> Richard Rhodes spends a lot of time in his “making of the atomic bomb” to figure out if the original inspiration for the atom bomb might have come from HG Wells.
Nonsense. Szilard thought chain reactions were possible and worked years to prove this is the case. The bomb was an immediate and obvious consequence.
Science fiction writers don't push physics or science forward. Physics and science push science fiction forward. As we discover more, what we can imagine also grows.
> Like a bunch of science fiction writers could think of something called “warp drive” and it took decades for some dude in Mexico to imagine a theoretical potential method to do this?
People 5,000 years go could imagine flying. But that doesn't help you with flying at all. Just because someone wrote a cute story about how nice it would be to fly, doesn't mean you're any closer to doing it.
More broadly, I don't buy for a second that science fiction doesn't feed back into the minds of scientists and engineers working on the next big thing. It would be strange if it didn't, and I think the burden of proof is on you to show that scientists and engineers are universally exercising the sort of perfect mental hygiene it would take to isolate themselves from the baseless speculations of writers.
> More broadly, I don't buy for a second that science fiction doesn't feed back into the minds of scientists and engineers working on the next big thing. It would be strange if it didn't, and I think the burden of proof is on you to show that scientists and engineers are universally exercising the sort of perfect mental hygiene it would take to isolate themselves from the baseless speculations of writers.
You don't need to isolate yourself. The baseless speculations of writers just don't help in doing science. If you pick any discovery, you'll see that it was a consequence of a lot of work and intuition about a particular area of math, physics, engineering, or biology. Scientists aren't waiting for the next Star Trek episode hoping to find some ideas. The reason is simple: the ideas in science fiction don't work. Almost always what we get is totally different from what was predicted and usually more amazing, and it's shaped by the math/physics/engineering/biology that led us there, not b some outcome we want to match in science fiction. It's just a cognitive bias that you remember good SF predictions and forget bad ones.
This whole Wells atomic bomb business is a prime example. Szilard couldn't possibly get any ideas from Wells. Because Szilard's actual contribution has nothing to do with what Wells wrote. He discovered chain reactions. And how he did so is well documented, by analogy to chemical chain reactions. Literally nothing in Wells would ever help you discover nuclear chain reactions. Nor is it obvious that what Wells wrote requires chain reactions, you can think of other fanciful mechanisms.
As a working physicist I would agree with you for the most part. Science fiction doesn't help because it doesn't contain ideas, which work beyond a surface plausibility level. However you can still get inspired by them in indirect ways. I find Paul Feyerabend's work interesting in that regard. In "Against Method" he argues that most breakthrough scientific discoveries can't be cleanly attributed to the scientific method.
I literally posted a link to what appears to be a letter written by Szilard himself (please correct me if I'm wrong), directly citing Wells' story as inspiration in an account of his own relationship with the genesis of the atomic bomb.
I can't help but notice that you seem to have completely ignored it in the construction of your response. Perhaps you didn't read my comment very thoroughly.
I read it. You should read it carefully too. He says he read a book. He never says it was an inspiration.
Just because I do AI research and tell someone I watched Star Trek, does that mean I'm saying that my latest NeurIPS paper is inspired by Star Trek? No way.
The suggestion that he'd mention it in the very first sentence of an account of how he arrived at the idea for the atomic bomb, when in fact it was totally irrelevant at the time, is absurd on its face; and your analogy is terrible. A better analogy might be somebody asking you how you developed your "latest NeurIPS paper" and you responding by describing a Star Trek episode in which a (superficially) similar technology is used, before even mentioning your own work. And later, perhaps, recounting how you exclaimed Star Trek, here we come! when you had your key insight.
You've overextended your argument, and you know it. There is no use continuing this conversation if you're going to go to such absurd lengths to deny what's obvious.
Like robots, flying cars, space stations, tablets, electric cars, AI...?
