4 ms·

I wonder if this is to do with major vs minor breakthrough. Take physics. As I read it, modern fundamental physics is mostly some combination of general relati

I wonder if this is to do with major vs minor breakthrough. Take physics. As I read it, modern fundamental physics is mostly some combination of general relativity and quantum mechanics, which are both early 20th century inventions. They weren't necessarily genius in particular in-depth analysis, rather they were genius new concepts that created a whole new blank canvas to fill in. What did the field look like just before them? I always forget the details, but was it lord Kelvin who said, physics just needs to figure out the ultraviolet catastrophe and it's done? I wonder if it looked similarly uninnovative. The canvas they had was full, and they needed a new canvas for true innovation. Now the thing is, I think true disruption, like GR and quantum physics, is not limited by the number of postdocs, but by truly genius insights. Einstein wasn't even working as an academic when he came up with Special Relativity. So the number of papers written isn't a proxy for pace of revolution. Not to mention, since number of published papers has become a target, it has become useless as a measure of progress.

ablatt89 4y ago
I agree, I think we're discounting genius insight as the primary driver of innovation and ground breaking science, and we can't expect genius insight to occur in some predictable time frame or a time frame even within a lifespan. I think perhaps we've also partially lost the meaning of ground breaking research given the constant news articles on "ground breaking science" and the constant overinflation and exaggeration of one's papers and achievements.
- buran77 4y ago
  A lot of the obvious questions on the table were answered, even without an answer we at least have the question. Today true, groundbreaking innovation needs someone to identify the new questions. It's like doing science in a bubble and you need someone to take a massive new one and merge it into our own. Right now we're not opening wide doors, but just refining and adding almost imperceptibly to an already huge bubble. We're grinding in the game because we can't find the boss on the map or can't beat it yet. Besides the current structure of research and the known weaknesses (misaligned incentives, funding issues, etc.) science in general today ran out of low hanging fruit. The last unexplored or unanswered riddles may need prerequisites that are outside of the current boundaries so someone needs to open the door do a vast new bubble that has more relatively low hanging fruit. Also humans probably (don't quote me on that :) ) can't come up with any new questions or answers unless they are already at the edge of that bubble. And they each see and understand a smaller patch of that surface as it expanded. Stumbling onto new thinks is exponentially harder. This is what those revolutionary discoveries did for us in the past: Opened the door to a new world where the hard answers were suddenly a bit easier, they made sense.
- klabb3 4y ago
  > we can't expect genius insight to occur in some predictable time frame Yes, and we can’t expect it to occur in a socially confined over-structured environment either. Academia has changed a lot since then, with peer review hell, publishing pressure, etc. I mean, are we really pretending to be surprised that a system of incrementalist incentives produces incrementalist results?
unsupp0rted 4y ago
It might be that human brains can only do so much physics, which is a tiny subset of all the physics there is. It’s amazing upright apes can figure out the speed of light or postulate and find the Higgs Boson in the first place. How much physics do we expect the smartest dog in the world to do? What if we 10x’d its lifespan? At some point either: 1. There is no more physics 2. We build beings that can do physics that we can’t 3. We’re stopped dead in our tracks at the limit of our ability to comprehend things that apes weren’t built to comprehend
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  We get around this in part by not understanding (or at least remembering our understanding of) many of the basics. Such as this guy who looked things up in a textbook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889 A bunch of blind people could theoretically construct a model of an elephant, if they work together well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
- Mezzie 4y ago
  Looks like time to pivot to bioengineering and get better physics brains. ;)
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    I wonder if we’d have any luck engineering a brain that can visualize higher dimensions the way we visualize 3d. It would be cool to have a brain that sees time, just as an incidental consequence of what’s happening in higher dimensions.
    - mansoon 4y ago
      My brain did this once. It doesn’t work very well anymore after that.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
It also seems unlikely that a patent clerk, even one with a PhD in physics, would be allowed to publish in a physics journal today. The gatekeeping has gotten a lot more strict.
- fckgnad 4y ago
  Filters out a lot of kook theories but I'm sure some revolutionary stuff from some Goodwill Hunting genius has been filtered out as well.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    I’m not sure it filters out kook theories, given the replication crisis. Rather, journals promote well-connected kooks at the expense of less well-connected kooks and happen to occasionally publish some science as a byproduct.
  - Attrecomet 4y ago
    Fun fact: peer review isn't gatekept. There are peer reviewed young earth creationist articles out there: https://www.cnet.com/culture/creationists-launch-peer-reviewed-journal/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/creationists-launch-peer-review... So "peer review" isn't holding back kook theories at all on its own. At best, journal prestige is bolstered by it, which the journal can then translate into holding them back. The track record is a bit unclear, though.
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      I view peer review as respecting the time of the journal subscriber. Someone filters out the things that are obviously flawed before wasting everyone else's time. Journal aren't just a magic upload into scientific consciousness; it takes time and energy to read and process them.
      - Attrecomet 4y ago
        It's doing a rather bad job at filtering out obvious flaws, given the reproducibility crisis we've got on our hands. Everyone says peer review is very important, but when it comes to reviewers putting in the hard and boring work of actually checking the raw data, almost none do, so in truth, peer review is NOT important to most scientists. And we nevertheless pay the price of adhering closer to orthodoxy for it, since effort being put in is a rather superficial "this paper sounds reasonable to me" filter, perhaps with some boxes that must be checked like p-value or sample size.
Maursault 4y ago
> but was it lord Kelvin who said, physics just needs to figure out the ultraviolet catastrophe and it's done? This is apparently a common misconception regarding a lecture given by Lord Kelvin in 1900 concerning "two clouds" in physics.[1] In fact, Max Planck solved the ultraviolet catastrophe, also in 1900, by assuming electromagnetic radiation can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete packets of energy called quanta. Albert Einstein also solved the ultraviolet catastrophe in a paper he published in 1905, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922, by, as always, standing on the shoulders of giants, hypothesizing that Planck's quanta were actual particles. These particles are known today by a word coined by physical chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis in a letter to Nature in 1926, namely, photons. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.16033.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.16033.pdf
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  TIL; very interesting!

