
The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897) - anarbadalov
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-most-important-scientific-problems-have-yet-to-be-solved/
======
raymondrussell
Ramón Y Cajal was a contrarian when this was written, but he had great timing.
In the late 19th century, it was fairly popular to believe that all the laws
of physics had already been established—remaining progress would come from
improvements in experimental methods. There's a famous "physics is over" quote
misattributed to Lord Kelvin (actually said by Michelson, the guy who measured
the speed of light).

A few years after this was written, Planck proposed energy quanta. And in
1905, Einstein published his four Annus Mirabilis papers, introducing the
photoelectric effect (applying quantum), special relativity, and the mass-
energy relationship.

~~~
jhbadger
As typical with contrarians, Ramón y Cajal said some things that held up well
and others that didn't. In the same book "Advice for a Young Investigator"
that this excerpt is from he also gave his view of theorists: "Basically a
theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one because it is easier
to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon"!

~~~
cryptonector
How is that wrong? Clearly anyone who says that is being somewhat facetious /
comedic.

~~~
jonny_eh
> Basically a theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one

Tell that to Einstein.

~~~
behringer
Didn't we recently confirm gravitational waves by checking out a couple
interacting black holes, originally theorized by Einstein 100 years ago? I
think even Einstein would agree that it was much harder to discover it than to
theorize it.

~~~
bobajeff
There have also been serious doubts over that discovery:

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032022-600-exclusiv...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032022-600-exclusive-
grave-doubts-over-ligos-discovery-of-gravitational-waves/amp/)

~~~
nabnob
So their method for finding the signal was to calculate the signal, then
subtract it from the data and see if the residual noise looks like noise...how
is that good science? It seems like it would be too easy to make your data fit
the theory.

------
sadmann1
I do wonder if every generation picks slightly higher hanging fruits in
science will there come a time when a single human lifetime won't be enough to
digest even the most specialised domain of science in order to build upon it

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
Right now, science has an emphasis on causal discovery. Showing that X is a
mechanism by which Y happens. That includes finding the different X's for a Y
and finding evidence for the relationship between a given X and Y. Once you
know _how_ a thing works, that doesn't necessarily make it easy to work with
it. For example in quantum mechanics, a common phrase is "shut up and
calculate" because the mental models are all messy.

But as we all know (especially those of us who have refactored many systems),
every once in a while you find a new way of looking at a thing that makes it
all much simpler. A geometric way to look at an algebraic thing, or vice
versa. Or a unifying structure to combine disparate pieces. Or just a "wow
that was dumb" undoing of unnecessary complexity. It makes further progress
easier.

I could imagine that, as the boundaries of science get more complex, there
will be more scientists working on making the rest of it less complex.
Meanwhile, maybe we get smarter and live longer. The calculations involved
with many areas of modern science have already outpaced what we can do by
hand, but we invented computers, so I can take the mean of a zillion numbers
without much effort and spend my time elsewhere.

And in med school, apparently they say "half of what we teach you will be
false, but we don't know which half." As science progresses, you don't just
add, you prune too.

~~~
bordercases
> Meanwhile, maybe we get smarter and live longer. The calculations involved
> with many areas of modern science have already outpaced what we can do by
> hand, but we invented computers, so I can take the mean of a zillion numbers
> without much effort and spend my time elsewhere.

With software being as slow as it is despite massive speedups, and even
_despite_ despite massive speedups, we really are still not good enough at
using our computers to their fullest capacity which still means getting
insights into complexity before crunching the numbers.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
Computation is not slow.

Operating systems might be slow. Applications might be slow. SaaS might be
slow.

But computation is not slow, and if you care about speed, you do computation
in a context where the aforementioned issues are not issues.

~~~
bordercases
Negate the operating environments that calculations are made in and the
operating environments are not an issue, alright.

There definitely is a lot of bloat in the software world, but even large
bioninformatics organizations have their own data-pipeline management teams to
keep these issues in spec.

------
lordnacho
Well written. One thing that I keep thinking is that even if you know the law,
there's still a lot of applications where its use is unobvious.

For instance, you might be satisfied you know how a pendulum works. Now put
another pendulum on it.

Or you think you understand gravity, because you got taught the inverse square
law. And you then get Kepler's laws. But then with three bodies, things get
really hairy.

Or you understand statics and materials. But how do we shove that into finite
elements? Not an obvious thing, and required some real investigation.

There's also completely new ways of seeing things. Who would come up with
information theory? Doesn't seem like something that would obviously be found,
despite not really requiring any physical experiment.

And then there's things like algorithm research that turn out to be really big
once there's a bit of computational power on the horizon. (Probably people
think about the algo before they can try it on a machine.)

------
breck
Impressive how timeless this is.

I would say the great problem of science right now is integrating all of the
knowledge there is.

It's time scientists stopped publishing dumb weakly connected PDFs, and start
switching to a GitHub like pull request model.

We could build a single strongly typed peer-reviewed repo of all of the
world's scientific information, complete with definitions, experiment
protocols and data, and make it universally downloadable and usable by all.

~~~
hyperbovine
Ah yes, the old everything-is-broken-and-software-engineering-has-all-the-
answers trope.

