Hacker News Reader

Comment by b5 | Hacker News Reader

In high school, my physics teacher told us about his time at Glasgow University where he’d worked on Scotland’s first laser. This would have been in the ’60s. He said it was fascinating, but they had no idea what to do with it then. He called it “a solution in search of a problem”.

View on HN

I once read that they needed a powerful energy source for nuclear fusion. In the fusion bomb they could use a fission bomb as source, but that was overkill for a fusion reactor.

Then someone invented the laser and it was like you build a cart and someone with a horse to pull it came around the corner.

The phrase “a solution in search of a problem” really reminds me of block chain. It's a really cool piece of tech, that so far has mostly enabled speculative investing and anonymous drug trade.

I disagree. It's a neat solution to exactly one, pretty theoretical problem: how to have digital currency without any trust involved in the system whatsoever.

And nothing else, because tracking things in the real world instead of currency requires trust that what's on the chain really is what is in the real world, and besides there are lots of highly trusted institutions in the world that it's not practical to do without, like the judiciary system.

No, a neat solution to one, not at all theoretical problem: how to maintain a append-only database (eg mapping domain names to registrant public keys and (less critically) append-only lists of signed IP addresses) without giving any participant the ability to either redact the database (eg remove the registration for thepiratebay.org) or prevent (specific or any) future appendments (eg, prevent new IP addresses for thepiratebay.org).

You're quite right that "solution in search of a problem" is not accurate, though.

Well you need protection against 51% attacks, which means you need it to be very expensive to get that many modes, which means the people running nodes need to be compensated for their expense.

Which can be done neatly by having the things in the database have value, so that the reward can also be inside the system, i.e. mining coins.

Other databases people come up with always have problems with 51% attacks, so the system isn't made completely open, so it's pointless because then more traditional solutions are better.

> Which can be done neatly by having the things in the database have value, so that the reward can also be inside the system, i.e. mining coins.

Sure, but that's a mechanism, not a goal.

I studied physics at Glasgow. You can still see the pipes in the ceiling of the corridors on the ground floor of the Kelvin Building which were intended to be used to heat the building using the laser's cooling fluid. That was apparently the only way they got permission to install something requiring so much power! I heard though that the laser coolant was never actually used for heating in the end...

Thankfully it found quite a few problems to solve.

I think "a solution in search of a problem" isn't a bad thing the more it's closer to first principles. It's another meaning when the solution is farther away from first principles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com