I don't know about number 3. As a 53 year old Gen X'er, I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order. The main things I don't understand are things like the Humane AI pin, which didn't seem against the natural order, I just didn't see the appeal or usefulness of it. Maybe it just doesn't seem like there is much new being invented.
> I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order.
So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it.
Every time I see someone doing that, I just absolutely cannot relate to what's going on in their head at all. I'm certainly not above watching some YouTube, but the complete mindlessness of it, they watch it goes on forever, and the utter stupidity of the videos. I feel like I'm watching zombies in an opium den.
But billions of people are doing that shit every day, so what do I know?
>>> It was the Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Planck who wrote that “science advances one funeral at a time” (which is actually a somewhat artful translation of his original statement, in German) about revered gatekeepers and their nostalgia for insights past that keep leaps in scientific understanding from happening. Turns out, he may have been right.
Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabend who showed that most paradigms (yes, including that one) of how science works are falsified by counterexamples in scientific history and practice.
We love to make a discovery seem like a triumph against evil, and obstruction, and sometimes it happens, but sometimes it's just a discovery.
Einstein spent his later career trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. He failed. So has everyone after him. It's not about Einstein being old. It's that it's a really hard problem.
TFA also refers to just Einstein's 1905 papers. He published general relativity 10 years later. And after GE he contributed e.g. stimulated emission, Bose-Einstein statistics, Einstein-de Sitter cosmological model and the EPR paradox, among lots of other stuff.
Also the claim "toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics" downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place.
Yes and being 'opposed' to QM contributed to expose the 'spooky action at distance' that QM implies, which is very important..
It's a pity that experimentators were able to demonstrate it only a long time after Einstein's death, what would have been his reaction??
Not a physicist either but my understanding is that is that if you believe that we can discover all the laws of physics that explain how the world operates then it needs to have a solution.
Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"
We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.
I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.
So we do know that all the tiny interactions like charge of particles etc must work side by side with all the big interactions like gravity as otherwise how would anything as we know it work. However it could as easily be neither are the right way to interpret the world and there is something we are missing, or we are right and we can find a method to combine the theory of the big and the small interactions but we are missing a section. At the end of the day we can't interact in any meaningful way with more than half the matter in the universe (it's proven to exist due to a gravitational pull), so it's clear we can't experience a lot of the universe and we definitely can't explain a lot.
So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.
Disruptive work nowadays is not very popular with institutions and doesn't win you grants. What does win grants is plodding along on a same path usually towards some end goal that is the latest buzzword. Those who stay in academia all start aspirational and wish to change the world, but the system sucks it out of them.
I was surprised that the article did not mention that Einstein was not originally given the Nobel prize for relativity because the Old guard did not like the work...
I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams.
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
I don't know about number 3. As a 53 year old Gen X'er, I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order. The main things I don't understand are things like the Humane AI pin, which didn't seem against the natural order, I just didn't see the appeal or usefulness of it. Maybe it just doesn't seem like there is much new being invented.
> I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order.
So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it.
Every time I see someone doing that, I just absolutely cannot relate to what's going on in their head at all. I'm certainly not above watching some YouTube, but the complete mindlessness of it, they watch it goes on forever, and the utter stupidity of the videos. I feel like I'm watching zombies in an opium den.
But billions of people are doing that shit every day, so what do I know?
This feels apt in more than just science/technology. It matches my experience with culture as well, e.g. music and movies.
I feel like many younger people still listen to music from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s etc, as an exception (?)
That's in the rule - for them it's "just a natural part of the way the world works".
It’s pretty damn accurate in my case.
>>> It was the Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Planck who wrote that “science advances one funeral at a time” (which is actually a somewhat artful translation of his original statement, in German) about revered gatekeepers and their nostalgia for insights past that keep leaps in scientific understanding from happening. Turns out, he may have been right.
Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabend who showed that most paradigms (yes, including that one) of how science works are falsified by counterexamples in scientific history and practice.
We love to make a discovery seem like a triumph against evil, and obstruction, and sometimes it happens, but sometimes it's just a discovery.
Disclosure: Old scientist.
Einstein spent his later career trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. He failed. So has everyone after him. It's not about Einstein being old. It's that it's a really hard problem.
TFA also refers to just Einstein's 1905 papers. He published general relativity 10 years later. And after GE he contributed e.g. stimulated emission, Bose-Einstein statistics, Einstein-de Sitter cosmological model and the EPR paradox, among lots of other stuff.
Also the claim "toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics" downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place.
Yes and being 'opposed' to QM contributed to expose the 'spooky action at distance' that QM implies, which is very important.. It's a pity that experimentators were able to demonstrate it only a long time after Einstein's death, what would have been his reaction??
Not a physicist, so this may be a dumb question… but do we even know for sure it’s a problem with a solution?
Not a physicist either but my understanding is that is that if you believe that we can discover all the laws of physics that explain how the world operates then it needs to have a solution.
Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"
We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.
I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.
So we do know that all the tiny interactions like charge of particles etc must work side by side with all the big interactions like gravity as otherwise how would anything as we know it work. However it could as easily be neither are the right way to interpret the world and there is something we are missing, or we are right and we can find a method to combine the theory of the big and the small interactions but we are missing a section. At the end of the day we can't interact in any meaningful way with more than half the matter in the universe (it's proven to exist due to a gravitational pull), so it's clear we can't experience a lot of the universe and we definitely can't explain a lot.
So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.
They hit the nail on the head in the first paragraph.
Older people have influence, power, control to direct where resources are allocated.
No 25yo scientists has the werewithal or experience to challenge that until later in life.
It’s kind of like asking why old people have all the assets.
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I found Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" helpful on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
I was shocked that the article did not mention Kuhn as the source for the two paradigms. Has he been forgotten already?
And of course if you haven't read that book, it's insightful and easy
I desperately want to slap a huge “citation needed” on that first paragraph.
Author must not have heard of Nobel Disease - many laureates go on to propose absolutely batshit insane theories. Sounds disruptive to me…
Ironically the article claims scientists become less radical as they get older. I suppose it depends what you consider radical.
They’re usually outside their field of expertise, though.
It’s like being a billionaire; you stop getting “no, that’s stupid” feedback and it rots your brain.
When brilliance in one area doesn't translate to another.
Disruptive work nowadays is not very popular with institutions and doesn't win you grants. What does win grants is plodding along on a same path usually towards some end goal that is the latest buzzword. Those who stay in academia all start aspirational and wish to change the world, but the system sucks it out of them.
nowadays? It's never been popular.
I was surprised that the article did not mention that Einstein was not originally given the Nobel prize for relativity because the Old guard did not like the work...