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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

This is a cultural holdover from the late 19th and earlier 20th century when novel results were much more plentiful. But now nearly all of the low-lying scientific fruit has been picked so the scientific endeavor needs to adjust its expectations. Unfortunately, culture changes more slowly than science.

BTW, the lack of new results is actually a good thing. It means we've got a lot of stuff figured out.

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> But now nearly all of the low-lying scientific fruit has been picked so the scientific endeavor needs to adjust its expectations.

Of our current energy/resolution paradigms

We know that ~20% of the universe is Dark Matter and that ~75% is Dark Energy. All we really know about Dark Matter is that it falls down and doesn't really interact with itself or anything else, really.

Dark Energy? Yeah, whatever it is, it pushes galaxies apart, that's about all we got.

There are a LOT of pretty easy discoveries to be made yet, but we just don't have the engineering to make them yet. The LHC was a marvel of engineering, but it can't even come close to the energy required to produce (theorized) Dark Matter particles. If you tried to make a bigger one, you'd need an LHC with a radius larger than the Earth's. That's not going to happen anytime soon, not by a long shot. We need another method than particle colliders, probably a very large space-based telescope to stare at black-holes with jets.

Biology is also rife with 'easy' things to do, but ones that we just don't have the tech for yet. Strangely, with all of the data that the Googs and the Zuck have, we have not seen a similar paradigm shift in psychology, criminology, or economics. At least in public literature.

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.

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.

Don't make things up.

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

Yes, but that collider can't get to the energy levels needed.

edit: My original post was waaaay too agro, I was way out of line. I misinterpreted your original post as meaning -the minimum size of a larger collider than the LHC would be larger than the Earth's radius-, instead of -a collider larger than the LHC that could hypothetically produce dark matter would be larger than the Earth's radius-.

for posterity: That collider can't get to the energy levels needed because it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because it's construction was cancelled after the project was defunded. Where it to have finished construction, it would accelerate protons up to 20 TeV. The LHC reaches 6.5 TeV. All of that information is clearly stated in the link I posted and is completely uncontroversial.

Stop bullshitting.

> BTW, the lack of new results is actually a good thing. It means we've got a lot of stuff figured out.

Not necessarily. If anything, the more we find out, the more we realise how much we don't know. Take quantum physics, that stuff slowed down since the 1930s.

It's not a bad thing, the journey's always fun too. But let's not kid ourselves that we're close to figuring everything out.

Personally, I interpret GP as we have already proven many of the true hypotheses that can be simply and easily formulated, based on the categories and concepts that we currently find intuitive.

And this shouldn't really be a surprise. Our cultures and societies have had thousands of years of evolution; our human instincts have had at least hundreds of thousands of years. In that time, both culture and instinct have picked up many true facts about the world that have helped us survive. A lot of science has been taking those facts and systematically investigating how far they hold.

So these both can be true: the more questions we ask, the more questions we have to answer, but also that many of the 'easy' hypotheses have been mined out, and any true advance in science will by necessity pull us further and further from the realm where our basic instincts and intuitions can usefully guide us.

Quantum mechanics being the prototypical example, of course.

> the more questions we ask, the more questions we have to answer, but also that many of the 'easy' hypotheses have been mined out.

Like a tree? The main branches are the most visible, and so the most tackled. The smaller branches are only realised when you're deep enough in it. That's where our age's advantage comes in, as we have many more qualified 'explorers' than before, but it also makes it all the more important that the foundational branches are solid.

But then again it may be closer to readjusting our lens. The big questions (of the natural kind, not innovation like AI) today still pertain what we take for granted, like quantum mechanics is making us question the nature of reality again. But much like the discovery of waves once threatened the credibility of light as particles, I'm optimistic that reconciliation can happen, and to ascend to another level ... but where can we stop? When can we say "This is it"?

Just musing..

My father used to illustrate the progress of science as an island in the Sea of Unknown. The more you expand the island by gaining new knowledge, the more you get into contact with the unknown.

But the things we realize we don't know are much harder to figure out, they take more resources (time, money, study participants, analysis, etc). That's the reason things are, and should be, slowing down.

We are, clearly, close to figuring out most of the easy stuff. For our current definition of "easy" based on the amount of work, computing power and strength of the mathematical tools that we consider normal.

When you can do multiple experiments and predict the results to 8+ digits of accuracy there is little room for improvement. Your theory also needs to predict the same 8+ digits for all existing experiments while being either simpler or allowing for some new prediction that's also accurate and in disagreement with existing theory.

There really are very few edge cases left for QM 2.0

> This is a cultural holdover from the late 19th and earlier 20th century when novel results were much more plentiful.

I'm not sure about that. As a former working scientist, I would say that the primary driver of this is the promotion and funding structure of science. I do agree thta a lot of low-lying fruit has been picked.

> the primary driver of this is the promotion and funding structure of science

Well, yeah, obviously. I'm saying that structure is there because it's a holdover from previous generations where novel results were easier to obtain.

The funny thing is the results where gained either through paced pondering or by ridiculously talented individuals like von Neuman. Big science for non-applied fields is an oxymoron. Once a principle is figured out you can chuck a ton of people at it. But before that arrives, you can't pretend everyone is von Neuman and put them racing against each others. It seems there is no room for time and craftmanship in the publish-or-perish approach to science.

Have you read this?

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science

If we are to measure science by its technological results, then we would judge Arrhenius' paper on global warming to be a failure because it didn't result in any iPhones being sold. The author illustrates a difference in value systems, but it's sort of inherent to those that one can't meaningfully argue one against the other. I think the problem is with our incentives, not our institutions.

No, I haven't. Thanks for the link.

or it could mean we're stuck in a local minima due to structural barriers

What constitutes the "low-hanging fruit" changes constantly. I suspect that trying to quantify them at any given point in time is as infeasible as it is useless.

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