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I don't know if this instance qualifies as one, but I think its fair to say that cosmology is the one domain of "fundamental" physics where "discrepancies" or q

I don't know if this instance qualifies as one, but I think its fair to say that cosmology is the one domain of "fundamental" physics where "discrepancies" or question marks keep piling up and not really resolving. It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" in a more economical way. I don't know if this generation of telescopes will get us there but it feels that this is a plausible outcome over the next 1-2 decades. Which would be very exciting :-)

barbazoo 4y ago
> It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" in a more economical way. Could we train a GPT3 like model with the entire corpus of astronomical research and try to answer some questions that way?
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  I'd say not a chance. GPT3 can regurgitate, and, in my opinion, even use knowledge, but I don't think it can synthesize knowledge.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    I think it's a bit more subtle than whether it can synthesize, because clearly it can produce seemingly new work. But what it definitely cannot do is seek new abstractions. It can't be curious about an inconsistency and probe its own knowledge for possible resolutions, or design an experiment that might shed further light in an unknown area. It can't even play a board game after ingesting the rules to it, much less identify contradictions or problems in such a ruleset. And a board game is a tiny microcosm compared with the laws of physics. It's conceivable that one or more scientists could work in conjunction with an AI to help augment their own abilities, co-pilot style, but I don't think we have a picture yet of what exactly that kind of thing would look like.
    - pmichaud 4y ago
      I kind of feel like _all it can do_ is seek new abstractions. It’s clustering the data into what you might think of as “concepts,” even though we haven’t made all that much progress on interrogating those concepts directly. I just think clustering concepts by their latent relationships is sort of what abstraction is.
      - mikepurvis 4y ago
        Hmm, interesting. I feel like that clustering/grouping part is like... the first stage on the way to finding an abstraction, but if all you've done is that part of it, then you haven't reasoned about what the abstraction is, or extrapolated out to a new hypothesis, or grappled with the other consequences of the grouping. Thinking of mathematics, an abstraction is only as valuable as what it can tell us about the underlying system— a laplace transformation into the frequency domain isn't particularly interesting unless we either a) happen to care about some frequency domain property of the function, or b) we can manipulate the transformed function and then un-transform it afterward, yielding a novel insight in the original time domain. My layman's assessment is that the current state of the art for machine cognition is about on the level of identifying that such a transformation might be possible, but not actually applying it or doing anything about it, much less unapplying it afterward.
        pmichaud 4y ago
        I think I get the gist of your point which I would handwavily summarize as “there is no there there,” which I agree with. But I’m thinking that in terms of functionality, there is no real distinction here. Like If I train a model to do video game physics, and reward it for getting the tank shell missile to land on arbitrary targets, then in some sense the system must have an abstraction of gravity or at least parabolic movement or at least a functional equivalent of that, and it must be able to “hypothesize” about the consequences of its model because that’s what it needs to do in order to hit the target, ie, “everything I’ve seen before leads me to believe tank missiles move like so, therefore if I apply the following forces, it should hit the goal”—the degree to which it wins at this task is exactly the degree to which it can form working models of its environment and reason about the cause and effect of the actions it can take. But of course all those words in the previous sentence are wrong because it’s not exactly doing any of that, just something functionally equivalent and automatic. Maybe we disagree about whether that last point means it can meaningfully “do abstraction” or not.
- largbae 4y ago
  Already done. They came back with the answer: "42"
  - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
    You're really not going to like it
  - foolswisdom 4y ago
    But what was really the question?
    - sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
      "What is the Matrix?"
    - Karellen 4y ago
      ChatGPT-3: What do you get if you multiply six by nine? ChatGPT-4: How many roads must a man walk down?
    - salawat 4y ago
      Mu.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    They haven’t but they will
- purpleblue 4y ago
  If you give GPT3 code with a bug in it, and ask it to find the bug, it can't really do that. I'm pretty sure giving it all the data and asking it why things aren't working the way it should, it wouldn't have actual knowledge. There's a depth to explaining things that GPT still can't do. It's still astonishing, and has completely changed my idea on what AI can do, like write plays with very incredible context (better than most humans!) but there are still major limits.
  - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
    >If you give GPT3 code with a bug in it, and ask it to find the bug, it can't really do that. The hell are you talking about? I've been doing this literally any time I need something fixed and it does just fine.
    - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