ablatt89 4y ago

I agree, I think we're discounting genius insight as the primary driver of innovation and ground breaking science, and we can't expect genius insight to occur in some predictable time frame or a time frame even within a lifespan. I think perhaps we've also partially lost the meaning of ground breaking research given the constant news articles on "ground breaking science" and the constant overinflation and exaggeration of one's papers and achievements.

buran77 4y ago
A lot of the obvious questions on the table were answered, even without an answer we at least have the question. Today true, groundbreaking innovation needs someone to identify the new questions. It's like doing science in a bubble and you need someone to take a massive new one and merge it into our own. Right now we're not opening wide doors, but just refining and adding almost imperceptibly to an already huge bubble. We're grinding in the game because we can't find the boss on the map or can't beat it yet. Besides the current structure of research and the known weaknesses (misaligned incentives, funding issues, etc.) science in general today ran out of low hanging fruit. The last unexplored or unanswered riddles may need prerequisites that are outside of the current boundaries so someone needs to open the door do a vast new bubble that has more relatively low hanging fruit. Also humans probably (don't quote me on that :) ) can't come up with any new questions or answers unless they are already at the edge of that bubble. And they each see and understand a smaller patch of that surface as it expanded. Stumbling onto new thinks is exponentially harder. This is what those revolutionary discoveries did for us in the past: Opened the door to a new world where the hard answers were suddenly a bit easier, they made sense.
klabb3 4y ago
> we can't expect genius insight to occur in some predictable time frame Yes, and we can’t expect it to occur in a socially confined over-structured environment either. Academia has changed a lot since then, with peer review hell, publishing pressure, etc. I mean, are we really pretending to be surprised that a system of incrementalist incentives produces incrementalist results?

unsupp0rted 4y ago

It might be that human brains can only do so much physics, which is a tiny subset of all the physics there is. It’s amazing upright apes can figure out the speed of light or postulate and find the Higgs Boson in the first place. How much physics do we expect the smartest dog in the world to do? What if we 10x’d its lifespan? At some point either: 1. There is no more physics 2. We build beings that can do physics that we can’t 3. We’re stopped dead in our tracks at the limit of our ability to comprehend things that apes weren’t built to comprehend

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
We get around this in part by not understanding (or at least remembering our understanding of) many of the basics. Such as this guy who looked things up in a textbook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889 A bunch of blind people could theoretically construct a model of an elephant, if they work together well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
Mezzie 4y ago
Looks like time to pivot to bioengineering and get better physics brains. ;)
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  I wonder if we’d have any luck engineering a brain that can visualize higher dimensions the way we visualize 3d. It would be cool to have a brain that sees time, just as an incidental consequence of what’s happening in higher dimensions.
  - mansoon 4y ago
    My brain did this once. It doesn’t work very well anymore after that.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

It also seems unlikely that a patent clerk, even one with a PhD in physics, would be allowed to publish in a physics journal today. The gatekeeping has gotten a lot more strict.

fckgnad 4y ago
Filters out a lot of kook theories but I'm sure some revolutionary stuff from some Goodwill Hunting genius has been filtered out as well.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  I’m not sure it filters out kook theories, given the replication crisis. Rather, journals promote well-connected kooks at the expense of less well-connected kooks and happen to occasionally publish some science as a byproduct.
- Attrecomet 4y ago
  Fun fact: peer review isn't gatekept. There are peer reviewed young earth creationist articles out there: https://www.cnet.com/culture/creationists-launch-peer-reviewed-journal/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/creationists-launch-peer-review... So "peer review" isn't holding back kook theories at all on its own. At best, journal prestige is bolstered by it, which the journal can then translate into holding them back. The track record is a bit unclear, though.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    I view peer review as respecting the time of the journal subscriber. Someone filters out the things that are obviously flawed before wasting everyone else's time. Journal aren't just a magic upload into scientific consciousness; it takes time and energy to read and process them.
    - Attrecomet 4y ago
      It's doing a rather bad job at filtering out obvious flaws, given the reproducibility crisis we've got on our hands. Everyone says peer review is very important, but when it comes to reviewers putting in the hard and boring work of actually checking the raw data, almost none do, so in truth, peer review is NOT important to most scientists. And we nevertheless pay the price of adhering closer to orthodoxy for it, since effort being put in is a rather superficial "this paper sounds reasonable to me" filter, perhaps with some boxes that must be checked like p-value or sample size.

Maursault 4y ago

> but was it lord Kelvin who said, physics just needs to figure out the ultraviolet catastrophe and it's done? This is apparently a common misconception regarding a lecture given by Lord Kelvin in 1900 concerning "two clouds" in physics.[1] In fact, Max Planck solved the ultraviolet catastrophe, also in 1900, by assuming electromagnetic radiation can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete packets of energy called quanta. Albert Einstein also solved the ultraviolet catastrophe in a paper he published in 1905, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922, by, as always, standing on the shoulders of giants, hypothesizing that Planck's quanta were actual particles. These particles are known today by a word coined by physical chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis in a letter to Nature in 1926, namely, photons. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.16033.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.16033.pdf

rich_sasha 4y ago
TIL; very interesting!