X-Message-Number: 20869 From: "michaelprice" <> References: <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #20847 - #20863 Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 23:41:44 -0000 Hi John (de Rivaz ): thanks for posting the Alec Reeves site - a shame he didn't get cryopreserved. Yes, many of his visions have come to pass in the 30+ years since he made them, but that doesn't mean that there hasn't been fundamental progress as well. The lead time from fundamental discovery to everyday mass consumer applications is long - usually much longer than 30 years, although this period has been decreasing - so this is exactly what you would expect; a gifted, farsighted individual today can extrapolate 30 or so years into the future. Who is Reeve's equivalent today? Perhaps Kurzweil and Vinge with their visions of a super-artifical-intelligence driven singularity in the 2030s. Your mention of Reeve's spurred to start rereading RV Jones' Most Secret War, which mentions Reeves and his Oboe wartime work, in which Jones says that the single invention that had the most impact on everyday life was the radio in the 1920s. Some authorities reckon it was the telegraph - see the Victorian Internet for why. Perhaps the internet today. In 30 years, I would guess, AI. Hi Yvan: >>> I see nothing really new in the past 30 years... >> considering just physics :-) >> inflationary cosmology >> superstring/brane theory >> cosmological constant >> neutrino mass > > Inflation, superstrings are just theories without experimental proofs. But not without evidence. Most astrophysicists accept that inflation has occured in the past. General relativity is a retrodiction of closed loop string theory, just the perhelion advance of mercury was a retrodiction of GR. > The cosmological constant was introduced by Einstein more than 80 > years ago. And swiftly dropped as lacking empirical basis. Only recently has the evidence (of the Universe's accelerating expansion) come to light. Hence a recent discovery. You can't have it both ways. You can't reject inflation and superstrings as important because they lack empirical basis (wrongly IMO) and then claim that the cosmological constant is not a recent discovery when its earlier formulation lacked any empirical basis. > The > neutrinos mass is a refinement of the standard model as would be the > discovery of Higgs bosons, these fit well in quantitative progress. Not to > put on the same footing as Yang-Mills' gauge theory in the 50's or > Feynman's QED ten years before. This is a just a subjective, empty word game. Any advance can be categorised as building upon earlier work. Feynman's path-integral QED was an extension of Dirac's work on the electron (for which reason Feynman nearly didn't publish!), which was an extension of Schroedinger & Heisenberg's QM, which was an extension of de Broglie's matter-wave hypothesis, itself based on Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect (and also Planck's blackbody work, itself an extension of Wein and Raleigh's spectral work etc etc). I could equally well argue that Einstein's other work, special relativity, was a consequence of Maxwell's equations (which you cite as fundamental elsewhere), which was a just an extension of Faraday's work on electromagnestism - which in turn was inspired by magnetic lode stones, known about since the time of the Phoenicans! If you argue like this, then of course you will never see any progress that is "really new", because nothing ever is. We're all standing on the shoulders of Giants, as Newton said. >>Have a look at the Kurzweil site for a Singularity progress report: For a more succient summary of trends pointing to a singularity try: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 >> in particular note the rising calculations per second per dollar rate >> (sort of super-Moore's Law) which approximates >>10exp(-14 + 6 x ((3.4)exp(-19 + t/100))) >> >> based on 49 data points spanning a century. t is years ACE or AD. >> Cheap superAIs within 30 years. > > Computing power is fast growing I agree. But artificial intelligence > would ask for more: a far better understanding of brain working. It's a mapping and modelling problem, which cheaper computing resources, work on neural nets and the ongoing biological information explosion should rectify. Cheers, Michael C Price ---------------------------------------- http://mcp.longevity-report.com http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20869