      It doesn’t solve non-trivial bugs. It can bugs that match patterns that have been asked a lot if Stackoverflow or something like that.
      - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
        I love the sound of goal posts as they go whooshing past.
        KMag 4y ago
        I think it's more likely a problem that the GP poorly worded their initial statement, rather than actually moving the goalposts. They were probably having trouble with a few thorny bugs, tried ChatGPT, got nowhere, and forgot to qualify their initial statement with "for the few non-trivial bugs I tried". From the external point of view, the goalposts moved, but from within the GP's poorly expressed mental model, they haven't moved. But, that's just a guess.
  - yreg 4y ago
    It can definitely find and fix bugs. Of course it's not great at it and cannot be relied upon.
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  The article mentions that they're training neural networks to classify these objects. Give it a decade and this kind of high level number crunching will be as common as calculators are today. Transformers will find their place in all of this, and I am confident we will have a breakthrough in a few years regarding novel synthesis.
- anon291 4y ago
  FWIW, I've tried asking ChatGPT to walk through some thought experiments. Things like, what happens if I shoot two bullet at c/2 in opposite directions on a train going at c/2? Now suppose, I'm an outside observer. And then trying to introduce quantum gravity. My thought was that perhaps it could 'reason through'. Unfortunately, it was unable to. Eventually, it said that this is an unsolved problem. In other words, it 'recognized' the thought experiments. Perhaps if you use a phrasing that's not in the literature. EDIT: Actually, just checked again, and chatgpt can't reason through relativity anymore: Me: Imagine I'm on a train traveling at half the speed of light. I'm in the middle of a car and I fire bullets going at half the speed of light towards the front and back of the car. Do the bullets arrive at the front and back of the car at the same time? ChatGPT: No, the bullet fired towards the front of the car will arrive at the front of the car first, while the bullet fired towards the back of the car will arrive at the back of the car later. This is because the front bullet is moving in the same direction as the train and the back bullet is moving in the opposite direction of the train. The relative velocity of the bullet and train will determine the time it takes for the bullet to reach the front or back of the car.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    It is going to be like a drunk Michael Ross (the fictional character). I.e. great memory but too drunk to think beyond what can be recalled. If it’s corpus has the answer it will shit it out.
- college_physics 4y ago
  well, you could. And it might not be a complete waste of time. I would not expect any directly useful answers(...). But producing a semi-random collation of sentences that spans the corpus of cosmological facts and models and asking scientists to review / draw "inspiration" from it might remove some of the biases of the average cosmologist (like having to follow the latest publish-or-perish fad). This would only be useful if the answer is sort of hidding in plain sight (within the published stuff) and you tweak the algorithm not to ignore weird observations or theories that are not cited a lot. But the beauty of science (and the human mind driving it) that important progress happens with creative jumps that invent completely new things (e.g., new mathematics) and frequently bear little resemblance to the past
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  GPT3 cant even play tic tac toe properly (at least in my attempts). What makes you believe it can build and manipulate a model of the universe, and then answer questions about that model in a way that goes beyond what humans can do?
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I think chatbots can probably answer known things, but we'll still need smart humans for original ideas. That said, I can imagine a chatbot can help as a rubber duck, bring up things that weren't considered yet, or be so wrong as to kickstart the human into a breakthrough.
sebzim4500 4y ago
I think this says less about cosmology and more about the incredibly effectiveness of the standard model in the regime we can test directly on earth. If we compare ΛCDM to most other scientific theories it doesn't look so bad in terms of discrepancies. Certainly there are many unexplained effects in solid state physics, there isn't even an accepted explanation for why rubbing a balloon on your head makes it stick to a wall and that's an experiment you probably did as a child.
- Eduard 4y ago
  > there isn't even an accepted explanation for why rubbing a balloon on your head makes it stick to a wall But the accepted explanation is "static electricity", no? Or do you mean we don't "really" know when asking a couple of follow-up "why?" questions further?
  - beambot 4y ago
    This is the triboelectric effect, and the low-lying mechanisms are poorly understood & poorly characterized.
    - Eduard 4y ago
      Reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect , I have the impression the mechanisms are not _that_ poorly understood, at least from my layman's perspective.
      - JimBlackwood 4y ago
