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I saw this piece today about the end of the age of the individual scientist. We're probably not going to see another Einstein or Newton--the shoulder of the giants have reached such a height that it takes 30 years of learning to climb that far. And the problems have grown so large and complex that it takes teams rather than individuals to tackle them. Nature has also recently had a number of stories about the end of the age of the single-author paper. No more brilliant, reclusive geniuses striding through academe; the new colossi are and will be geniuses at managing, at marketing, at networking. The age of Fermi, Feynman, Wheeler, and Einstein is ending, making way for the age of CERN and ESO and Merck.
The upside of this is that, while single great intellects will no longer be able to be famous down the ages for solving timeless and profound questions, it is an age of fabulous opportunity for everyone. Despite the fact that billions choose to grossly ignorant, anyone who desires to can easily know more than Newton or Einstein or Feynman. We have instant access to all of their writings, thoughts, and lectures. I no longer need to take physics from tired, struggling grad student who doesn't speak English; I'll just take the definitive, greatest physics course ever given and listen/read/watch the Feynman lectures. It took all of the computing power in the world and dozens of the greatest minds ever developed to simulate nuclear reactions during the Manhattan Project. Now, if I want, I can solve the equations, create the simulations, all of it, in just a few afternoons. The commodity at the moment is time to cogitate on the vast information that we have, and the filters to sort through it.
An indication of this information overload is that it shouldn't actually take 30 years to climb to the top of the shoulders of giants--we just haven't yet created the filters and the access to the right information to allow education to be as quick and easy as it could be. Most subjects aren't difficult, if you find the person who understands it the best and can explain it the most clearly. Physics isn't confusing or counterintuitive when coming from Feynman. Asimov's books on neutrinos or chemistry are such brilliant little jewels of clarity that they should be in every classroom. I spent eight years in high school and college learning not very much--most of it was an exercise in frustration being taught poorly by people who didn't really understand what they were talking about; I could have saved years of effort just by reading Dawkins and Gould and Hitchens and watching and listening to every lecture they ever gave. The fact that I was a science major at a large midwestern university, and I don't think I had ever even heard of Richard Feynman until after college when I stumbled across an audio file of his on Napster sums up the lack of filters currently available in education.
The upside of this is that, while single great intellects will no longer be able to be famous down the ages for solving timeless and profound questions, it is an age of fabulous opportunity for everyone. Despite the fact that billions choose to grossly ignorant, anyone who desires to can easily know more than Newton or Einstein or Feynman. We have instant access to all of their writings, thoughts, and lectures. I no longer need to take physics from tired, struggling grad student who doesn't speak English; I'll just take the definitive, greatest physics course ever given and listen/read/watch the Feynman lectures. It took all of the computing power in the world and dozens of the greatest minds ever developed to simulate nuclear reactions during the Manhattan Project. Now, if I want, I can solve the equations, create the simulations, all of it, in just a few afternoons. The commodity at the moment is time to cogitate on the vast information that we have, and the filters to sort through it.
An indication of this information overload is that it shouldn't actually take 30 years to climb to the top of the shoulders of giants--we just haven't yet created the filters and the access to the right information to allow education to be as quick and easy as it could be. Most subjects aren't difficult, if you find the person who understands it the best and can explain it the most clearly. Physics isn't confusing or counterintuitive when coming from Feynman. Asimov's books on neutrinos or chemistry are such brilliant little jewels of clarity that they should be in every classroom. I spent eight years in high school and college learning not very much--most of it was an exercise in frustration being taught poorly by people who didn't really understand what they were talking about; I could have saved years of effort just by reading Dawkins and Gould and Hitchens and watching and listening to every lecture they ever gave. The fact that I was a science major at a large midwestern university, and I don't think I had ever even heard of Richard Feynman until after college when I stumbled across an audio file of his on Napster sums up the lack of filters currently available in education.
A recent Astronomycast was discussing how the age of the astronomer spending long, cold nights in mountain observatories is likewise ending--today's researchers get the data remotely, and more and more from huge datasets already there to be analyzed. A couple of quick calculations show that we aren't too many years from just recording the entire sky and archiving it. Assuming a resolution of 0.001", a 2D 360° sky, and equations for circumference and surface area of a sphere, the sky can be considered a digital canvas of 50 billion pixels. With 24 bit color, and one scan per second, the entire sky produces about 10 petabytes a day in the visible, or about 4 exobytes a year. Sure, that's a hell of a lot of data, but Moore's Law says I'll be able to store one day's worth in 20 years, and a year's worth in 30ish. Humans do so poorly at intuiting exponential growth; Phil Plait mentioned something similar on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe this week: Recently some researchers suggested looking along the ecliptic for SETI-transmitting civilizations, reasoning that, since we can detect transiting planets, aliens that might similarly be able to detect us via transect may decide to transmit towards us. Dr. Plait's point was that, there is such a short technological window in which this is relevant, that there's not much chance that it would make a difference.
Finally, the worry about about human environmental destruction and climate change causing the extinction of thousands of species is not such a great worry, if humanity shows enough foresight to take a few precautions. If we can go just a few more years without managing to destroy all global biodiversity, the "extinction is forever" argument will no longer be valid: Genetic archives of all life--again a huge dataset, but one becoming managable--will allow the recreation of what we have lost, once we get control of our destructive practices. (Hopefully someone's got a preserved tissue sample from a baiji--a particularly poignant recent loss.) And it doesn't need to be physical archives of frozen cells such as the seed vault in Norway--all that is needed is the data. Venter-type metagenomics projects dedicated to cataloging biodiversity will allow recreation of desired species, de novo. Sure, it'll be complex, but it's an engineering problem, not a fundamental one.
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