Scientists speed up the speed of light?

[Kairos]

It's not science.

Science involves formulation of models which make risky and falsifiable predictions. Those predictions become hypotheses in experiments. Experiments are conducted, duplicated, and we look for any evidence the predictions are falsified.

This woo woo about multiple universes, strings, and other such nonsense is not real science. It makes no experimentally verifiable predictions. They engage in what is nothing more than very math-intensive metaphysics.

Fortunately, Europe still has a real physics community working on the latest particle physics and actually solving real scientific problems. Hope is not all lost.

But, in general, most of the sciences are compromised now. We are living in a kind of dark age.

 

[Treversal]

It's not science.

Science involves formulation of models which make risky and falsifiable predictions. Those predictions become hypotheses in experiments. Experiments are conducted, duplicated, and we look for any evidence the predictions are falsified.

This woo woo about multiple universes, strings, and other such nonsense is not real science. It makes no experimentally verifiable predictions. They engage in what is nothing more than very math-intensive metaphysics.

Fortunately, Europe still has a real physics community working on the latest particle physics and actually solving real scientific problems. Hope is not all lost.

But, in general, most of the sciences are compromised now. We are living in a kind of dark age.

It all depends on what you believe is important. I believe that AI should be the number one field of research.

Forbes:
At the research level, the United States remains highly invested in AI and other emerging technologies. The National Science Foundation (NSF) currently invests over $100 million each year in AI research. DARPA recently announced a $2 billion investment in an initiative called AI Next whose goal is advancing contextual and adaptive reasoning. Meanwhile, the US military has created a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) to oversee service and defense agency AI efforts.

 

[Kairos]

My feelings have nothing to do with it.

I have a masters degree in computer science. Before my service-connected disability caused me to drop out, I was in my last two years of a doctoral program for computer science (artificial intelligence, in particular: computational linguistics).

I am telling you, that woo woo is not real science. It has nothing to do with feelings, or priorities, or any of that nonsense. It's about what science actually is; and string theory et all is NOT science.

 

[Treversal]

My feelings have nothing to do with it.

I have a masters degree in computer science. Before my service-connected disability caused me to drop out, I was in my last two years of a doctoral program for computer science (artificial intelligence, in particular: computational linguistics).

I am telling you, that woo woo is not real science. It has nothing to do with feelings, or priorities, or any of that nonsense. It's about what science actually is; and string theory et all is NOT science.

I mentioned that AI was the goal and that America is spending a lot to get there. Just as Congressional Pork Projects will always exist, there will always be woo-woo science and I'm certain that the U.S. Government knows exactly what they are doing.

 

[Kairos]

Even in computer science the amount of bullshit that gets published is unbelievable.

Science is compromised, man. This is a dark age.

 

[Kairos]

It's not just science either. There's nothing I can say about the current state of American sciences that wasn't said about that bridge construction in Miami collapsing on innocent drivers below because the company wanted the project run by affirmative action hires.

There is a book by an intellectual named Peter Turchin called Secular Cycles. In it he describes the cyclical nature of western civilization, especially throughout the medieval period. The model breaks down in the 1600s, in my opinion, because that is where we broke out of the Malthusian Trap, and a new model is required to better describe our current position in this flaming dumpster fire we find ourselves in today.

Anyway, one of the hallmarks of the end of a secular expansion was a credentials explosion. In the medieval period, that happened in the form of increasing numbers of titles of nobility. Historians will see this huge explosion in pointless titles of nobility handed out to people in exchange for favors, money, etc. These were usually people coming out of the merchant families in the cities.

Then when the Malthusian Trap was reached, food yields no longer grew and you got a lot of destabilization. The next phase was the internecine conflict between all these nobles for dwindling productive land, resources, and power.

Our present situation is a little different because we are not currently affected by Malthusian concerns, at least in nations dominated by people of European or East Asian descent. But we still see the credentials explosion. It happens in the form of all these useless degrees. Instead of minting some clown as a baron without an actual barony who is in charge of some royal program that does nothing useful, we have the purple-haired gender studies graduate who gets hired at Google to fuck with everybody like some communist political officer. There is an explosion in degrees. College degrees mean very little now because of it.

The end result of that is that you have actually a ton of people in the sciences who do not belong there. It used to be that people of average intellect could go after low-hanging fruit problems and sort of cruise through the system. There aren't enough low-hanging fruit. So they are all trying to publish or die. The journals are trying to make a buck and they will publish just about anything these days.