        It's in the lines: > The triboelectric effect is very unpredictable, and only broad generalizations can be made. > The mechanisms of triboelectrification (or contact-electrification) have been debated for many years, with possible mechanisms including electron transfer, ion transfer or the material's species transfer. > Recent studies in 2018 using Kelvin probe microscopy and triboelectric nanogenerators revealed that electron transfer is the dominant mechanism for triboelectrification between solid and solid. > For a general case, since triboelectrification occurs for any material, a generic model has been proposed by Wang, in which the electron transfer is caused by a strong electron cloud overlap between two atoms for the lowered interatomic potential barrier by shortening the bonding length. So, still very much misunderstood. There is an experiment showing the dominant mechanism (so still only explaining a part!) between solid-solid and a generic model proposed that can be used to explain other interactions (solid-liquid, liquid-liquid, etc). Unless there's a tested model with predictable results, I'd say we're not really understanding it properly.
jackmott42 4y ago
I don't think it is fair to characterize cosmology as not making progress no. Stuff is far away and occluded and hard to measure and see. Each improvement in observation causes a need to refine previous ideas, as expected. There are of course the two big mysteries that have lingered for a long time: Dark Matter and Dark Energy, but other areas of physics have lingering mysteries as well.
- teawrecks 4y ago
  I almost had the same reaction, but technically they didn't say anything about cosmology not making progress. It's entirely reasonable to assume a scientifically minded person describing a field as "piling up question marks" means they think it's making a LOT of progress. Imagine a field that answers questions more often than it finds new ones; that'd be a pretty stagnant field to be in.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    This is how I understood OP, too. Last time we had a "crisis in physics", it was the early transition from classical physics to quantum mechanics, when some good new ideas had been coinceived of, but trying to reconcile them with the classical way of thinking and with experimental evidence required increasingly convoluted hacks in the models to make it all work - until folks like Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac found more holistic and clean ways to approach the problem space. The number of question marks piling up in cosmology does feel similar. It will help to shape new theories that reconcile all this experimental evidence.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Sometimes the questions keep piling up until someone happens up on just the right question. That question itself wouldn't have been thought of except for the thinking of all of the previous unanswered questions. Then the big Eureka!! moment and someone gets a Nobel prize 20 years later.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "Imagine a field that answers questions more often than it finds new ones; that'd be a pretty stagnant field to be in." Funnily enough, that's what the science community of the ending 19. century thought about physics, before they started to look deeper. Max Planck was advised against a career in physics, because: "In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." He rather found some more holes.
gibolt 4y ago
The number of possibilities are countably infinite. Makes sense that we will keep finding things we don't understand for a long time.
freedude 4y ago
Fields of science should always be willing to change based upon empirical evidence. I think there are several other scientific areas where we know less than we ought. 1. The sub-atomic level 2. The cellular level 3. Ocean biology 4. Geology, particularly effects of earthquakes and volcanic activity 5. Weather patterns over time
- NovaVeles 4y ago
  I feel for the Weather pattern folk. All of the one I have spoken to over the years are pretty cool. They are trying to model an insanely complex system - oh but thanks to global warming they are struggling to make models that work for longer than a few years because it all keeps changing!
  - abtinf 4y ago
    If “it all keeps changing”, which thwarts their attempts to “model an insanely complex system”, then wouldn’t that mean any claim about “global warming” is actually a claim to possessing a priori knowledge?
    - michaelhoney 4y ago
      No. That the planet is warming is incontrovertible. What this might mean for highly interdependent, chaotic systems is harder to predict. Will the Greenland ice sheet melt? Looks like yes. Will that affect the Gulf Stream? Probably. Will that make Spain colder? again, probably, but the error bars are bigger, and so on.
      - thereisnospork 4y ago
        It just sounds like global warming is giving them good test data. A comprehensively accurate model should be able to take e.g. a Greenland ice sheet melting in stride.
        Cthulhu_ 4y ago
mmusson 4y ago
It may be more a question of a new generation of physicists, willing to consider that particle dark matter is not the explanation for the acceleration discrepancy.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Sadly, I'm to the point that unless we call it the Kardashian Space Telescope, the draw to new generations will not be there. We're closer to Idiocracy future than Interstellar future.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I think you're overly generalizing, I don't believe today's generation is much different from previous generations when it comes to interest in STEM and the like. Sure, their attention spans are different - I mean "ours" are due to the advent of the internet etc - but I don't believe their ambitions are that much different. It's just that they want to become youtubers instead of movie stars / musicians.
pantsforbirds 4y ago
Would you bet that we'll see a paradigm shift of a similar nature to the classical physics -> quantum mechanics / relativity paradigm change, but for Cosmology in our lifetimes?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The answer to that will highly depend on how old you and the GP are.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Yes, we are in the middle of a huge shift in the definition of intelligence. AND that could have enormous impact on our perception and ability to see reality.
