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Comment by jaimehrubiks | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could understand the minds of these people. They lived with us and yet they are so much ahead in the comprehension of the universe. I've always loved science, I chose to do computers in the end though. I don't understand a single world of the abstract.

I also wish I could just know what people in a thousand years learn about the universe. It seems like the knowledge we gain (science and technology) is exponential and just started a few years ago.

It also feels like this contribution is so cool, even more seeing that Hawking is sharing it with us things after dying somehow.

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Stephen Hawking would not have understood a single line of your code. The language of his and your profession are different and must be learned. Would you go to Japan and feel that the people there must be eons beyond your comprehension because you don’t speak Japanese? No! You would learn Japanese, and would find out that they’re just like you, but they just speak a different language which they spent many years perfecting.

To keep in your analogy working in mathematics is more like working with a codebase that is ~100 years old and that still contains all the dead ends, unused code and false starts, because no code ever gets deleted. It is basically impossible to navigate modern research mathematics without a team of professionals guiding you for quite some time. Some of the most successful research mathematicians manage to either find a largely unexplored niche (Jacob Lurie with Higher Category Theory) or manage to work their way backwards to a research level understanding of a specific already established field (Peter Scholze, he claims that he basically worked his way backwards from the Langlands Conjectures and never took a course in Linear Algebra, but just picked it up on the way).

I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit. Sure, being a programmer and being Stephen Hawking are two very different things, but we still take an occasional dip in the ocean of abstract thinking when working deeply on complex, generalized problems in programming.

One person's mundane work is another person's magical wizardry.

Also, unfortunately there's no evidence that I know of that our knowledge is going to continue growing at an exponential pace. It seems an equally plausible hypothesis that we're reaching a plateu that may last for quite a length of time.

(But... I personally have my hopes up that we'll be doing Star Trek style space exploration within the next millennium!)

> One person's mundane work is another person's magical wizardry.

Absolutely. Sometimes I get excited about a topic and try to learn as much as possible, but once you peek behind the curtain it's just as mundane as anything else.

Most of the time an abstract is hard to understand because the concepts have been abstracted. If you just break it down and pick it apart, it's not hard to understand, though it can be time consuming depending on what you already know.

once you peek behind the curtain it's just as mundane as anything else

So much of interesting computation is just matrix manipulation/linalg under the covers. Which is pretty cool actually: it means the skills are very transferrable, which it turns means it is worthwhile going deep.

This is a breath of fresh air compared to most sorts of computing, where the skill really is "memorize all the workarounds to the bugs", and all the time you know as soon as the next version comes out, all that is obsolete, so you try to avoid wasting too much time learning it.

I'm tempted to believe that cosmology and astrophysics are the exception to that rule.

Astrophysics and cosmology are both relatively straightforward. There is one set of partial differential equations that are relevant, a few more when you also want to understand things like the magneto-hydrodynamics of stars or charged gas clouds. In the end it is nothing you can't manage to understand with a bit of study. What is truly hard is to prove rigorous mathematical statements about any of those equations and the resulting geometry. But the number of people who attempt this are dwarfed by the total number of people working in this field 1:1000 maybe.

I mean, what's behind the curtain of most things is "a bunch of differential equations".

With things like astrophysics you also have "and computer simulations".

It's not magic man. You haven't studied and pondered these concepts for decades, as Hawking and his peers have. I love science but let's tone down the intelligence and hero worship a bit.

> They lived with us and yet they are so much ahead in the comprehension of the universe.

Aren't these people just theorists? Black hole is a theory and not a proven reality that can be directly observed.

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