HN Explorer

Ask HN: Where are the great scientific theories of our lifetime?

14 points by alister ↗ HN
It seems to me that all the GREAT theories and discoveries happened before we were born:

Evolution, Big Bang, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, Godel's incompleteness theorem, continental drift, asteroid death of dinosaurs (K-T extinction event), fission/fusion, germ theory, etc.

All of those theories and discoveries are at least 50 years old.

You'd think that with scientific knowledge supposedly doubling every 7 years that we'd have many new really important discoveries and truly groundbreaking theories. But we don't. Why not?

27 comments

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Mz
Maybe we do and they just are less visible in part because there are so many -- ie the big ideas are not towering head and shoulders over everything else in the landscape, so we kind of don't notice. "Can't see the trees for the forest" type thing.
alister
So you're saying that the great theories and discoveries these days don't get the fame that, say, the Big Bang gets, because there are so many of them. If that's the case you should still be able to name a theory or discovery in your area of expertise that you think qualifies as a great theory or discovery--of the same caliber as the Big Bang or evolution--even though it is not famous.
Mz
As I said above: I have cystic fibrosis and got myself well. I'm a former homemaker. I have no fame. I have no idea if this will lead to fame or not. (Personally, I generally assume that if I get fame, it will be for something else and then people will nag me for info on how I did it. Until then, no one gives a flying f*.) But it's a pretty amazing accomplishment. And it's not a fluke: My oldest son has the same diagnosis and he is even healthier than I am. I have some theories regarding my condition and acting on those theories is what has gotten results. Two key concepts are that excess acidity and the salt issue are two very major factors in all that goes wrong down the line and that effectively addressing those prevents/reverses what are really secondary, tertiary or further down the order of hierarchy effects. So, yeah, I think big things are going on and not being noticed. I have reason to believe that some of what I have figured out can be used to good effect for figuring out how to effectively treat other genetic disorders and medical conditions. The small number of people who have taken an interest in what I'm up to tend to report astonishingly good results.

What I have accomplished was built on the info out there, so I think lots of amazing stuff is currently available. But clearly I'm biased.

Peace.

keiferski
I once read that the 20th century was the domain of physics, and (by all predictions) the 21st century will be the domain of biology and chemistry. Perhaps the breakthrough advances are in those fields?
alister
But can you name ANY amazing breakthrough in physics in the 20th century past about 1960? Or in biology and chemistry for that matter? The original question still stands.
Mz
I have a form of cystic fibrosis and have figured out how to get myself well in spite of doctors and most of the world telling me it couldn't be done. My oldest son has the same diagnosis and is even healthier than I am. I was able to do this in part because of the avalanche of information available online even to ordinary schmucks who can't afford pricey subscriptions to some of the medical journals or what not that some folks I know subscribe to. So I think there is quite a lot of amazing information about biology and chemistry available. They are researching tissue regeneration and have done things like had someone regrow a fingertip that had been cut off. I think stuff like that is pretty amazing. Any reason you wouldn't?
[dead] ld50
..care to share?
dylanrw
Just out of curiosity, what is it you do in addition to doctor's instructions?
Mz
A smidgeon of info here: http://healthgazelle.com/

And, actually, I haven't seen a doctor in nearly five years. (Possibly politically incorrect to comment on that but it bugs me to imply I am under a doctor's care by not mentioning it. It's simply not accurate.)

crasshopper
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/

- symmetry breaking (2008 prize)

- proof of black holes

- microwave background radiation measurements

- quantum theory of optical coherence...laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique (2005 prize)

I'll let you continue down the list...

hackerblues
For biology:

- Various advancements in stem cell research. Eg: skin cells into stem cells. - The creation of a living organism with a completely synthetically constructed genome. - The sequencing of the human genome. - Nearly all of neuroscience.

alister
Those example are all technology. Astounding technology, sure, but still technology. They're not great theories or discoveries. (And by "discovery" I mean a discovery of something that exists in nature -- like plate tectonics -- not discovering a way to make something.)
petervandijck
Neuroscience is a biggie. Finally getting much closer to really understanding consciousness.
wbhart
Well, you didn't say when you were born. But let me have a go:

Inflation theory (1980), Gluons (1979), Experimental verification of quarks (mid 1970's), Quantum Chromodynamics (1960, modern version 1975), Quantum Computing (1982), Spintronics (1980s), Josephson effect (1962), SQUIDS (1964/1965), Semiconductor Photolithography (1982), Nanotechnology (1980s), high temperature superconductivity (1986).

Nothing interesting happened after 1994 because of the invention of the Spice Girls and because the eighties were over and everyone became obsessed with having answers immediately and looking it up on the web instead of reading books and so on. (It's just possible that this is when I gave up reading books and so I don't know about anything that happened since then. But I'd rate that possibility at less than 10% based on a back of the envelope calculation.)

alister
These are technology (not theories or scientific discoveries): - SQUIDS (1964/1965) - Semiconductor Photolithography (1982) - Nanotechnology (1980s) - High temperature superconductivity (1986) - Quantum Computing (1982) - Spintronics (1980s)

And these are old (which was my original point about nothing happening recently): - Josephson effect (1962) - Inflation theory (1980) - Gluons (1979) - Experimental verification of quarks (mid 1970's) - Quantum Chromodynamics (1960, modern version 1975)

wbhart
Listing Godel's incompleteness theorem is a bit unfair to mathematics. What about K-theory, Schemes, Motives, the Langland's programme, Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena on primes, Number Field Sieve, RSA and Elliptic Curve Crytography, all more recent. The list goes on, forever.... Proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem, the class number 1 conjecture, the Bieberbach conjecture, Catalan's conjecture, Serre's conjecture, Kepler conjecture, Poincare conjecture (Thurston's geometrization conjecture)....
alister
I can't comment on all of those, but the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is not in the same category of importance as the examples I gave. It's an accomplishment certainly, but not a theory or discovery of GREAT importance to the world.