User23 4y ago
There's a joke that calling Computer Science Computer Science is like calling Astronomy Telescope Science, but part of what makes it funny is the ring of truth to it. Our instruments really do limit our observations. The advantage Computer Scientists have is that we can glimpse a world of Platonic Forms[1], where Functions, and Sets, and Information exist, or something close enough for government work, merely through the intellect. Astronomers have no such luxury. [1] Or whatever circumlocution you prefer to express the same general concept.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  Computer Science doesn’t get the pass, unfortunately. First of all because it’s a branch of maths, so in reality it doesn’t have any instruments to worry about. Secondly, applied CS relies on an incredibly simple instrument: binary logic gates. The computers we have today are just a mesh of stuff that flips on and off with no intermediate states. That’s pretty primitive as a means of expression and computation compared with the rest of the universe
  - Taniwha 4y ago
    Oh, let me introduce you to metastability ....
    - bpye 4y ago
      Is that computer science or is that physics though?
      - Taniwha 4y ago
        well a bit of both - if someone hasn't given you the scary meta stability lecture you haven't really done computer science :-)
  - bombolo 4y ago
    > The computers we have today are just a mesh of stuff that flips on and off with no intermediate states. Only when things are working properly and there isn't too much cosmic radiation, interference, strange patterns accessing memory, someone turning on a light…
suetoniusp91 4y ago
The simulation gets less cohesive the farther from earth you look.
- peatmoss 4y ago
  I was just thinking about video games where vegetation, animals, and hills spring into existence when you get close enough. Far away, and they don't bother to render the little things. Depending what generation tech we're running on in the parent reality, JWST may be causing a noticeable jump in system load.
  - yreg 4y ago
    Whatever JWST can see should be trivial to convincingly mock compared to the complexity of simulation of the scenes here on Earth.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    And now you have come to the reason GPU prices have been so high. Crypto was just a cover story.
  - wruza 4y ago
    I had the same idea about magic. Back in the day people could do things that we can’t because nobody looked into details and the universe had enough “possibility space” to allow it. Once you turn your gaze into atomic or galactic workings, this space shrinks tremendously and further research becomes much harder because you glued the puzzle from its sides in a particular way and there’s not much left to hope for, except for solving it to the center in a bizarrely complex way. We may have painted ourselves into a horrible corner.
    - peatmoss 4y ago
      This is an excellent sci-fi premise. Also an interesting thought experiment to think of what an optimal research approach would be if you knew a priori that you were living in a universe in which the implementation details don’t exist until observed. Come to think of it, quantum physics is actually like this in some respects.
77pt77 4y ago
Everyone knows that general relativity is broken. Plus cosmology has the problem that you can't really conduct reproducible experiments.
Dopameaner 4y ago
I always wondered if we could somehow get a James webb telescope revolving around all planets of our solar system in the next 1000 years. That should give us pretty awesome visuals.
- eru 4y ago
  Huh, why would you want to do that? If you have the resources to spare, you can do much better than replicating James Webb style telescopes. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
- positr0n 4y ago
  What would be the benefit of the telescope orbiting other planets than earth?
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    I can't imagine any, besides redundancy and more observation time.
    - throwawaymaths 4y ago
      Interferometry.
  - mnw21cam 4y ago
    There's definitely a benefit to placing a decent telescope outside the asteroid belt. From Earth, we get a lot of light reflected from the Sun from dust orbiting somewhere between Earth and 2 AU from the Sun, which pollutes our space images - it's called the Zodiacal Light [0]. A telescope outside this light pollution would be able to see faint objects much more clearly and easily than Webb. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I want to venture that 1000 years is pessimistic. I just hope governments or private entities open up their wallets to build and launch more and better telescopes. I'm reading the whole JWST project is estimated to cost $10 billion. That's about 4.4 overpriced Twitters, 77 US Department of Defense budgets (just for 2023), and 11.7 Facebook annual revenues. We have the technology and the means, what's lacking now is the will.
odieldomanie 4y ago
There is the esoteric "Cosmological Natural Selection" theory that predicts the discrepancies. This guy at https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/archive https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/archive explains his version of this theory (albeit in an emotional way) that I find a pleasant read.
- EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
  It's an amazing theory that I now share. F R A C T A L H A T C H E R Y
fartsucker69 4y ago
not surprising imo, because of how limited our observational capabilities are. we'd probably progress quicker if we could look at far away stuff up close instead of from billions of light years away.

