One Tenth of a Second
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Without precision instruments, how can we know that light has a speed, that stars are not points of light on a crystal sphere surrounding the earth, that diseases are carried by microbes... General relativity was a way to solve anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, something only detectable with precise measurement. Without it, general relativity would make no sense: why use all these complex formulas when Newton gravity works just as well? Send Einstein's work to the 16th century and it will be slashed by Occam's razor.
The "tenth of a second" problem is just that, technology able to measure tenth of seconds opened new fields.
I don't mean that technology is more important than scientific research, but they go hand in hand, no good science without good observation, no good observation without good tech, and no good tech without good science.
New discoveries rely on engineering breakthroughs. And engineering breakthroughs rely on new discoveries
I bought an air filter, it has a PM 2.5 meter on it.
Everyday I'm discovering and understanding what drives PM2.5 in my house.
It's not really an engineering breakthrough, you could loophole it to PM2.5 meters are getting cheaper. But really to me, it's the measurement, just better data.
I could have bought a PM 2.5 meter years ago but culture held me back. I personally don't believe in working from home, but if you did, once again the tech has existed for a while there's no real breakthrough happening.
Get the tools to the people.
Why is there no free easy to use OCR (Tesseract = PITA), I don't think a breakthrough or discovery is needed there.
With the fireplace I will behave in a way that creates less spikes now, just more effort to be less smokey. And to light a fire well is a cool skill you can nerd on. I do want to get a better fireplace.
Somedays it just spikes, I don't know why. Perhaps pollen, I'll work it out one day perhaps.
I bought a Ultrasonic Incense, because I'm a nerd that's kinda techy and fun. Undecided if I like it.
And I always run the filter, wattage is less than a led light, and cost a little (Filters aren't real cheap) but way less than my 'longevity' drugs.
It could be dumb, but I have more info every day.
If you're a hacker who follows through you can make one, mines un-assembled in the cupboard, discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20640114
> it will be your discoveries then that advance understanding
This in practical reality doesn't really happen. The philosophy fails here.
I'm just talking analytically around what happens when people get a device that can measure 1/10 finer or how Excel has pushed science, not related to philosophy or theoretical ideas around purer sciences.
More specifically citizen science like this not for profit air quality map - https://waqi.info/ Tools to the people.
For example, ASML make the tools that make chips. Keysight and Tektronix make the tools that measure production. They are just random names. The list goes on. The upper echelons of such companies are at the frontiers of engineering.
But moving a generation forward in precision is good, you only ever get close to perfect with diminishing returns.
I dunno, from Archimedes to Newton, and from Maxwell to Einstein, most important scientific discoveries arose from thinking breakthroughs (and led to better tools, as opposed to having been caused by them). The "better tools" at most helped verify it after it was expressed, not reach it.
It's the incremental, evolutionary stuff, that's mostly helped by better tools...
"The BS model: Science => Technology => Practice.
Historically, the truth: Practice =>Technology =>"Scientific" misattribution"
Information theory came after people were already sending signals over the wire. Similarly, there were architectural feats before geometry or Newton’s laws were discovered.
There's only so much a naked eye can observe. Technology drives science by allowing us to observe more things.
Technology is how we extend the set of things to which these principles can be applied, and thus the set of things we can learn about our world.
edit: re-read your comments again, and i see your point now. You are absolutely right.
Yes, and in this example theoretical physics is providing the new tools for experimental physics to attempt to find ways to work with.
And sometimes pure mathematics people are off making new tools that the theoretical physicists can later use to expand their playground.
“It's maths all the way down” is the modern “it's turtles all the way down”!
You can think up "breakthroughs" all you want, it's easy. As any mathematician or software developer can confirm, it's easy for a human to propose an explanation and immediately convince themselves of its correctness; validating hypotheses is hard work that the brain desperately tries to avoid. And in physics, validating things on paper can only get you so far - you ultimately need experimental confirmation to make solid science.
Here is where technology becomes necessary: in order to favor one hypothesis over the other, you need to find where they give conflicting predictions, and then check what actually happens in reality. That's only possible when you can perform the necessary experiment and observe the results with sufficient precision to discriminate between competing explanations. Technology is what gives you this capacity, expanding the scope of experiments you can run.
As someone else mentioned, you could drop Einstein back a few hundred years and his work would be laughed off - because ultimately there would be no way to tell if he's right or not. The theory may look beautiful (if complex) on paper, but if you can't discriminate between it and alternatives through an experiment, it's meaningless and you may as well use the simplest model that fits all your current observations.
While they do so, they validate the said scientific breakthroughs. Science is not only about coming up with models or hypotheses. Science is "theory and validation." Take out either of them, and you don't have science.