It has a real effect on everything, not just the sciences. Consider the leap in technology between the RAZR and the iPhone. When is the last time you saw that kind of technological leap in the wireless market? Not since, in fact. But that leap was peanuts compared to the leap from expensive brick cell phones to the StarTacs, and the StarTac was just a refinement of the initial invention of wireless telephony.

It's all slowing down. We make progress in a few areas that mean very little, like entertainment and networking, but no real meaningful advances. The last huge invention was the Internet. Think about that.

We no longer can put people on the Moon. We lost the ability to do that. I could go on and on about the paucity of scientific and engineering advancement.

Anyway, that's my screed and I am sticking to it. I grow tired of the woo woo. Seriously. I will talk about ghosts and all sorts of crazy things, but science should be left alone. It's a touchy subject.

 

[Treversal]

It's not just science either. There's nothing I can say about the current state of American sciences that wasn't said about that bridge construction in Miami collapsing on innocent drivers below because the company wanted the project run by affirmative action hires.

There is a book by an intellectual named Peter Turchin called Secular Cycles. In it he describes the cyclical nature of western civilization, especially throughout the medieval period. The model breaks down in the 1600s, in my opinion, because that is where we broke out of the Malthusian Trap, and a new model is required to better describe our current position in this flaming dumpster fire we find ourselves in today.

Anyway, one of the hallmarks of the end of a secular expansion was a credentials explosion. In the medieval period, that happened in the form of increasing numbers of titles of nobility. Historians will see this huge explosion in pointless titles of nobility handed out to people in exchange for favors, money, etc. These were usually people coming out of the merchant families in the cities.

Then when the Malthusian Trap was reached, food yields no longer grew and you got a lot of destabilization. The next phase was the internecine conflict between all these nobles for dwindling productive land, resources, and power.

Our present situation is a little different because we are not currently affected by Malthusian concerns, at least in nations dominated by people of European or East Asian descent. But we still see the credentials explosion. It happens in the form of all these useless degrees. Instead of minting some clown as a baron without an actual barony who is in charge of some royal program that does nothing useful, we have the purple-haired gender studies graduate who gets hired at Google to fuck with everybody like some communist political officer. There is an explosion in degrees. College degrees mean very little now because of it.

The end result of that is that you have actually a ton of people in the sciences who do not belong there. It used to be that people of average intellect could go after low-hanging fruit problems and sort of cruise through the system. There aren't enough low-hanging fruit. So they are all trying to publish or die. The journals are trying to make a buck and they will publish just about anything these days.

It has a real effect on everything, not just the sciences. Consider the leap in technology between the RAZR and the iPhone. When is the last time you saw that kind of technological leap in the wireless market? Not since, in fact. But that leap was peanuts compared to the leap from expensive brick cell phones to the StarTacs, and the StarTac was just a refinement of the initial invention of wireless telephony.

It's all slowing down. We make progress in a few areas that mean very little, like entertainment and networking, but no real meaningful advances. The last huge invention was the Internet. Think about that.

We no longer can put people on the Moon. We lost the ability to do that. I could go on and on about the paucity of scientific and engineering advancement.

Anyway, that's my screed and I am sticking to it. I grow tired of the woo woo. Seriously. I will talk about ghosts and all sorts of crazy things, but science should be left alone. It's a touchy subject.

I think you gave the answer. Low hanging fruit. All of the easy work has already been done. Now it takes more and more people and resources to produce results. In fact you quoting, whether you know it or not, an article that I read recently. Aren't there always stalls in discovery? What changes were brought by the printing press? Computers? AI??? Look at Moore's Law. Every year it takes more minds and more resources to get the higher fruit. But I believe a new wave is coming. A renaissance, a revolution.

 

[Angelface239]

It's not possible to go faster than the speed of light if special relativity is even remotely close to correct. If you could travel faster than light, the universe would be a completely different place from what we understand, so all speculation is out. You might as well say the light you emit turns into unicorns dancing on rainbows at that point.

Maybe the words are confusing here. By travel, I mean travel at a velocity faster than the speed of light constant. Maybe it's possible to travel from one point in the universe to another point faster than light would take to travel that distance across space.

But in the context of this thread.. just no.

Okay.