barbazoo 4y ago

> It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" in a more economical way. Could we train a GPT3 like model with the entire corpus of astronomical research and try to answer some questions that way?

Enginerrrd 4y ago
I'd say not a chance. GPT3 can regurgitate, and, in my opinion, even use knowledge, but I don't think it can synthesize knowledge.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  I think it's a bit more subtle than whether it can synthesize, because clearly it can produce seemingly new work. But what it definitely cannot do is seek new abstractions. It can't be curious about an inconsistency and probe its own knowledge for possible resolutions, or design an experiment that might shed further light in an unknown area. It can't even play a board game after ingesting the rules to it, much less identify contradictions or problems in such a ruleset. And a board game is a tiny microcosm compared with the laws of physics. It's conceivable that one or more scientists could work in conjunction with an AI to help augment their own abilities, co-pilot style, but I don't think we have a picture yet of what exactly that kind of thing would look like.
  - pmichaud 4y ago
    I kind of feel like _all it can do_ is seek new abstractions. It’s clustering the data into what you might think of as “concepts,” even though we haven’t made all that much progress on interrogating those concepts directly. I just think clustering concepts by their latent relationships is sort of what abstraction is.
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      Hmm, interesting. I feel like that clustering/grouping part is like... the first stage on the way to finding an abstraction, but if all you've done is that part of it, then you haven't reasoned about what the abstraction is, or extrapolated out to a new hypothesis, or grappled with the other consequences of the grouping. Thinking of mathematics, an abstraction is only as valuable as what it can tell us about the underlying system— a laplace transformation into the frequency domain isn't particularly interesting unless we either a) happen to care about some frequency domain property of the function, or b) we can manipulate the transformed function and then un-transform it afterward, yielding a novel insight in the original time domain. My layman's assessment is that the current state of the art for machine cognition is about on the level of identifying that such a transformation might be possible, but not actually applying it or doing anything about it, much less unapplying it afterward.
      - pmichaud 4y ago
        I think I get the gist of your point which I would handwavily summarize as “there is no there there,” which I agree with. But I’m thinking that in terms of functionality, there is no real distinction here. Like If I train a model to do video game physics, and reward it for getting the tank shell missile to land on arbitrary targets, then in some sense the system must have an abstraction of gravity or at least parabolic movement or at least a functional equivalent of that, and it must be able to “hypothesize” about the consequences of its model because that’s what it needs to do in order to hit the target, ie, “everything I’ve seen before leads me to believe tank missiles move like so, therefore if I apply the following forces, it should hit the goal”—the degree to which it wins at this task is exactly the degree to which it can form working models of its environment and reason about the cause and effect of the actions it can take. But of course all those words in the previous sentence are wrong because it’s not exactly doing any of that, just something functionally equivalent and automatic. Maybe we disagree about whether that last point means it can meaningfully “do abstraction” or not.
largbae 4y ago
Already done. They came back with the answer: "42"
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  You're really not going to like it
- foolswisdom 4y ago
  But what was really the question?
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
    "What is the Matrix?"
  - Karellen 4y ago
    ChatGPT-3: What do you get if you multiply six by nine? ChatGPT-4: How many roads must a man walk down?
  - salawat 4y ago
    Mu.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  They haven’t but they will
purpleblue 4y ago
If you give GPT3 code with a bug in it, and ask it to find the bug, it can't really do that. I'm pretty sure giving it all the data and asking it why things aren't working the way it should, it wouldn't have actual knowledge. There's a depth to explaining things that GPT still can't do. It's still astonishing, and has completely changed my idea on what AI can do, like write plays with very incredible context (better than most humans!) but there are still major limits.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  >If you give GPT3 code with a bug in it, and ask it to find the bug, it can't really do that. The hell are you talking about? I've been doing this literally any time I need something fixed and it does just fine.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    It doesn’t solve non-trivial bugs. It can bugs that match patterns that have been asked a lot if Stackoverflow or something like that.
    - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
      I love the sound of goal posts as they go whooshing past.
      - KMag 4y ago
        I think it's more likely a problem that the GP poorly worded their initial statement, rather than actually moving the goalposts. They were probably having trouble with a few thorny bugs, tried ChatGPT, got nowhere, and forgot to qualify their initial statement with "for the few non-trivial bugs I tried". From the external point of view, the goalposts moved, but from within the GP's poorly expressed mental model, they haven't moved. But, that's just a guess.
- yreg 4y ago
  It can definitely find and fix bugs. Of course it's not great at it and cannot be relied upon.
soulofmischief 4y ago
The article mentions that they're training neural networks to classify these objects. Give it a decade and this kind of high level number crunching will be as common as calculators are today. Transformers will find their place in all of this, and I am confident we will have a breakthrough in a few years regarding novel synthesis.
anon291 4y ago
FWIW, I've tried asking ChatGPT to walk through some thought experiments. Things like, what happens if I shoot two bullet at c/2 in opposite directions on a train going at c/2? Now suppose, I'm an outside observer. And then trying to introduce quantum gravity. My thought was that perhaps it could 'reason through'. Unfortunately, it was unable to. Eventually, it said that this is an unsolved problem. In other words, it 'recognized' the thought experiments. Perhaps if you use a phrasing that's not in the literature. EDIT: Actually, just checked again, and chatgpt can't reason through relativity anymore: Me: Imagine I'm on a train traveling at half the speed of light. I'm in the middle of a car and I fire bullets going at half the speed of light towards the front and back of the car. Do the bullets arrive at the front and back of the car at the same time? ChatGPT: No, the bullet fired towards the front of the car will arrive at the front of the car first, while the bullet fired towards the back of the car will arrive at the back of the car later. This is because the front bullet is moving in the same direction as the train and the back bullet is moving in the opposite direction of the train. The relative velocity of the bullet and train will determine the time it takes for the bullet to reach the front or back of the car.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  It is going to be like a drunk Michael Ross (the fictional character). I.e. great memory but too drunk to think beyond what can be recalled. If it’s corpus has the answer it will shit it out.
college_physics 4y ago
well, you could. And it might not be a complete waste of time. I would not expect any directly useful answers(...). But producing a semi-random collation of sentences that spans the corpus of cosmological facts and models and asking scientists to review / draw "inspiration" from it might remove some of the biases of the average cosmologist (like having to follow the latest publish-or-perish fad). This would only be useful if the answer is sort of hidding in plain sight (within the published stuff) and you tweak the algorithm not to ignore weird observations or theories that are not cited a lot. But the beauty of science (and the human mind driving it) that important progress happens with creative jumps that invent completely new things (e.g., new mathematics) and frequently bear little resemblance to the past
_Algernon_ 4y ago
GPT3 cant even play tic tac toe properly (at least in my attempts). What makes you believe it can build and manipulate a model of the universe, and then answer questions about that model in a way that goes beyond what humans can do?
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I think chatbots can probably answer known things, but we'll still need smart humans for original ideas. That said, I can imagine a chatbot can help as a rubber duck, bring up things that weren't considered yet, or be so wrong as to kickstart the human into a breakthrough.