Humans have been theorizing and creating mental models for thousands of years. But only with the better tools were they able to select verified models, and discard those that didn't fit the observation, and as a consequence, make more and more sophisticated and accurate predictions.
To take two recent examples, the first photograph of the black hole and the first detection of gravitational waves (both predicted by Einstein's GR, coincidentally) required a stupendous amount of collective brainpower of brilliant engineers and scientists. 100% of that brainpower went into figuring out building those better tools and analyzing the collected data. The scientific community itself has acknowledged the criticality of those better tools, 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for building a "better tool" to observe gravitational waves, LIGO [1].
This is not to say that theory isn't important but to call out that observational tools are not "at most help verify theory" but are an integral part of science.
There is, of course, a way to validate theory within its own framework and that is what mathematicians do. I guess the philosophy is a similar domain, but I have not read much about it, so I can't comment much.
On a related note, I highly recommend this panel discussion about the topic of GW, LIGO etc., from the horses' mouth. LIGO is absolutely mind-blowing, a testimony to collective human ingenuity [2].
[1] https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-2017-nobel-p...
This is something I hadn't thought about before, but it makes total sense.
When I read that, my first thought for current technological toolage that might lead to new discoveries is the massive transformer language models that Open-AI / EleutherAI / others are building.
Some basic extrapolation on how-far-how-soon technology like GPT-X has come suggests that future versions could (should?) be revolutionary for knowledge discovery.
I don't think that's entirely true. As far as I know, the Mercury precession anomaly wasn't considered a serious problem to Newton's theory at the time.
Einstein was motivated by theoretical problems that arose from trying to reconcile Newton's theory with special relativity, which inspired him to take the principle of equivalence seriously: the notion that gravitational mass and inertial mass are fundamentally the same. This is what lead to the famous field equations. Their derivation is not some sort of reverse engineering of the Mercury precession anomaly. Someone wrote a few words about it here [1].
The fact that GR could explain the Mercury anomaly was a bonus. The break through, however, came with the first measurement of light being deflected by the sun during a solar eclipse.
Einstein's GR truly came out of nowhere.
[1] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/622/what-was-einstei...
Likewise, he also noted that constructing better instruments is theory-dependent, as better theory allows a more complete understanding of sources of error (not to mention entirely new technologies).
Laudan called his a "tri-partite" model, as I recall.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
The pontificating on what drives the founders and c-levels kind of goes into the weeds a bit. I was hoping for more concrete examples of the types of speech, as well.
But the culture parts of the essays was quite thought-provoking.
For example, I remember the idea of the Losers explained was fairly eye-opening for me. Regardless of the name, the fact that they were a largely savvy group that just chose an entirely different trade-off and decided to treat their jobs purely as a means to an end so they could focus on things they cared about clicked with me in a way that hadn't really before. I mean, I'd worked jobs like that, with a slightly different aim, as a teenager and while going to college, but I was so focused on getting a job more aligned with my interests (which I was lucky enough to do partway through college) that it skewed my view of work and the people around me. The idea of "Losers" made a few things click for me, by linking the middle class expansion of the middle 20th century, the massive manufacturing sector, and the people that were able to live great middle-class lives because of it. These "Losers" are people that have carved out their own little chunk of that dream, and are consciously putting the requisite amount of effort in to not be fired and/or feel like they aren't absolute shit at their job, as nothing more or nothing less is really needed for them to meet their real goals, which are not work related. There's something to envy in that.
Does that mean everyone fits in the categories presented, or that all the categories are accurate in all or even most respects? No, but nevertheless, as a prism with which to compare and reassess my own experiences, I found it extremely useful.
> Instead, I think of them in terms of what the modern corporate structure has done to them: Broken the losers, tricked the clueless, and forced the sociopaths into ethical conundrums.
> To be specific, I propose that we name the losers, clueless and sociopaths to “pragmatists, idealists and opportunists.” Their roles, relationships and dynamics remain the same ...
whoa! The Office elvates so far above Office Space? I'm going to have to disagree.
Originally the Babylonian clock split day and night each into 12 equal segments -- thus the length of an hour was different at night and day, and varied each day.
The concepts of minutes (small part) and seconds (even smaller part) is quite modern -- about a thousand years old, despite being broken into 60 (those Babylonians were quite influential!); once you do that you can continue into even smaller fractions but it was all pretty abstract.
Seconds only became interesting about 500 years ago when the clock technology could finally represent them, but they've only been useful for the last 250 years or so.
So having .1 s (not .1s!) be interesting 130 years ago is itself interesting, and reflects the state of technology (not science) of the time.
