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Comment by make3 | Hacker News Reader

this is extremely exciting. makes me hope that we will see a unified theory of physics in our lifetime

Usually discovering new fundamental forces will move us away from unification, not towards it.

Not necessarily, because it could give a hint. It is possible to get from various higher dimensional gauge groups like SO(10) to almost the standard model. But the left over particles often couple in unfavourable ways and lead to proton decay for example.

every single article on the matter has says that it would be a step towards potentially explaining dark matter and dark energy, which would help towards a unified theory

Discovering new physics doesn't move us away from a unified theory, it just means we were wrong about how much farther we have to go.

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

I hope to see a lot of things in my lifetime: life discovered outside our planet, human cloning, artificial organs and blood, AGI, humans on Mars, cures for a broad spectrum of cancers and Alzheimer's, human life extension / slowing aging, broad advances in chemistry and materials science, major advances in metabolomics, protein folding, drug discovery, gene therapies and repair...

> I hope to see a lot of things in my lifetime: life discovered outside our planet, human cloning, artificial organs and blood, AGI, humans on Mars, cures for a broad spectrum of cancers and Alzheimer's, human life extension / slowing aging, broad advances in chemistry and materials science, major advances in metabolomics, protein folding, drug discovery, gene therapies and repair...

The same list of things people were 'hoping for' in 1988. (From personal experience; probably a high estimate.) We're not a iota closer here in 2019.

Wishful thinking isn't enough; no matter how hard you hope and how much money you waste, you're not going to make a fundamentally better airliner or horse buggy.

What? Human cloning is basically possible but illegal, we can absolutely grow artificial organs (intestine, heart, certain brain structures), life extension and diseases cures are closer via Crispr, metabolomics has advanced, hospitals use glycomics for diagnosis, gene therapy is used in clinical trials, machine learning for materials science, drug discovery and protein folding is coming along.

What is your definition of iota? We're not there, but to say there's no progress is just untrue.

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