Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yaa101 | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion science is getting less bang for bucks because the low hanging fruit has been picked by now. The big fundamental structures describing nature its working are more or less known. It's about details nowadays and it takes more time and effort to get the details right. You can see that it takes multi disciplinary teams nowadays to discover the connections between these large systems and how they (how all in the universe) connect. People are curious which is our most precious gift from nature and science will go on as long as people stay curious. But yes, not all science is about returns of value in economic sense, a lot of it is fundamental and also often results of science is laying in a drawer waiting to either getting monitized or used for further discovery. Science moves by spurts and hiccups, not straight forward with an even pace.

View on HN

Aristotle thought the low-hanging fruit had been picked in his time. (I didn't keep the original quote, but it said roughly that most important knowledge that could be figured out probably would be within a few lifetimes.)

This may be accurate in delimited fields like fundamental physics (though even there you have to wonder when you reflect on e.g. the half-century between Turing and Deutsch/Feynman with no one picking up quantum computing). But our understanding of nature is so tiny compared to what's out there. We're only a small percentage of the way to understanding even our own biology in full. Why would the frontier of available discoveries become much poorer, relative to our abilities if deployed well, long before useful discoveries run out? Maybe they really do, and we won't really know until we can look back much later, but it's not how I'd bet.

> This may be accurate in delimited fields like fundamental physics

No, major advances are still possible there.

I agree with you, but I would like to qualify that. The low hanging fruit analogy is apt in more ways than one; there are likely to be deeper truths out there that we don't know enough to model; take dark matter and dark energy and the expanding universe for one. In that respect I disagree that "the big fundamental structures ... are more or less known"

However, these fruits of science are so far out of reach of humanity's experience that they will be very difficult to exploit.

Personally, I think that the social sciences have yet to see their renaissance. The social sciences involve complex systems that are difficult to model, so there simply aren't comprehensive quantitative theories in these fields on the order of physics. If we develop efficient, cheap computation, orders of magnitude greater than what we currently have,[1] perhaps the social sciences may see its heyday.

The social sciences are stuck in a vicious cycle of politics, not technicals: There is tons of behavioral science and evolutionary biology that they continue to ignore.

Not true in biology, not remotely true in neuroscience. The big questions are hanging very visibly but it is just not easy to answer them.

> In my opinion science is getting less bang for bucks because the low hanging fruit has been picked by now.

This is certainly part of of the reason in physics, experimental verification takes more and more resources. It took the LHC to find the Higgs boson and LIGO/VIRGO to detect gravitational waves. The Nebel committees also tend to be conservative as a later u-turn would be unfortunate. For example, no prize has been awarded for Inflation theory.

While I think the analysis is quite flawed with regards to Physics I do think there is some value in looking at the Chemistry and Medicine prizes. It does torpedo the core assumption of the singularity movement, that of exponentially increasing progress.

Articles like this are best considered as a starting point for a conversation rather than firm statement of reality.

But isn't a big part of the conservatism that there is so little that can be tested at a macroscopic level? The existence of the neutron can be demonstrated with some polonium and berylium.

> The big fundamental structures describing nature its working are more or less known. It's about details nowadays and it takes more time and effort to get the details right.

This (bullshit) is what they thought in the 1890s,and is why physics was considered boring, basically a dead field. Oops!

Difference is, this time around we might be standing at the edge of what we can possibly know and/or understand.

And how could we possibly estimate if we are or not?

Perhaps there are many levels to understanding and knowledge? It's not a binary thing.

Models can be correct in a particular domain of application, but incorrect outside of those constraints. Progress is made by determining the constraints that define the domain of applicability for a given model, and then trying to find new models that are valid beyond those constraints [1].

For fundamental physics, we may have reached the edge of the current "level". Our results at this level seem to have a very wide domain of applicability. Who knows how long it will take to make a fundamental breakthrough that will really shake things up and deepen our understanding...

[1] A concrete example: Newton's model of gravity is not "wrong" or "false". Its domain of applicability and validity is simply much more restricted than the models developed by Einstein. Interestingly and perhaps unsurprisingly, many common phenomena that humans care about fall squarely within the area where Newton's models are quite valid and useful.

Here is quote from 1894 by Albert A. Michelson that captures the attitude of that time: ``[...] it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have now been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.''

That was before quantum physics, GR, transistors, lasers, etc...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com