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Let's say that nobel prize winning scientists are getting older because scientists need to accumulate much more information to be productive. Doesn't it follow

Let's say that nobel prize winning scientists are getting older because scientists need to accumulate much more information to be productive. Doesn't it follow naturally that there will come a point where science will practically be limited by the human lifespan? As in, there is so much one has to learn before being a productive researcher that there simply isn't enough time to learn it?

bartwe 12y ago
Wouldn't the 'surface' grow much quicker than the 'radius'? then that effect would slow down.
cflyingdutchman 12y ago
Yes. (If a number of big assumptions hold). I've written this blog post in my head a bunch of times and will write it for real soon. There's a fun (very loose) parallel with the expansion of our physical universe.
rifung 12y ago
This is a good question, but I don't think this will necessarily happen for two reasons. 1) With more scientific advances we will hopefully be able to live longer 2) The better we understand a field, the more we can compress and simplify it and have an easier time teaching it. At least this appears to be the case in mathematics, where I can only imagine many years ago something like trigonometry was not well understood and the greatest mathematicians of the time did research to further our understanding of it, but now it's something we're expected to learn in high school. I can only imagine this will happen as well to the current topics of research as well.
MiddleEndian 12y ago
At some point,yes. For now though, we could work on starting earlier. Maybe finishing high school by 16 instead of 18 to get a head start.
- Someone 12y ago
  Specializing earlier would help more. Does a would-be physicist need to spend time reading Shakespeare, learning piano playing? A would-be football player spend time learning to read, other than the code of playbooks? (Yes, truly optimizing for career intensity may imply making choices that do not feel right, ethically) Also, being better at predicting talent will help in the sense that more people will manage to reach the frontier of science. Having some strong driving force that forces children to take the necessary tests and follow their predictions will further increase that number. However, neither would help to lengthen one's career substantially. The best one can win is 25% or so (20 years on a 80 year life span)
pa5tabear 12y ago
Yes, but perhaps computers can also accelerate the rate of learning in the right hands. Especially as we become better at interfacing with them, the knowledge of the cloud can be viewed as an extension of the mind and only the most key concepts need be learned in detail.
nostrademons 12y ago
Thomas Kuhn published a landmark study on the progress and history of science about 50 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev... His finding was that science works by accretion of facts, except that over time, a number of facts that don't fit the established theory build up. Eventually, this reaches a crisis point where you realize that the current models are unable to explain reality, and then they get thrown out (a "paradigm shift") and everything needs to be figured out again from first principles. At this point, younger scientists have the advantage, because the "knowledge frontier" contracts back to nothing (almost...the new theory still has to account for old experimental results). The last major paradigm shift in physics was a century ago, with the twin discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics. You could probably argue that we're due for another one soon - the weight of evidence that our understanding of the universe is flawed has been building up, with unexplained results around dark matter/dark energy/cosmology and the failure of superstring theory to make accurate testable predictions. It's pretty likely that within our lifetime physics may become a hot place for brilliant 20-somethings again. But in the meantime, most of the action has been in computing. The field of practical applications of computer science has been undergoing a paradigm shift approximately every 10 years (wasn't yesterday's top Hacker News story about that?), hence why we see so many young tech billionaires.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Have there ever been 'physics billionaires'?
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    Bob Noyce. Thomas Edison. Elon Musk.
    - jsprogrammer 12y ago
      What physics has Elon Musk contributed?
drawkbox 12y ago
> Doesn't it follow naturally that there will come a point where science will practically be limited by the human lifespan? As in, there is so much one has to learn before being a productive researcher that there simply isn't enough time to learn it? It already happens and I think this is where AI and robotics play a big part. They will essentially evolve us in thinking as our lives will become too short to gain all the knowledge needed and they will pass the information better while connecting many more dots that can only be seen from a higher macro perspective from a longer life. A 500 year old AI knowledge bank and study (evolving with time) will be no match for a 70-80 year life in the field. AI will be the great thinking age even though we won't be doing most of it. Yes we have this now with records and digital data but correlation will get more difficult and so much gets lost from age to age. Additionally, a single lifetime will be throttled with AI that can really match or exceed human capability. AI and smarter computers will be our turbo button on science.
- alan-crowe 12y ago
  I imagine it working the other way round. There is a great deal to learn before you can make progress on general purpose artificial intelligence. Humans may be unable to code up a general purpose AI because the human life span is too short.
  - Jochim 12y ago
    I disagree that we'd be limited by human life span. I think rather that we'd see us moving away from individuals making "breakthrough discoveries" to progress eventually being something that might take multiple generations of work and research by large numbers of people working together on a problem. We also have to keep in mind that once something has been discovered, it generally takes a lot less time to learn than it did for the person discovering it.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    The NI that was created in my lab can already bullshit, lie and make jokes and from inception to the present has only taken 20 months.