What does this distinction mean?
I have trouble parsing it too.
Kind of like the pseudo-math joke around xmas when people write Ho Ho Ho as Ho^3 when it should be (Ho)^3 otherwise it's just Hooo.
Maybe it's to conform to the proper usage of SI units with the space like 100 kg, 45 m/s, 20 kV/ns, and etc...
I believe he suggested time could be divided by these units as well, although I can't find the exact reference, so I could be wrong on that count.
Same thing with mouse. Wireless mouse feels unnaturally sluggish to me now. Was years before I realized that it wasn’t just in my mind and most gamers use wired.
If 0.1s makes any sense (as in humans processing 10 events per second), which I do honestly doubt, then 100ms -> 30ms still means that the other party is almost one full event behind.
That's massive.
Btw, with modern games 30ms isn't just one full event/server tick behind. Multiplayer shootets do have 100 or higher tick rates now, so 30 would be more like 3 cycles behind
Still, it only goes to show it matters at so many levels.
Like, if using a 60Hz screen with 30ms latency, you're always almost 2 frames behind, so you always react 2 frames late, compared to another 60Hz screen person at the same ping with, say, 2ms latency.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050214193844/http://archive.ga...
Not that I advocate for wireless mice but modern gaming wireless mice do not suffer from lag issues
Edit: I think I've figured it out. If there's a complicated way to say something simple, he takes the complicated way. If there's a rarely seen word he can substitute where a common word will do, he uses the rarely used word.
His prose reads heavy, but the ideas in it are light. This is like the exact opposite of Paul Graham. His prose is easy, but I find deep and actionable knowledge in many things he writes.
"The book consists of 30 chapters, each exploring one dream about time that Einstein had during this period."
The chapters are versions of the world where time has different rules. In one, the closer you get to the town square, the slower time moves. In another, people build higher and higher houses, since you age more slowly the higher you are from the surface of the Earth. And so on...
It's also funny that the OP mentions astronomy as the origin of the .1s problem, but doesn't mention, you know, machinery. Engines (internal combustion or otherwise) were cycling in the .1 - .001s range in the 19th century.
And in terms of the challenges of modernity, isn't the biggest modern challenge, not just to time, psychology, or physics, but to the entire notion that knowledge be organized and expanded upon by succeeding generations when institutional integrity declines and the proliferation of baseless speculation and idle daydreams is allowed to mascarade as legitimate academic content?
We humans are stuck in our time and place, at all time scales. At the high end, there is no escaping the light cone. And I'm never going to experience nanosecond time. We exist at this level of zoom, and unaided humans are stuck here. So what? We range out with our imperfect instruments. No sane person is asserting that telescopes and microscopes are eyes. We get born, recapitulate what our ancestors learned, use their tools, build our own, and push back the veil of ignorance a little.
What's the big whoop?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8
Different phenomena and physical senses have different temporal distinction rates. Smell is probably among the slowest. Touch (really a collection of senses from pressure, heat, cold, vibration, proprioception, pain, and possibly others), ranges from slow (heat/cold) to fast (vibration). Visual range gets close to the 1/10th of a second described in the article, though some changes may be slower, others (usually based on flicker or interference patterns) may give even higher resolution, though an upper bound of 1/100th, possibly 1/1000th of a second (strobe effects) is probably the extreme, and that's already special cases outside typical (and certainly evolutionary) experience.
[1] I might have missed it, though.
[2] https://www.worldathletics.org/disciplines/sprint-event/100-...
I wonder what exactly he means by that. Sure, eyes may start betraying you at faster speeds but human cognition is in no way limited to one tenth of a second. For example, speedrunners reliably hit 1/60 of one second actions, and I'm sure many other human endeavors require similarly fast thinking.
One time I reacted to a snake before I realized I saw the snake. There are also problems with laying down memories.
As the author of the post says, we still have trouble nailing this down in the modern day.
The "me" part of my brain knows I blink. I know I'm blind, but I don't remember it at all. Turns out it's actually worse thanks to being blind while my eyes rotate in their sockets. "saccades".
There's some machinery grinding away all the time, making up little stories about the world to maintain a consistent view. I spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time wondering where else I'm blind.
The snake thing is cool. I know I have some hardwired reflexes around heat and pain. I can't think of a case where I've exercised the "hidden monster" reflex, but I believe you, and I probably have it, or something like it.
