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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

Higgs and LIGO are big nothingburgers compared to anything that happened in physics in any given year between 1910 and 1950 or so. Meanwhile "physicists" spend their careers doing piffle like writing programs for quantum computers that arguably will never exist in the corporeal world.

Yeah, I coulda been one of those guys: I even had a pretty good idea for an imaginary QC platform and a position in a major research institution. I couldn't live with myself: I got a job in the valley.

Physics and science in general looks stagnant to the larger population because it is actually stagnating. Stating otherwise is mendacity of the highest order.

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I disagree with the assessment of LIGO being nothing- LIGO is the only physical confirmation of the existence of gravity waves. It did a nice job of turning something we predicted from theory into an observation that is hard to deny (it's also a tour de force of engineering and management).

Why is it stagnating though? Lack of talent? Lack of funding? Is it that all the lowest hanging fruit is gone and the problems are becoming intractable to solve?

>Is it that all the lowest hanging fruit is gone and the problems are becoming intractable to solve?

Considering that the only way to even observe Higgs is to build a multi billion dollar collider I'd bet on that one.

Social problems, IMO. Physics career track is designed to produce this outcome. Peter Woit (OP) wrote a decent book on the subject.

> "Physics and science in general looks stagnant (...) because it is actually stagnant.

Mate, what are you on about? We manipulate life almost at will, we have proven theorems that were unsolved for centuries, etc. Your limited imagination and your apparent lacking ability to see things in perspective make no rule.

> manipulate life ... at will

Cure for cancer? Cure for any genetic disease? Antibiotic resistant bacteria?

Do you genuinely believe this is an insightful response? Without knowing your background, this makes it seem rather likely you are arguing from the 'larger population' point of view.

Given the forum, let's assume you're a little more familiar with tech: Perfect encryption? NLP that understands meaning? Do you see now how it's a fallacy to take cutting edge scientific breakthroughs and demand instantaneous applications, and if these aren't met, discard the breakthroughs as having little meaning?

His comment is spot on. We cannot manipulate life almost at will. We have some amazing tools, but the actual outcomes of manipulation are mostly just selecting for rare, random positive outcomes, than actual intent and engineering leading to rational results.

(background: PhD in Biophysics, I've cloned genes and run huge simulations of protein folding, as well as worked in genomics and pharmaceutical chemistry).

I think you misunderstand, what you are saying is my point. I argue that science, unlike the parent comment's claim, has not stagnated but made amazing progress. Yet, that when seeking to identify scientific progress by looking at new applications one might not arrive at a valid conclusion.

Why do others misunderstand? Maybe you say one thing and mean something else? It is clear you're arguing for the sake of arguing, and this community is worse off for it.

OK. I would say "discovery is stochastic", such that we do make amazing progress in a theoretical sense, although that progress doesn't seem to lead to tangible improvements.

Certainly our understanding of the world is improved, no? When you mean 'tangible' in the sense of 'solving a real world problem', i.e. an immediate application, then I feel this is getting a little circular. I simply reject the claim that one of the parent comments were making whereby science in general is not progressing. (edit: question mark)

Look at how computing has changed in the past 30 years. From huge ugly boxes with CRT monitors to powerful touch computers in our pockets. How is this not physics? Sure, the principles and the foundations were laid out in the decades prior to that, but moving in smaller but important practical increments is also science.

That's a win for engineers I think. Isn't the stagnation argument saying that physicists aren't creating new foundations for the engineers of 2075?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance

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