bartwe 12y ago

Wouldn't the 'surface' grow much quicker than the 'radius'? then that effect would slow down.

cflyingdutchman 12y ago

Yes. (If a number of big assumptions hold). I've written this blog post in my head a bunch of times and will write it for real soon. There's a fun (very loose) parallel with the expansion of our physical universe.

rifung 12y ago

This is a good question, but I don't think this will necessarily happen for two reasons. 1) With more scientific advances we will hopefully be able to live longer 2) The better we understand a field, the more we can compress and simplify it and have an easier time teaching it. At least this appears to be the case in mathematics, where I can only imagine many years ago something like trigonometry was not well understood and the greatest mathematicians of the time did research to further our understanding of it, but now it's something we're expected to learn in high school. I can only imagine this will happen as well to the current topics of research as well.

MiddleEndian 12y ago

At some point,yes. For now though, we could work on starting earlier. Maybe finishing high school by 16 instead of 18 to get a head start.

Someone 12y ago
Specializing earlier would help more. Does a would-be physicist need to spend time reading Shakespeare, learning piano playing? A would-be football player spend time learning to read, other than the code of playbooks? (Yes, truly optimizing for career intensity may imply making choices that do not feel right, ethically) Also, being better at predicting talent will help in the sense that more people will manage to reach the frontier of science. Having some strong driving force that forces children to take the necessary tests and follow their predictions will further increase that number. However, neither would help to lengthen one's career substantially. The best one can win is 25% or so (20 years on a 80 year life span)

pa5tabear 12y ago

Yes, but perhaps computers can also accelerate the rate of learning in the right hands. Especially as we become better at interfacing with them, the knowledge of the cloud can be viewed as an extension of the mind and only the most key concepts need be learned in detail.

nostrademons 12y ago

Thomas Kuhn published a landmark study on the progress and history of science about 50 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev... His finding was that science works by accretion of facts, except that over time, a number of facts that don't fit the established theory build up. Eventually, this reaches a crisis point where you realize that the current models are unable to explain reality, and then they get thrown out (a "paradigm shift") and everything needs to be figured out again from first principles. At this point, younger scientists have the advantage, because the "knowledge frontier" contracts back to nothing (almost...the new theory still has to account for old experimental results). The last major paradigm shift in physics was a century ago, with the twin discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics. You could probably argue that we're due for another one soon - the weight of evidence that our understanding of the universe is flawed has been building up, with unexplained results around dark matter/dark energy/cosmology and the failure of superstring theory to make accurate testable predictions. It's pretty likely that within our lifetime physics may become a hot place for brilliant 20-somethings again. But in the meantime, most of the action has been in computing. The field of practical applications of computer science has been undergoing a paradigm shift approximately every 10 years (wasn't yesterday's top Hacker News story about that?), hence why we see so many young tech billionaires.

jacquesm 12y ago
Have there ever been 'physics billionaires'?
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Bob Noyce. Thomas Edison. Elon Musk.
  - jsprogrammer 12y ago
    What physics has Elon Musk contributed?

drawkbox 12y ago

> Doesn't it follow naturally that there will come a point where science will practically be limited by the human lifespan? As in, there is so much one has to learn before being a productive researcher that there simply isn't enough time to learn it? It already happens and I think this is where AI and robotics play a big part. They will essentially evolve us in thinking as our lives will become too short to gain all the knowledge needed and they will pass the information better while connecting many more dots that can only be seen from a higher macro perspective from a longer life. A 500 year old AI knowledge bank and study (evolving with time) will be no match for a 70-80 year life in the field. AI will be the great thinking age even though we won't be doing most of it. Yes we have this now with records and digital data but correlation will get more difficult and so much gets lost from age to age. Additionally, a single lifetime will be throttled with AI that can really match or exceed human capability. AI and smarter computers will be our turbo button on science.

alan-crowe 12y ago
I imagine it working the other way round. There is a great deal to learn before you can make progress on general purpose artificial intelligence. Humans may be unable to code up a general purpose AI because the human life span is too short.
- Jochim 12y ago
  I disagree that we'd be limited by human life span. I think rather that we'd see us moving away from individuals making "breakthrough discoveries" to progress eventually being something that might take multiple generations of work and research by large numbers of people working together on a problem. We also have to keep in mind that once something has been discovered, it generally takes a lot less time to learn than it did for the person discovering it.
- sitkack 12y ago
  The NI that was created in my lab can already bullshit, lie and make jokes and from inception to the present has only taken 20 months.