~~~
ibeckermayer
Who claimed software engineering has all the answers? OP is proposing a tool
that could be used to help integrate scientific knowledge better than the
disintegrated system of PDF’s that exists, what’s wrong with that?

------
luhn
(1897)

An excerpt from _Advice for a Young Investigator_.
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/437689.Advice_for_a_Youn...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/437689.Advice_for_a_Young_Investigator)

------
scottlocklin
One of the great Spanish thinkers, criminally underrated in Anglo countries.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal)

~~~
enriquto
I'd rather say he's criminally underrated in Spain.

It is definitely easier to hear casually about Ramon y Cajal in "anglo
countries" than in Spain. For example, I have spent my childhood in the
spanish state, and I first heard about Ramon y Cajal during the first
conference that I attended, in Switzerland, from a lovely presentation by an
English professor.

One of the dramatically few spanish first-rate scientists, and he's not a
household name. Very, very sad state of affairs.

~~~
yiyus
I do not know what you are talking about. We study Ramón y Cajal in school,
the most important grants in Spain are named after him, there is a Ramon y
Cajal square or street in every city... Even the most ignorant Spaniard knows
him and will tell you that he is our most respected scientist from all time.

Science, in general, is criminally underrated in Spain, but Ramón y Cajal is
literally the household name.

------
commandlinefan
Well I definitely didn't expect to see this at the end:

 _Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 – 1934)_

But I believe he's probably still right in 2020.

------
anarbadalov
Just a quick note to the moderators: thanks for adding (1897) to the title and
clearing up the confusion that i caused! i assumed Ramon y Cajal was more of a
household name.

------
AmericanChopper
> It is nevertheless true that if we arrived on the scene too late for certain
> problems, we were also born too early to help solve others.

I think this could be used to describe almost any point in history though. The
greatest discoveries in science have always required massive breakthroughs in
thinking, that typically defy conventional intuition. Perhaps there are some
rare moments in time following a major discovery where the fruitful areas of
inquiry seem obvious. But “I don’t even know where to start looking for the
next major scientific discovery” or “this hypothesis might be wrong and we
could potentially spend the rest of time investigating it” seems to be the
default state of trying to make major breakthroughs in science.

------
grabbalacious
What a contrast with Albert A. Michelson, speaking in 1894:

> _most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and
> that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application
> of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is
> here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where
> quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent
> physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be
> looked for in the sixth place of decimals_.

------
yters
Most of reality is inexplicable according to modern science. So, there are
probably vast quantities of discoveries to still be made.

------
tom-thistime
The author of this essay died in 1934.

~~~
Animats
Right. _" Who, a few short years ago, would have suspected that light and heat
still held scientific secrets in reserve? Nevertheless, we now have argon in
the atmosphere, the x-rays of Roentgen, and the radium of the Curies, all of
which illustrate the inadequacy of our former methods, and the prematurity of
our former syntheses."_ That had to be from the early 20th century.

The problems today are either in areas where complexity is the limiting
factor, like biology, or beyond current experimental reach, like string theory
and dark matter. The complexity problem can probably be overcome with computer
assistance. Experimental reach is harder.

------
webdva
Very inspiring rhetoric. Should encourage any curious soul that seeks to
expand the knowledge base.

------
rygh
May be it's yet to be discovered

------
bingeworthy
Agreed. Thanks, dude.

------
nxpnsv
Well, if they were solved, then they would not be regarded as problems...

------
LastZactionHero
This is a great rebuttal to about 90% of HN comments.

------
deith
Ramón and Cajal, two great thinkers.

~~~
gfiorav
If this was a joke, it's a pretty good one

~~~
deith
It's probably one of the most widely known jokes in Spain.

------
mtnGoat
Why come up with new ideas and solve hard problems when you can just be the
User for X and become a unicorn based no nothing but smoke, mirrors and clever
accounting like WeWork?

~~~
dang
" _Eschew flamebait. Don 't introduce flamewar topics unless you have
something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
tangents._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
mtnGoat
strange how this is selectively enforced around here. :x

~~~
dang
It always feels that the mods are against you. The other side feels the same
way.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22always%20feels%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

It's true that moderation isn't consistent, but that's not because it's
selective in the way you imply. Rather, it's because we can't come close to
reading everything, and can't moderate what we don't see. If you notice a post
that breaks the site guidelines and hasn't been moderated, the likeliest
explanation is that we haven't seen it yet.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20likeliest&sort=byDate&type=comment)

------
carapace
ORT (Only Read Title) but uh...

WTF is gravity? Why is gravitational mass and intertial mass identical (in all
known situations)?

Do we orbit the Sun or the image of the Sun? In other words, what's the
_speed_ of gravity?

 _Can we control gravity?_

\- - - -

What is subjectivity?

Why is "it" always _now?_

"You" and "now" are synonyms, why?

\- - - -

WTF is up w/ the structure and dynamics of the Solar System? ( 97.77° axial
tilt!? Go home Uranus you're drunk!)

\- - - -

QM and Relativity, chocolate and peanut butter?

Or the Universe is messing with us and actually _is_ describable by multiple
_irreconcilable_ models?

~~~
earenndil
> WTF is gravity?

That's metaphysics, not science.

> Do we orbit the Sun or the image of the Sun? In other words, what's the
> speed of gravity?

The image. Speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light.

