lot to be done in our understanding of computing (as in, nature of computation) 1. Computation related problems (Church-Turing thesis, novel algorithmics + computing platforms such as quantum computing). Is approximately correct/probabilistic computing a loophole for getting essentially/mostly correct results in P time for NP-hard problems? Nature of AGI/what enables sapience when doing computing. Of course as we go into "less fundamental" sciences like chemistry/biology/etc then the amount to be learned is just overwhelming, we truly know very little.
- HenryKissinger 7y ago
  The difference between the problems physicists were tackling at the turn of the 20th century and the ones we're trying to tackle today is that we don't have the technology or the resources required to build the kind of experiments that would allow us to study these phenomena at a meaningful scale and test out our hypotheses. E.g. https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and-space-if-we-ha-1829207595 https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and... "We Could Solve the Mysteries of Time and Space—If We Had a Particle Accelerator the Size of the Solar System" That's the problem. Our collective civilization will need to move a few levels forward before we can afford to tackle these problems.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    But the same was 100,200,300 and so years ago. Thete were always some sort of limitations, mostly technological. I'm not saying that we'll build solar system size colliders any time soon, however 50-100 more years and we should be much much more sophisticated in terms of what we can do in space and back on the earth.
AareyBaba 7y ago
The origin of life, why life is evolvable, the evolution of the complexity in a eukaryote cell, and multicellular consciousness/intelligence are to me big unanswered questions in science. Although, life can be reduced to chemistry and chemistry to physics I feel we are missing some high-level self-organizing principle of the universe.
- ggggtez 7y ago
  >why life is evolvable Sorry, could you explain why you think life is not evolvable exactly? Assuming you take the existence of a single celled organism with DNA as a given (we still don't know the origin of life), evolution gets you the rest of the way rather nicely. Notably, "life" usually contains the assumption that it is evolvable as part of the definition. If the children of the organism can't adapt to the environment, we don't consider those things to be "alive" (e.g. a 3d printer that can print a copy of itself isn't alive). As for the origin of life, all serious scientists are onboard with abiogenesis, though we don't know the mechanism. Every year, new science comes out showing how microfluid droplets with organic compounds + the natural environment, can result in behavior that looks similar to a cell. For example, this one shows fairly interesting "cell like" movement without any life, and there was another last year that proposed a possible abiogenesis of cell walls through evaporation and organic compounds that suck up large molecules into the interior when evaporated. https://qz.com/487712/why-these-colored-water-droplets-seem-to-be-alive/ https://qz.com/487712/why-these-colored-water-droplets-seem-...
  - AareyBaba 7y ago
    We know that life is evolvable because life exists and we know the biochemical mechanisms involved (DNA + cellular biochemistry). Evolution implies a relatively smooth path through "DNA space" from, say for example, an early single cell eukaryote to a mushroom. However the search space is enormous. Even if we account for billions of years of evolution and a trillions of evolutionary experiments each year, a simple random walk with selection through DNA space should go nowhere because of the numbers involved. The curse of dimensionality[0] means there has to be some other principle of nature to make the search space yield a path from one viable life form to another. The search space of life would have to be 'smooth' in some sense. That 'smoothness' is something we don't understand. If DNA space is just 256 bits (as a dramatic simplification), then 2^256 is a very very big space to search just by chance [1]. Now imagine a space orders of magnitude bigger. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality [1] https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?t=22 https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?t=22 (3Blue1Browns wonderful illustration of how large 2^256 is)
ggggtez 7y ago
Physics might be bumping up against limits of knowledge, but I think it's quite short sighted to claim that this means all of Science is bumping up against fundamental limits. Just because many of the questions we want to solve today are of practical significance (inventing new medicines, perhaps) doesn't make it any less scientific. Indeed, almost 20 years after the Human Genome Project, we have only scratched the surface on how to understand what any particular genes are doing, and are very far from doing anything more than "hacking" on existing genes, let alone writing a biological program from the ground up.

jhbadger 7y ago

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

glial 7y ago
At least in the psychological sciences, he's not wrong.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cryptonector 7y ago
How is that wrong? Clearly anyone who says that is being somewhat facetious / comedic.
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  > Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one Tell that to Einstein.
  - behringer 7y ago
    Didn't we recently confirm gravitational waves by checking out a couple interacting black holes, originally theorized by Einstein 100 years ago? I think even Einstein would agree that it was much harder to discover it than to theorize it.
    - ISL 7y ago
      The experiment would never have been done without the theory, and a long line of experiments suggesting that Nature and the theory had a lot to do with one another, first. We knew that gravitational waves, or something very much like them, happened due to the binary pulsar work by Hulse and Taylor in 1974. Einstein's advance was quite spectacular, and early. Source: Am gravitational experimentalist.