sebzim4500 4y ago

I think this says less about cosmology and more about the incredibly effectiveness of the standard model in the regime we can test directly on earth. If we compare ΛCDM to most other scientific theories it doesn't look so bad in terms of discrepancies. Certainly there are many unexplained effects in solid state physics, there isn't even an accepted explanation for why rubbing a balloon on your head makes it stick to a wall and that's an experiment you probably did as a child.

Eduard 4y ago
> there isn't even an accepted explanation for why rubbing a balloon on your head makes it stick to a wall But the accepted explanation is "static electricity", no? Or do you mean we don't "really" know when asking a couple of follow-up "why?" questions further?
- beambot 4y ago
  This is the triboelectric effect, and the low-lying mechanisms are poorly understood & poorly characterized.
  - Eduard 4y ago
    Reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect , I have the impression the mechanisms are not _that_ poorly understood, at least from my layman's perspective.
    - JimBlackwood 4y ago
      It's in the lines: > The triboelectric effect is very unpredictable, and only broad generalizations can be made. > The mechanisms of triboelectrification (or contact-electrification) have been debated for many years, with possible mechanisms including electron transfer, ion transfer or the material's species transfer. > Recent studies in 2018 using Kelvin probe microscopy and triboelectric nanogenerators revealed that electron transfer is the dominant mechanism for triboelectrification between solid and solid. > For a general case, since triboelectrification occurs for any material, a generic model has been proposed by Wang, in which the electron transfer is caused by a strong electron cloud overlap between two atoms for the lowered interatomic potential barrier by shortening the bonding length. So, still very much misunderstood. There is an experiment showing the dominant mechanism (so still only explaining a part!) between solid-solid and a generic model proposed that can be used to explain other interactions (solid-liquid, liquid-liquid, etc). Unless there's a tested model with predictable results, I'd say we're not really understanding it properly.

