Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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But don't you see the problem here? You don't know what you don't know. Radio communication wouldn't surprise e.g. Newton in the least once explained, but it's something he also would never have envisioned in a million years, because it was simply technology that he had no reason to even might imagine would be possible, outside of fantasy and fiction. He was actually skeptical of his own discovery of gravity because of the implication of some invisible force at work!

Or let's go back to ultra modern times. Nuclear warheads are shockingly small. Imagine telling something at the turn of the 20th century that soon a weapon the size of a small table would have a kill radius of multiple miles. I mean you can obviously imagine it, but it seems kind of silly to think about being actually real, until it turns out it is.

So there are two possibilities now. (1) Now we've finally reached that point, that we will only ever reach once, where our knowledge is advanced enough such that there will no longer any major revolutionary discoveries made. Or (2) we're just like every other generation throughout time who assumed that what they knew was, more or less, the peak of what's knowable (or at least not fundamentally wrong) only to have their own ignorance demonstrated with marked clarity in times yet to come.

Beyond the philosophical there are countless technical reasons to also think this is the case. Like you mention astronomy, yet so much of what's going on out there remains a complete mystery. Disharmony between the really big and really small aspects of the universe, whatever 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' truly are, the fact that observed galaxies are moving at rates far different than expected by relativity or Newtonian mechanics (including after factoring in whatever dark matter may be), that a big-bang would require a mysteriously convenient faster-than-light inflationary period to actually work, and countless other issues. So many things are breaking at scale, that it seems highly reasonable to assume that there remain yet many revolutionary and worldview-shifting discoveries to be made.

> You don't know what you don't know.

But we do know what is possible given the universe we can see. There is no magic left; the god of the gaps has been made so small that it can only live down in the quantum foam.

> Nuclear warheads are shockingly small. Imagine telling something at the turn of the 20th century that soon a weapon the size of a small table would have a kill radius of multiple miles.

Einstein published On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies in 1905, so that puts us close enough to the turn of the 20th century to state as a fact that at least a handful of well-read scientists would have no problem imagining what you proposed.

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies has nothing, whatsoever, to do with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are about nuclear fission, which was not even discovered until 1938. Nuclei weren't even discovered until 1932 for that matter! But getting back to the point here, do you not think every other generation thought exactly what you are saying? There's a really fun quote from Michelson (of the Michelson-Morley experiment) in 1894:

"...It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles [of physics] have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

Notably Michelson was the first person to experimentally observe a shocking key fundamental of relativity, outside the scope of this post. But he was so convinced that there was "no magic left, etc, etc" that he (and everybody else) actually thought his experimental result was due to a miscalibration or lack of precision in his results. So convinced was he of this, that he casually rejected his own results which would only be explained decades later - coincidentally, partly in the paper you seemingly randomly referenced here!

The question was: could you expect to explain an atomic bomb and its power to someone at the turn of the 20th century? The answer is clearly: yes.

Knowing the specific structure of the atom is _not_ required for this. The point was to prove that something was not necessarily 'magic' and the example selected was a bad example, because we can actually show that people were on the cusp of figuring it out themselves and would not have a hard time following an ELI5 overview. Are you providing information they do not have at hand? Yes. Will a reasonably well-read person of the era understand your explanation of how such a device would work? Yes.

Don't be simple. You obviously know that's not what I said, it's like a quarter of a page above where you're posting! What I said:

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"Imagine telling something at the turn of the 20th century that soon a weapon the size of a small table would have a kill radius of multiple miles. I mean you can obviously imagine it, but it seems kind of silly to think about being actually real, until it turns out it is."

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So yes, give somebody from an era an absolute ton of information on things they had 0 knowledge of and 0 reason to think existed, and sure - they can begin to understand how a nuclear weapon might actually be viable. And that's the point. And the same will undoubtedly be true for countless other discoveries as we continue to advance our understanding of the universe. Something like e.g. faster than light travel is obviously easy to imagine today, but we still have 0 knowledge of anything* that might enable it, let alone how such things might work, and so it remains strictly in the domain of fantasy. Yet 50 years from now, it might simply be something everybody takes for granted. Because we don't know what we don't know.

* - not strictly true, but you probably think it is - and this is outside the context of this post in either case.

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