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> My old Uni (Manchester) doubled down hard on the work of Geim and Novoselov by building a dedicated "Graphene Institute", after they got the Nobel Prize, but even 15 years after that award most people are still trying to figure out what does it all actually mean really? Not just in terms of the theory of physics, but how useful is this stuff, in real world usage?

That's the beauty of real research. There's no guarantees it'll pan out. But it's generally worth doing and spending (sometimes decades of) time exploring. Too many people have become infatuated with instant gratification. It's pervasive even in young, scientific minds. The real gratification is failing that same test 100 times until you finally land on a variation that might work. And then figuring out why it worked.

Edit: And if that success never comes, the gratification is graduating and moving on to more solvable problems, but bringing with you the scientific methods you learned along the way. Scientists might spend their whole lives working on something that won't work and that's okay. If that isn't for you, go into product dev.

When I was a kid, magnets seemed magical. I'm 60 now, and they still seem like magic, despite always having some on hand to play with.

Magnets, how do they work? It's surprisingly complicated actually!

Miracles!

It’s interesting to think what in people’s personal perception makes them find strange thing interesting or scary or boring. Especially when it comes to grapheme.

Imagine doing computing on grapheme clusters.

That's what I thought LLMs did

I still don’t believe explanations for gravity…let alone dark matter!

Not believing an explanation for dark matter seems prudent. It's just the name we've given to a certain set of observations not matching how we believe the universe works. We're still piecing together the details.

Relevant xkcd tooltip: https://xkcd.com/1489

Do you suppose everything is explainable? Gravity feels to me like the sort of thing that just sort of is. I'm all for better characterizations of it, but I'm not holding my breath for an answer to: why?

Everything may be explainable, just not by humanity.

How does our biology affect the limits of what we can comprehend?

Oh plenty of ways probably. I expect there are perspectives out there which would have a look at our biggest questions and find them to be mundane with obvious answers but which would themselves boggle at concepts that we consider elementary.

But here I am in this body, and not that one, so I'm content to accept an axiom or two.

the question is depth and quality of explainability as determined by the predictive power those explanations provide...

Gravity is something very simple. It cannot be a complex thing, because it demonstrates a very simple behavior.

There are plenty of cases where a complex thing has very simple behavior. For centuries, brewers could get away with a mental model for yeast as something that multiplies and converts sugar to alcohol until it can't anymore. It took quite a jump in technology to realize just how fantastically complex the inner workings of a yeast cell is.

I'm not proposing that gravity is underpinned by something complex, just that if its mechanism is out of our reach then so to are any conclusions about that mechanism's complexity.

I also think that gravity is complete bunk. Funny how there's suddenly Graphene everywhere from dental applications to injectibles.Weird times.