jackmott42 4y ago

I don't think it is fair to characterize cosmology as not making progress no. Stuff is far away and occluded and hard to measure and see. Each improvement in observation causes a need to refine previous ideas, as expected. There are of course the two big mysteries that have lingered for a long time: Dark Matter and Dark Energy, but other areas of physics have lingering mysteries as well.

teawrecks 4y ago
I almost had the same reaction, but technically they didn't say anything about cosmology not making progress. It's entirely reasonable to assume a scientifically minded person describing a field as "piling up question marks" means they think it's making a LOT of progress. Imagine a field that answers questions more often than it finds new ones; that'd be a pretty stagnant field to be in.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  This is how I understood OP, too. Last time we had a "crisis in physics", it was the early transition from classical physics to quantum mechanics, when some good new ideas had been coinceived of, but trying to reconcile them with the classical way of thinking and with experimental evidence required increasingly convoluted hacks in the models to make it all work - until folks like Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac found more holistic and clean ways to approach the problem space. The number of question marks piling up in cosmology does feel similar. It will help to shape new theories that reconcile all this experimental evidence.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Sometimes the questions keep piling up until someone happens up on just the right question. That question itself wouldn't have been thought of except for the thinking of all of the previous unanswered questions. Then the big Eureka!! moment and someone gets a Nobel prize 20 years later.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "Imagine a field that answers questions more often than it finds new ones; that'd be a pretty stagnant field to be in." Funnily enough, that's what the science community of the ending 19. century thought about physics, before they started to look deeper. Max Planck was advised against a career in physics, because: "In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." He rather found some more holes.

gibolt 4y ago

The number of possibilities are countably infinite. Makes sense that we will keep finding things we don't understand for a long time.

freedude 4y ago

Fields of science should always be willing to change based upon empirical evidence. I think there are several other scientific areas where we know less than we ought. 1. The sub-atomic level 2. The cellular level 3. Ocean biology 4. Geology, particularly effects of earthquakes and volcanic activity 5. Weather patterns over time

NovaVeles 4y ago
I feel for the Weather pattern folk. All of the one I have spoken to over the years are pretty cool. They are trying to model an insanely complex system - oh but thanks to global warming they are struggling to make models that work for longer than a few years because it all keeps changing!
- abtinf 4y ago
  If “it all keeps changing”, which thwarts their attempts to “model an insanely complex system”, then wouldn’t that mean any claim about “global warming” is actually a claim to possessing a priori knowledge?
  - michaelhoney 4y ago
    No. That the planet is warming is incontrovertible. What this might mean for highly interdependent, chaotic systems is harder to predict. Will the Greenland ice sheet melt? Looks like yes. Will that affect the Gulf Stream? Probably. Will that make Spain colder? again, probably, but the error bars are bigger, and so on.
    - thereisnospork 4y ago
      It just sounds like global warming is giving them good test data. A comprehensively accurate model should be able to take e.g. a Greenland ice sheet melting in stride.
      - Cthulhu_ 4y ago

mmusson 4y ago

It may be more a question of a new generation of physicists, willing to consider that particle dark matter is not the explanation for the acceleration discrepancy.

dylan604 4y ago
Sadly, I'm to the point that unless we call it the Kardashian Space Telescope, the draw to new generations will not be there. We're closer to Idiocracy future than Interstellar future.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I think you're overly generalizing, I don't believe today's generation is much different from previous generations when it comes to interest in STEM and the like. Sure, their attention spans are different - I mean "ours" are due to the advent of the internet etc - but I don't believe their ambitions are that much different. It's just that they want to become youtubers instead of movie stars / musicians.

pantsforbirds 4y ago

Would you bet that we'll see a paradigm shift of a similar nature to the classical physics -> quantum mechanics / relativity paradigm change, but for Cosmology in our lifetimes?

jacquesm 4y ago
The answer to that will highly depend on how old you and the GP are.
gitfan86 4y ago
Yes, we are in the middle of a huge shift in the definition of intelligence. AND that could have enormous impact on our perception and ability to see reality.

