August 8th, 2008, 11:19 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaQuoteOriginally posted by: TraderJoeQuoteOriginally posted by: aiQUANTIs it worthwhile spending time and money on this kind of research? What difference will it make?What kind of an arrogant, lazy schmuck asks a question like this ? Where do you think your laptop, mobile phone, television, radio, the Internet, radar, nuclear energy came from exactly? Outer space? No, they were a product of research done in physics labs around the Western world. Whilst no one in 1905 was predicting laptops (not even Einstein) so no one alive today can predict what the world will look like in 2105, let alone 3105. Time travel, alternative energy sources, quantum computing, worm holes, time travel plus a hundred other things we can't possibly predict may be around. Even if some dictator outlawed such resaerch it would still go on as it is an integral part of human nature to want to explore the natural world that we live in.This line of logic is guilty of the same extrapolation that gave us the subprime mortgage crisis -- that the trends of the past will be the trends of the future. Just because physics was a productive source of inventions in the past is no reason for it to be a source of productive inventions in the future (especially will respect to the required investment).The reason the physics of the past gave us so much (and the physics of the future is likely to deliver so little) is in the scale of physics. The physics underlying "the laptop, mobile phone, television, radio, the Internet, radar" were all low energy, low-scale phenomena. Even nuclear energy is modest-scale physical phenomenon -- my university had a small reactor in the basement of the engineering building that can't have cost more than a $1 million. In contrast, those top 10 questions are largely about scales of time, distance, and energy that are many orders of magnitude outside what is biologically and economical compatible. For example, is it even that likely that one could cheaply produce and store Higgs bosons in kilogram quantities and that doing so would be useful?I'll will agree that these questions are intellectually interesting, but I doubt they will provide the same economic ROI that early 20th century physics did. The physics of today costs far too much and deals with phenomena that are far too outside the realm of everyday phenomena. I'm sure that answering these 10 questions will have some economic ROI, but that this ROI will be miniscule compared the ROI created by answering the top 10 physics questions of 1908. That is, physics has picked all the low hanging fruit.As an aside, I wonder: are these the right "top 10"? Perhaps that should be the #1 question because some of these top 10 questions may be implied by theories that Pauli would call "not even wrong."I have never heard so much arrogant and pompous twaddle in all my life! Physics isn't about collecting a box of protons. You sound like the halfwit at IBM in the 1940's who said he sees the the need for no more than 6 computers in the world. Or some people at the end if the 1890's who said that physics was all but done - along came quantum theory a few years later and boy, did they ever look stupid. I guess to be fair to you, there are two points here: 1) an appreciation of physics (which you obviously haven't got) and 2) the dangers of prediction, especially about the future . Anyway, happy reading.