A 500-Year-Long Science Experiment
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
"No strategy is likely to be completely foolproof 500 years later. So the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date."
Seems like - if they also keep each version from today through 500 years - this may be almost as interesting as the bacteria longevity itself. Seems like this would be an interesting experiment in itself.
And one we have already carried out many thousands of times. Just ask a classicist or a medieval historian ;-)
It is _the_ standard corpus for many languages going back 2000 years. The actual content becomes secondary.
Maybe some are, but from what I understand new editions are much more haphazard (there isn't a specific simple goal) and old editions are often lost. I wasn't aware of a specific long term language experiment specifically designed to keep revisions over a long term, but then I'm definitely not a historian.
Just a thought.
It doesn't even come close to ticking all of the boxes you've mentioned but perhaps the bible is the closest thing to what you've described?
As singularity2001 said, from a linguist perspective it's probably the most valuable document in the world, regardless of content.
Of course, there are sociological considerations in the mix as well.
There's also the pitch drop experiment, which IMO rivals watching grass grow: https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
I'd have called it unstoppable force and immovable object personally.
I can see it having several disappointing failure modes though.
Most of the universities I can see on that list are not religiously affiliated.
I think that in our quick-pace life where old technologies are 20 years old, we sometimes forget that the world is an old place.
In the case of the older educational institutions (e.g. King’s school, Bologna), the dividing lines between church and state were messy and overlapping and even now if they are not religiously affiliated their roots may lie there. My high school is “merely” 350+ years old (predates Newton) and started out with a curriculum that was mostly bible and classics although it would be considered unaffiliated today.
I used the two words longevity and continuity because something can be old but have transformed unrecognizably, or close thereto (e.g. while amcountry may be ancient, the monarchies at its head can change radically. Likewise even some ancient commercial enterprises).
It's not that corporations can't exist for that long. It's that they're much less likely to, and are thus a poorer bet for the survival of an extremely long-term project.
A huge clock is being built into a mountain owned by Jeff Bezos that will keep time for 10,000 years with minimal maintenance.
I'm starting to wish everything would be designed with unattended 10,000 year time scales in mind.
Sci-fi books and shows often feature a trope of the protagonists unearthing some ancient alien/precursor tech that's many thousands of years old, and still in working condition[0]. Ever since encountering this theme, I too find myself wishing tech was built for longevity. Wouldn't it be cool if in far future, my great-grandkids find some piece of tech I was using, and it would still be working?
Related is my hatred for planned obsolescence and related business moves - often justified by saying that good engineering means minimizing costs, and thus designing for "just right" longevity; somehow this "just right" lifespan always ends up being perfect for generating recurring revenue for the manufacturer. Totally by coincidence.
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[0] - See e.g. StarGate series, which deals with this a lot - from the stargate network itself to various other ancient doodads they find and repurpose or reverse-engineer.
We have this, it's just relegated to the extremely expensive or extremely simple. Basically, metal items without too many fine parts. Old swords and knives might last for a few hundred years in a good environment (and alloys might help? That's a technology of itself), and gold lasts quite a long time, but is limited in which items it's appropriate to use for.
It's not impossible to believe that my great grandkids might use my favorite paring knife. It's also not all that special sounding, since we've had that for centuries, so it doesn't seem all that amazing. I imagine there was some point in history it did though.
25 years you're likely to have at least 1 old timer (when was Logan's Run set?) that was around the last time a vial was opened.
> “Of course, for an experiment to go on like this, I’m assuming that science still looks somewhat like today, in the sense that universities will exist, there will be professors with labs, and so on,” says Lenski. “Yet if one looks not so far into the past, that isn’t how science was done.”
I have the highest regards for Lenski as a biologist, but this is pretty wrong (unless he was quoted out of context). Universities have been around for the past millennium, and have not fundamentally changed during that time. Provided civilisation survives, I have no reason to expect they won't survive the next 500 years.
Also, the issue with how to preserve the instructions is not as big a deal as they make out. There's plenty of paper books still legible from 500 years ago. As long as you are careful about storing it, that shouldn't be a problem. (Though of course, creating new copies is still prudent.)
I mean, that’s just completely wrong. The scientific method itself isn’t that old. The institution of Universities has been around for a thousand years, give or take. But if you were to compare them now and then, you’d find them mostly unrecognisable. Their aims, their organisation, their funding, their constituents … pretty much everything changed, multiple times, over the years. You might argue that they won’t change enough in 500 years to threaten the experiment and you might be right (I certainly hope so) but it’s far from obvious.
And I still argue that universities have not changed their fundamental nature, much as their exterior might have. Universities were founded as a universitas magistrorum et scholarium, a community of teachers and scholars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University), as they still are today. Already in medieval times, their two-fold purpose was to school the next generation of leaders and thinkers, and to provide a place for new knowledge to be discovered. That goal has not changed in any way.
Even when you go into further detail, things haven't changed as much as you make out. Funding continues to come from tuition fees, governments, and other big public organisations with a stake in the outcome of the universities' work. Their students continue to be mostly well-to-do young people aiming for a higher career; be that administrative, educational, theological, medical, legal, or academic. Their organisation in many places still revolves around the core concept of a group of professors, each in charge of their own research group (with attached students), and collectively in charge of the whole corporation. Other things too: the teaching forms of lectures and seminaries, the international community of university scholars, all that hasn't really changed in the last 1000 years.
Book suggestion: James Hannam, "God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science", is a good popular introduction into scholarship in the Middle Ages, and specifically talks about the rise of the university in this period. (https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundation...)
Yes, that’s kind of my point: The introduction of the scientific method fundamentally changed research, and Universities as institutions. In fact, this dramatic change really cannot be overstated. Your comment appears to underestimate its importance.
> Also, assuming that the scientific method is the only valid way to achieve knowledge completely ignores almost everything that is not a natural science.
Again, kind of my point. It’s not the only valid way (though it’s the best general way we’ve discovered so far, and there are reasons to assume that it the best possible general way; and, importantly, it’s not restricted to natural science).
(I forgot to say, thanks for the book recommendation. I’ll check it out.)
Hm, perhaps I misunderstood you? I fully agree that the rise of the scientific method around the time of Newton "fundamentally changed research". But I don't see how it had the same kind of impact on the university as an institution of higher learning and research. The structure of groups of scholars doing research (whatever method they used) didn't much change, after all - or am I wrong? If I am wrong, could you give some details, please?
If you're interested, I reviewed the book here: https://terranostra.one/posts/Gods-Philosophers.html (Though I didn't pay particular attention to the role of the universities in the review).
That's very high-sounding, but at least in the US it's mostly just seen by huge swaths of high school students as High School Part II; the natural next step before getting a job.
Pitch flows _slowly_. Apparently it is so viscous that at room temperature a suspended blob might release a drop about once a decade or so.
A few university physics departments have had experiments to watch pitch drop running for almost a century.