User23 4y ago

There's a joke that calling Computer Science Computer Science is like calling Astronomy Telescope Science, but part of what makes it funny is the ring of truth to it. Our instruments really do limit our observations. The advantage Computer Scientists have is that we can glimpse a world of Platonic Forms[1], where Functions, and Sets, and Information exist, or something close enough for government work, merely through the intellect. Astronomers have no such luxury. [1] Or whatever circumlocution you prefer to express the same general concept.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Computer Science doesn’t get the pass, unfortunately. First of all because it’s a branch of maths, so in reality it doesn’t have any instruments to worry about. Secondly, applied CS relies on an incredibly simple instrument: binary logic gates. The computers we have today are just a mesh of stuff that flips on and off with no intermediate states. That’s pretty primitive as a means of expression and computation compared with the rest of the universe
- Taniwha 4y ago
  Oh, let me introduce you to metastability ....
  - bpye 4y ago
    Is that computer science or is that physics though?
    - Taniwha 4y ago
      well a bit of both - if someone hasn't given you the scary meta stability lecture you haven't really done computer science :-)
- bombolo 4y ago
  > The computers we have today are just a mesh of stuff that flips on and off with no intermediate states. Only when things are working properly and there isn't too much cosmic radiation, interference, strange patterns accessing memory, someone turning on a light…

suetoniusp91 4y ago

The simulation gets less cohesive the farther from earth you look.

peatmoss 4y ago
I was just thinking about video games where vegetation, animals, and hills spring into existence when you get close enough. Far away, and they don't bother to render the little things. Depending what generation tech we're running on in the parent reality, JWST may be causing a noticeable jump in system load.
- yreg 4y ago
  Whatever JWST can see should be trivial to convincingly mock compared to the complexity of simulation of the scenes here on Earth.
- dylan604 4y ago
  And now you have come to the reason GPU prices have been so high. Crypto was just a cover story.
- wruza 4y ago
  I had the same idea about magic. Back in the day people could do things that we can’t because nobody looked into details and the universe had enough “possibility space” to allow it. Once you turn your gaze into atomic or galactic workings, this space shrinks tremendously and further research becomes much harder because you glued the puzzle from its sides in a particular way and there’s not much left to hope for, except for solving it to the center in a bizarrely complex way. We may have painted ourselves into a horrible corner.
  - peatmoss 4y ago
    This is an excellent sci-fi premise. Also an interesting thought experiment to think of what an optimal research approach would be if you knew a priori that you were living in a universe in which the implementation details don’t exist until observed. Come to think of it, quantum physics is actually like this in some respects.

77pt77 4y ago

Everyone knows that general relativity is broken. Plus cosmology has the problem that you can't really conduct reproducible experiments.

Dopameaner 4y ago

I always wondered if we could somehow get a James webb telescope revolving around all planets of our solar system in the next 1000 years. That should give us pretty awesome visuals.

eru 4y ago
Huh, why would you want to do that? If you have the resources to spare, you can do much better than replicating James Webb style telescopes. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
positr0n 4y ago
What would be the benefit of the telescope orbiting other planets than earth?
- midoridensha 4y ago
  I can't imagine any, besides redundancy and more observation time.
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    Interferometry.
- mnw21cam 4y ago
  There's definitely a benefit to placing a decent telescope outside the asteroid belt. From Earth, we get a lot of light reflected from the Sun from dust orbiting somewhere between Earth and 2 AU from the Sun, which pollutes our space images - it's called the Zodiacal Light [0]. A telescope outside this light pollution would be able to see faint objects much more clearly and easily than Webb. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I want to venture that 1000 years is pessimistic. I just hope governments or private entities open up their wallets to build and launch more and better telescopes. I'm reading the whole JWST project is estimated to cost $10 billion. That's about 4.4 overpriced Twitters, 77 US Department of Defense budgets (just for 2023), and 11.7 Facebook annual revenues. We have the technology and the means, what's lacking now is the will.

odieldomanie 4y ago

There is the esoteric "Cosmological Natural Selection" theory that predicts the discrepancies. This guy at https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/archive https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/archive explains his version of this theory (albeit in an emotional way) that I find a pleasant read.

EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
It's an amazing theory that I now share. F R A C T A L H A T C H E R Y

fartsucker69 4y ago

not surprising imo, because of how limited our observational capabilities are. we'd probably progress quicker if we could look at far away stuff up close instead of from billions of light years away.