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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

I didn't say there was nothing left to be discovered, I said that most of the low-lying fruit has been picked. Obviously there's a lot left to be discovered, but what's left is manifestly more difficult to figure out than what has already been figured out.

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Food for thought: it could be that the already-picked "low-lying fruit" is responsible for new discoveries being harder to make. Once you get into a certain mode of thinking, or come to view the world a certain way, it becomes harder to see the world as operating any differently.

So, maybe it's not so much that we have stuff "figured out", as it is that we have mental models that, while they work well enough to make certain predictions, also constrain our thinking in terms of what phenomena are possible. The "EM drive" controversy is one example of this tension.

Very unlikely. We are where we are today because along the way there were a LOT of alternative theories considered and discarded, either because they did not agree with experiment, or because they lacked explanatory power. Science is actually very open to new ideas. We even know for certain that the current foundations WILL change (because dark matter, etc.) It's just that making progress is really hard because our current theories already account for ALL of the phenomena that are easily accessible here on earth.

>> because our current theories already account for ALL of the phenomena that are easily accessible here on earth.

I'm not so sure of this. Have you heard of Edward Leedskalnin, or his "Perpetual Motion Holder"? The textbooks that I have discussing magnetism do not explain this effect, which you can see an example of here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWSAcMoxITw

If you can explain this effect with our "current theories", I would love to hear it!

That's a neat trick, but I see no reason to believe that it's anything other than straightforward electro-magnetism.

It is a neat trick! Somehow those pieces of metal are storing a magnetic field like a permanent magnet, but release their "charge" when the field is broken.

There's another interesting effect where an electric charge can be pulled from that set-up. Lasersaber demonstrates that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_ssUTRbRRs

I certainly can't explain it, and I don't think we have an adequate theory that does explain it (yet).

It's altogether possible that you're correct, but I'd say that most of the responsibility lies in this: if you look at pondwater with your naked eye, you can see cloudy pond water. If you look with a carefully made glass bead, you can see bacteria and protists, and thereby make a TREMENDOUS discovery: unicellular organisms. But if you want to get even CLOSER and understand more about what parts make up the organisms and other things at greater magnification levels, you're going to need a bigger, better microscope, and that will cost more money, require more care and understanding to correctly operate, and be able to scan less total area at a time.

In other words, much of the problem we face in the current scientific age is due to the fact that our instruments are now electron microscopes and Hadron Colliders, instead of carefully made glass beads and simple mirrors.

It's similar to problem faced in software of managing increasing complexity. No silver bullets known of yet for all those problems, just chronic application of powerful minds to the problem. :)

On the other hand certain technological leaps can create a whole field of new low hanging fruits.

For example within medicine when computer power and AI is advanced enough to help us much more connecting the dots between DNA, viruses, environment etc.

Yes, that's a very good point.

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