Is this why science advances one funeral at a time?
15 points by Brajeshwar 6 hours ago | 16 comments

hackthemack 48 minutes ago
I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams.

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

reply
zoogeny 3 minutes ago
This feels apt in more than just science/technology. It matches my experience with culture as well, e.g. music and movies.
reply
somewhatgoated 14 minutes ago
It’s pretty damn accurate in my case.
reply
Animats 57 minutes ago
Einstein spent his later career trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. He failed. So has everyone after him. It's not about Einstein being old. It's that it's a really hard problem.
reply
jampekka 45 minutes ago
TFA also refers to just Einstein's 1905 papers. He published general relativity 10 years later. And after GE he contributed e.g. stimulated emission, Bose-Einstein statistics, Einstein-de Sitter cosmological model and the EPR paradox, among lots of other stuff.

Also the claim "toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics" downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place.

reply
renox 39 minutes ago
Yes and being 'opposed' to QM contributed to expose the 'spooky action at distance' that QM implies, which is very important.. It's a pity that experimentators were able to demonstrate it only a long time after Einstein's death, what would have been his reaction??
reply
ceejayoz 52 minutes ago
Not a physicist, so this may be a dumb question… but do we even know for sure it’s a problem with a solution?
reply
KalMann 41 minutes ago
Not a physicist either but my understanding is that is that if you believe that we can discover all the laws of physics that explain how the world operates then it needs to have a solution.

Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"

We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.

I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.

reply
ktallett 43 minutes ago
So we do know that all the tiny interactions like charge of particles etc must work side by side with all the big interactions like gravity as otherwise how would anything as we know it work. However it could as easily be neither are the right way to interpret the world and there is something we are missing, or we are right and we can find a method to combine the theory of the big and the small interactions but we are missing a section. At the end of the day we can't interact in any meaningful way with more than half the matter in the universe (it's proven to exist due to a gravitational pull), so it's clear we can't experience a lot of the universe and we definitely can't explain a lot.

So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.

reply
grebc 9 minutes ago
They hit the nail on the head in the first paragraph.

Older people have influence, power, control to direct where resources are allocated.

No 25yo scientists has the werewithal or experience to challenge that until later in life.

It’s kind of like asking why old people have all the assets.

reply
scarecrowbob 31 minutes ago
I found Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" helpful on this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

reply
moomin 8 minutes ago
I desperately want to slap a huge “citation needed” on that first paragraph.
reply
ktallett 42 minutes ago
Disruptive work nowadays is not very popular with institutions and doesn't win you grants. What does win grants is plodding along on a same path usually towards some end goal that is the latest buzzword. Those who stay in academia all start aspirational and wish to change the world, but the system sucks it out of them.
reply
johnny22 2 minutes ago
nowadays? It's never been popular.
reply
kulahan 52 minutes ago
Author must not have heard of Nobel Disease - many laureates go on to propose absolutely batshit insane theories. Sounds disruptive to me…
reply
ceejayoz 50 minutes ago
They’re usually outside their field of expertise, though.

It’s like being a billionaire; you stop getting “no, that’s stupid” feedback and it rots your brain.

reply