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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:

by 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.
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    Linear extrapolation is not always adequate. I tend to agree with GP that we may be close to a saturation point.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      We're possibly within a few orders of magnitude of the saturation point, wielding the resources of a single planet. Which leaves the obvious path forward...
- ivalm 7y ago
  This is not clear to me at all. I don't think "bigger particle accelerators" is what we need, and lots of the questions I posted are not necessarily solvable by particle accelerators. We do need new experiments, but probably in a sense of "new ways to observe the universe" rather than "old ways to observe the universe scaled bigger."
earlINmeyerkeg 7y ago
I personally believe a lot of that stuff cannot be further studied unless we are able to divert solutions to other problems in our society first. I'm saying that we need to have things like mass quantity sustainable energy, significant automation, global unification and standards, higher minimum education levels. I'm saying that imagine 50% of the population works in blue collar general labor or semi-skilled labor fields. Now in this hypothetical worlds, all those jobs are managed by autonomous robots. Also we have a green power that is sustainable, storable, sufficient for even double the population, and can be held in high densities at low volumes. So there are now innumerable sectors within the economy that we don't need people themselves to learn. That leaves more time for people to take extended amounts of time to learn and study. I mean quite literally a Star-Trek "post-scaricity world" in a lot of ways. People use time to further themselves and expend time on cultural or scientific endeavors. Life is no longer about struggle and survival since money clearly would have no value if any and everything can be made or consumed for free. I mean it's really interesting to think that the only "conflict" that would exist is between people trying to min-max life in terms of achievement. There would be no achievement in religion, money, or ownership since everybody can do it. Ultimately what I'm saying is that a lot of our advances are contingent upon other sectors becoming automated and allow for more people to get into academic sectors.
- ethbro 7y ago
  Where does population control enter into this hypothetical? Because that's the only way you get to post-scarcity.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Education, quality of life and equal opportunities for women. As these increase, the birth rate goes down. Most countries that score highly in these areas actually have below replacement birth rates and only grow in population due to immigration.
  - krastanov 7y ago
    Pretty much any study of the past century and any projection from reputable sources says that populations reach equilibrium and stop growing as the level of education, in particular education of women, rises. This is a non-problem that has always taken care of itself in any developed country and we have no reason to believe it will not take care of itself in the developing world as well. The UN for instance does not believe there will be 10 billion humans on earth ever (where "ever" means "as long as projections have any value").
ramblerman 7y ago
> gravity at high energies Not a physicist so excuse the ignorance, but do we understand gravity at all? I mean afaik we can observe and predict it's behaviors but do we understand what underlying force causes it, and if it potentially has a counter force.
- ivalm 7y ago
  Well, at sufficiently low energies and sufficiently large length scales we can say gravity is how space time curves under the influence of energy (principly from gravitational mass; another mystery, why gravitational and inertial masses proportional to each other). This picture is called general relativity and it works very well in a wide range of regimes (from motion of planets and galaxies to merger of black holes). However, there should be an exchange of force carrier description (quantums of graviton) at small enough scales or very large energy densities where we fail to make the math work (because we expect certain properties/symmetries from gravitons). So the word "understand" is a bit loaded. GR is a certain understanding of how gravity works, but it is not a "quantum mechanical" understanding.

by ivalm 7y ago

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.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Linear extrapolation is not always adequate. I tend to agree with GP that we may be close to a saturation point.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    We're possibly within a few orders of magnitude of the saturation point, wielding the resources of a single planet. Which leaves the obvious path forward...
ivalm 7y ago
This is not clear to me at all. I don't think "bigger particle accelerators" is what we need, and lots of the questions I posted are not necessarily solvable by particle accelerators. We do need new experiments, but probably in a sense of "new ways to observe the universe" rather than "old ways to observe the universe scaled bigger."

earlINmeyerkeg 7y ago

I personally believe a lot of that stuff cannot be further studied unless we are able to divert solutions to other problems in our society first. I'm saying that we need to have things like mass quantity sustainable energy, significant automation, global unification and standards, higher minimum education levels. I'm saying that imagine 50% of the population works in blue collar general labor or semi-skilled labor fields. Now in this hypothetical worlds, all those jobs are managed by autonomous robots. Also we have a green power that is sustainable, storable, sufficient for even double the population, and can be held in high densities at low volumes. So there are now innumerable sectors within the economy that we don't need people themselves to learn. That leaves more time for people to take extended amounts of time to learn and study. I mean quite literally a Star-Trek "post-scaricity world" in a lot of ways. People use time to further themselves and expend time on cultural or scientific endeavors. Life is no longer about struggle and survival since money clearly would have no value if any and everything can be made or consumed for free. I mean it's really interesting to think that the only "conflict" that would exist is between people trying to min-max life in terms of achievement. There would be no achievement in religion, money, or ownership since everybody can do it. Ultimately what I'm saying is that a lot of our advances are contingent upon other sectors becoming automated and allow for more people to get into academic sectors.

ethbro 7y ago
Where does population control enter into this hypothetical? Because that's the only way you get to post-scarcity.
- taneq 7y ago
  Education, quality of life and equal opportunities for women. As these increase, the birth rate goes down. Most countries that score highly in these areas actually have below replacement birth rates and only grow in population due to immigration.
- krastanov 7y ago
  Pretty much any study of the past century and any projection from reputable sources says that populations reach equilibrium and stop growing as the level of education, in particular education of women, rises. This is a non-problem that has always taken care of itself in any developed country and we have no reason to believe it will not take care of itself in the developing world as well. The UN for instance does not believe there will be 10 billion humans on earth ever (where "ever" means "as long as projections have any value").

ramblerman 7y ago

> gravity at high energies Not a physicist so excuse the ignorance, but do we understand gravity at all? I mean afaik we can observe and predict it's behaviors but do we understand what underlying force causes it, and if it potentially has a counter force.

ivalm 7y ago
Well, at sufficiently low energies and sufficiently large length scales we can say gravity is how space time curves under the influence of energy (principly from gravitational mass; another mystery, why gravitational and inertial masses proportional to each other). This picture is called general relativity and it works very well in a wide range of regimes (from motion of planets and galaxies to merger of black holes). However, there should be an exchange of force carrier description (quantums of graviton) at small enough scales or very large energy densities where we fail to make the math work (because we expect certain properties/symmetries from gravitons). So the word "understand" is a bit loaded. GR is a certain understanding of how gravity works, but it is not a "quantum mechanical" understanding.