I do agree that public key cryptography is hugely important to the world, but it's technology rather than a discovery or a theory. (For the same reason, I didn't put the Web or Wikipedia on the list. It's very important, but it's technology.)

Are you saying that some of the others on your list are (a) recent, and (b) in the same magnitude of importance as the Big Bang and Godel's incompleteness theorem?

chromic
I'd say it's because you consider the 'GREATNESS' of a discovery is correlated how well it answers a simple question that almost anyone can come up with. Evolution is a great answer to simple questions about life for anyone willing to accept it, but subatomic particle research just doesn't have immediate implications to most people.

Edit: Also, what are your thoughts on technology? While it isn't a theory or scientific discovery, personal computing has had a major impact on society in the last couple of decades.

alister
There's no question that personal computing, the Web, Wikipedia, advance in semiconductors, networking, etc. have been amazing in the last few decades. That's why my question is not, "Where are the great technical developments of our lifetime?" :-).
petervandijck
I just read a book about astrophysics where he was lamenting just that.

They've been stuck by not being able to combine general relativity and quantum physics for decades now, entire careers. Pretty frustrating if you're in that field.

guygurari
At least part of the problem is in communicating great discoveries to the general public. Let me give an example. In the last few decades, Cosmology transformed from being a speculative, mostly theoretical field to a precise, quantitative science. Experiments that measured the Cosmic Microwave Background (WMAP in 2001 and others) enabled us to form a history of the universe that is backed by evidence. Measurements of supernovae (1998) showed the universe is accelerating (an amazing fact by itself) and from this we understand its future behavior.

Within Cosmology, I think the theory of inflation (Guth, 1980) deserves special mention. Its purpose is to explain what happened before what most people think of as The Big Bang, and it does so successfully, agreeing with highly nontrivial experimental tests (with data collected by WMAP and others). The fact that we can say something meaningful about what happened before the big bang, and then check it experimentally -- isn't it just mind blowing? What's fascinating is that inflation requires quantum mechanics and general relativity to work together to produce the effects we measure in the microwave background -- the very effects that are later crucial for the formation of galaxies. [1]

And yet, no one I talked to outside the physics community is even remotely aware of any of this. We are making great strides toward understanding where we came from -- the very origins of the universe -- and yet almost no one seems to notice. Wouldn't surprise me if there are similar examples in other fields.

[1] The basic picture is that the microscopic uncertainties of QM are amplified by GR to become cosmic-scale perturbations, which later collapse (due to gravity) to form galaxies.

[dead] zeynel1
There is a big scientific discovery, so far unknown to the general public, that you may be interested to know. The discovery was made by Isaac Newton. But instead of revealing his discovery to the world, Newton hid it in his Principia as a secret code. The discovery itself is as important as the realization that the earth moved; or Galileo's observation that the Moon is not a perfect body as believed by Scholastic Doctors of Philosophy of his time.

Newton discovered that what I call "Kepler's Rule" is the definition of density. This realization leads to the conclusion that we are living in a matterless world; and effectively reduces Newtonism to a religious cult teaching occult as true science.

You can read more about Newton's discovery in my blog http://science1.wordpress.com/

bendmorris
I think groundbreaking theories just aren't as obvious anymore because many of the big general questions have been answered and with these answers, disciplines are constantly dividing and subdividing. Therefore, the great ideas of today don't seem as far reaching. Take evolution, for example - pioneered back when the study of "biology" was mostly just taxonomy and natural history; it now has applications in the vast array of modern biological sciences, including ecology, medicine, genetics, and even computing.

There are some great movements in science today that wouldn't have been possible in the past. Bioinformatics, working with huge amounts of genomic data, is one example - how about the Human Genome Project, which was completed in the last decade? Another is James Brown's "macroecology," the idea of using statistics and huge amounts of data to learn about general patterns in the world at enormous temporal and spatial scales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroecology) and answer questions like "what effect would climate change have on the world?" And, depending on how old you are, the potential global application of immunology to eradicate infectious diseases such as smallpox and polio.

crasshopper
At first I was a detractor but it seems Lee Smolin agrees with you. From "The Trouble with Physics" (free preview part):

The period of time I will address -- roughly since 1975 -- is the span of my own professional career as a theoretical physicist. It may also be the ... most frustrating period ... since Kepler and Galileo....

The story I will tell ... tragedy. To put it bluntly...we have failed. We inherited a science ... that had been progressing so fast for so long ... model for ... other kinds of science.... For more than two centuries, until the present period, our understanding of the laws of nature expanded rapidly. But today, despite our best efforts, what we know for certain about these laws is no more than what we knew back in the 1970s.

How unusual is it for three decades to pass without major progress in fundamental physics? Even if we look back more than two hundred years, to a time when science was the concern mostly of wealthy amateurs, it is unprecedented.

triviatise
Maybe you are adding up all of the great discoveries throughout all of history and comparing them to a 50 year period.

Another issue is that many of the "great" theories were considered to be crocks at the time. It took decades for them to be proven and/or accepted. Anything equivalent discovered now might not be proven for a hundred years.

For example theory of manmade global warming. Telomere theory of aging - may lead to everlasting life Genetic basis of disease How viruses are integrated into our genome

Things that are yet to be proven but there are competing theories. Some may turn out to be correct Origin of species Unified theory Extraterrestrial life