3 ms·

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project (for the list of interesting contemporary scientists, I'll n

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project (for the list of interesting contemporary scientists, I'll nominate Venter. That guy is a trip.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals All since 1970, is that recent enough? And, ya know, sometimes it does actually take a little time for major achievements to be recognized as such.

apu 17y ago
As well as the fact that sometimes entire new fields open up in very short periods of time -- for example, physicists thought at the end of the 19th century that they were basically just tying up loose ends, when relativity and quantum mechanics burst on the scene (in a relatively short time span).
smanek 17y ago
I don't know - Id on't consider those to be that significant. The Human Genome project was a fairly natural extension of the discovery of DNA 50+ years ago, the DARPA Grand Challenge is a pretty natural extension of Turing, Von Neumann, etc.'s works 50+ years ago. I'm not saying the things you list weren't hugely important, I'm just saying that they weren't as fundamental as the entirely new fields that were developed earlier (relativity, quantum mechanics, theory of computation, etc).
- calambrac 17y ago
  That the HGP isn't as significant as the discovery of DNA is pretty obvious - DNA ranks with fire and the atom as the most important discoveries in human history. But it (or, more precisely, the science and techniques developed to accomplish it) is easily as important as the other things you listed. The HGP is to the discovery of DNA as quantum mechanics is to the discovery of the atom. And you're being overly reductive when you say the Grand Challenge is a "pretty natural extension of Turing, Von Neumann, etc.'s". I'm pretty sure the physicists that you've mentioned would take exception to the idea that their work didn't have a clear lineage of its own.
  - smanek 17y ago
    Of course no idea appears ex nihlio - but I think certain ideas are just so novel and groundbreaking that they mark a qualitative change in humanity (I would include, for example, newtonian physics, relativistic physics, or quantum mechanics.) I just feel like their were are far fewer (if any) of those truly ground breaking discoveries now than there were in the early 20th century. This might just be perspective bias, but it seems like scientific progress was being made much more quickly from, say, 1850-1950 than any other time in human history. We still have a lot of big open questions, but progress seems to have slowed down. Hopefully the LHC will change that ... As for the Grand Challenge, I work in the AI field myself (I'm engaged in some work for DARPA right now, and I know several people who were on Grand Challenge teams), and we're still basically stuck in turing/von-neumann paradigms. In my opinion, most of what we've done in the last 50 years in AI is come up with better search heuristics. It makes AI/ML much more useful - but it's nothing really paradigm shifting. I will of course grant this could all be in my head, since I haven't, and probably couldn't, define a metric that measures the 'significance' of theory (maybe something about marginal information-theoretic predictive power, but that's difficult to measure and still not quite right).

apu 17y ago

As well as the fact that sometimes entire new fields open up in very short periods of time -- for example, physicists thought at the end of the 19th century that they were basically just tying up loose ends, when relativity and quantum mechanics burst on the scene (in a relatively short time span).

smanek 17y ago

I don't know - Id on't consider those to be that significant. The Human Genome project was a fairly natural extension of the discovery of DNA 50+ years ago, the DARPA Grand Challenge is a pretty natural extension of Turing, Von Neumann, etc.'s works 50+ years ago. I'm not saying the things you list weren't hugely important, I'm just saying that they weren't as fundamental as the entirely new fields that were developed earlier (relativity, quantum mechanics, theory of computation, etc).

calambrac 17y ago
That the HGP isn't as significant as the discovery of DNA is pretty obvious - DNA ranks with fire and the atom as the most important discoveries in human history. But it (or, more precisely, the science and techniques developed to accomplish it) is easily as important as the other things you listed. The HGP is to the discovery of DNA as quantum mechanics is to the discovery of the atom. And you're being overly reductive when you say the Grand Challenge is a "pretty natural extension of Turing, Von Neumann, etc.'s". I'm pretty sure the physicists that you've mentioned would take exception to the idea that their work didn't have a clear lineage of its own.
- smanek 17y ago
  Of course no idea appears ex nihlio - but I think certain ideas are just so novel and groundbreaking that they mark a qualitative change in humanity (I would include, for example, newtonian physics, relativistic physics, or quantum mechanics.) I just feel like their were are far fewer (if any) of those truly ground breaking discoveries now than there were in the early 20th century. This might just be perspective bias, but it seems like scientific progress was being made much more quickly from, say, 1850-1950 than any other time in human history. We still have a lot of big open questions, but progress seems to have slowed down. Hopefully the LHC will change that ... As for the Grand Challenge, I work in the AI field myself (I'm engaged in some work for DARPA right now, and I know several people who were on Grand Challenge teams), and we're still basically stuck in turing/von-neumann paradigms. In my opinion, most of what we've done in the last 50 years in AI is come up with better search heuristics. It makes AI/ML much more useful - but it's nothing really paradigm shifting. I will of course grant this could all be in my head, since I haven't, and probably couldn't, define a metric that measures the 'significance' of theory (maybe something about marginal information-theoretic predictive power, but that's difficult to measure and still not quite right).