I can't count the number of times I've performed (useful) actions, to then almost be stunned for a moment as I reconcile what happened. The one I remember most vividly is a ball that was passed right at me from across the pitch. I knew my teammate kicked it, but I thought it was a shot towards goal at first. I couldn't see till about 2 metres away from me as it was across a defensive line, but it was a driven, pacy pass towards me. I stuck out a foot to kick it into goal very tidily, before I even registered that the pass was actually coming towards me.
Feels like time slowing down around you for half a second, pretty cool.
It was and remains a powerful and fascinating experience.
I doubt a major league baseball player has time to consciously decide exactly when to start the swing for many pitches, but instead relies on feel and training, and allows their mind to instead determine whether they should abort entirely. A speedrunner is just another form of highly trained individual, so I think whether they are good at hitting sub 100ms timing events (as long as they are advertised ahead of time or are regular) is sort of orthogonal as to whether people can consciously measure periods that small in general terms.
Not planned, but an unconscious reaction or muscle memory. There isn't enough time to think about something and then trigger your muscles to move. It's got to be second nature to hit that level of "reaction time".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_chronometry
> "One of the most obvious reasons for this standard pattern is that while it is possible for any number of factors to extend the response time of a given trial, it is not physiologically possible to shorten RT on a given trial past the limits of human perception (typically considered to be somewhere between 100-200 ms), nor is it logically possible for the duration of a trial to be negative."
To prove it's not reaction time, you could even close your eyes for the last half second. And someone could do this on a trick they just learned and don't have muscle memory for.
> nor is it logically possible for the duration of a trial to be negative.
Yet hitting the button early for a trick with a small window of frames happens constantly. That by itself should show it's not a matter of reaction time.
Not to successfully hit the ball, but just to start to make an adjustment to their swing.
The pitch length is 20m, and typical fast balls can be 120km/h=33m/s. For a "yorker" that might mean only 20.12/33=0.6s for the ball to reach the batsman, but for a typical bounced delivery, it's probably like 1 second.
However, the ball bounces usually 5 m from the batsman, and changes direction after the bounce, and that gives only 5/33=0.15s (or maybe 0.2-0.25s) to reach the batsman after the bounce.
Which means that the batsman is unable to change their swing after the bounce. That I find hard to believe. I think they do.
I don't think there are any speedrunners who can be expected to give a frame-perfect response to an unexpected event.
The observational astronomy version could be that a human being could synchronize two clocks to less than 0.1 second difference (by starting one when the other reached a specified time, maybe), but still not measure an uncontrolled natural event to the same precision.
I'm not sure how this works with timing human athletic performance using a stopwatch, but I think I would actually be wary of trusting a stopwatch-measured time much below 0.1 second precision, even if the stopwatch displays more decimal places. I think athletic records in the timeframe this book is talking about were reported to the nearest 0.1 second and not below, and having more decimal places in our measurements has required video replay and, later, other electronic timing methods.
This is the reason why tool-assisted speedruns are faster than speedruns without a tool. TASBot (a great thing to search for fun videos from Awesome Games Done Quick) certainly can react within a single frame, every time.
Humans generally rely on cues usually called a "setup" do to these.
Human cognition operates at rates of faster than 1 second, but slower than 1/100th of a second. In most cased, assuming about a 1/10th second response cycle is about right, and, in the context of the article and book, it's when nonhuman mechanical systems began to become capable of operating within that timeframe, that they exceeded human capabilities.
The eye and memory will register only a vague blurred impression of an event taking less than 1/10th of a second. With very standard photographic equipment, it's quite possible to capture a single frame in clarity at 1/100th to 1/1000th of a second. The former is considered relatively slow, though good for freezing virtually all macroscopic motion. At 1/1000th of a second, virtually all human-scale activity (say, sports or activities) is frozen, though very high-speed events (high-speed machinery, explosions, bullets) may still show motion blur. A good film camera would typically have a minimum exposure of 1/1000th to 1/2000th of a second.
Moreover, mechanised sensing equipment can distinguish between events at these levels. Human perceptions will simply get causality and order all out of sequence. It wasn't until June of 1878 that the very common phenomenon of a galloping horse was conclusively choreographed by means of Eadweard Muybridge's photography, and the motion of the horse and its legs in motion accurately understood.
Muybridge's sequence consisted of 24 photographs, at 1/2000th of a second (see discussion above), with the total sequence taking about 1 second. (The cameras were placed 27 inches, or 67 cm, apart, the total span was 16 meters, the horse was galloping at a 16m/s pace, or one mile every 1:40.)
Each frame then captured 1/24th of a second, about half the 1/10th second limit discussed in the article.
Take Laguna Seca, 11 corners. If one could find a tenth in each, one would be a very significant 1.1 seconds faster per lap.
Small fractions of time, what an interesting topic.