Sci-fi lets us set impossible looking goals, until somebody comes up with something similar and practical. I'd give sci-fi more credit for shaping our current world. Writers dream, science builds which I think is a beautiful symbiosis.
Szilard knew Wells very closely and definitely read Wells work which talks about atom bombs dictating the world order in the fifties. He says himself that it didn’t exactly seed the thought but I find that hard to believe personally. This doesn’t take anything away from him, if that’s somehow offending you.
The correct analogy is about how long you go from someone imagining a flying machine where the wings don’t move to an actual plane. They called it “warp drive” for heavens sake.
Also comparing the lack of progress today to the lack of progress in medieval times is not the flex you think it is.
> The correct analogy is about how long you go from someone imagining a flying machine where the wings don’t move to an actual plane. They called it “warp drive” for heavens sake.
No way. The idea that your wings don't have to move wasn't new, it's ancient. People were building paper planes thousands of years ago. If all it took to fly is to not move your wings, people would have been flying around thousands of years ago.
Making a flying machine takes far more than that. You need to understand the lift equation, how airfoils work, how and why you can and can't control wings and attitude, etc. The Wright brothers didn't strap wings to a bicycle, they spent years working on the physics and engineering of flight, including building wind tunnels.
From the outside, at a high level, without understanding the physics or engineering of these systems, it's easy to say "Oh, it's just X". Like looking at the solution to a chess problem and saying "Of course, I would have seen that". You wouldn't have. As evidenced by the fact that no one did. For millenia.
> Also comparing the lack of progress today to the lack of progress in medieval times is not the flex you think it is.
I never said there's a lack of progress today. Scientific progress is amazing today, far faster today than at any point in history.
>Scientific progress is amazing today, far faster today than at any point in history
What're you basing this on/how're you defining the growth rate here? Not rhetorical, would be interested to see your data since it seems quite a common argument to hold that it's slowing in lots of areas
> What're you basing this on/how're you defining the growth rate here? Not rhetorical, would be interested to see your data since it seems quite a common argument to hold that it's slowing in lots of areas
One kind of metric to look at are published papers, patents filed, money invested into science, total citations. All of them are increasing a lot. But these are terrible and unconvincing, you could see the numbers go up if we were spinning our wheels.
The value of science and engineering should really be measured in terms of how much easier they make our lives. If you look at that, it's hard to find a metric that doesn't show that scientific progress is healthy and increasing. Moore's law is still going. The cost of solar per Watt is down like 100x in 30 years. The cost of batteries is down 50x in 30 years. The cost of sequencing a genome is down 10,000x in 20 years. Productivity per worker doubled in 30 years. 30 years ago digital cameras were super low resolution, now they're amazing. 20 years ago computer vision could barely detect a person walking in front of car, it was state of the art research; it's now so reliable the new infrastructure bill makes it mandatory for new cars.
I picked examples from all sorts of areas of the economy and human life for a reason: none of these are down to one discovery. They required countless advances from material science, to basic physics, even the mathematics, engineering, etc.
Everything is far cheaper to make today and people are far more productive compared to 30 years ago, and it's just incomparable compared to 60 years ago.
But I get it. It doesn't feel that way. That's not a science problem. That's a politics problem. The gains from all of these improvements at a societal level are mostly going to the ultra-rich sadly, because people vote against their own best interests routinely.
You're confusing engineering and technology with fundamental research.
Digital cameras and batteries aren't in the same league as game changing concepts like quantum theory and relativity.
Game changers don't just mean you can make stuff cheaper, they mean you can imagine completely new kinds of stuff that were literally unthinkable before the game changed.
Before you can improve batteries you have to invent the concept of a battery. Which means having some basic understanding of electricity. Before you can improve computer vision you have to invent the concept of a computer. Which requires inventing a theory of computability.
And so on.
The point is there really hasn't been a lot happening at the game changer level for a long time now. Refinement is fine, but it's unwise to confuse it with fundamentals.
> You're confusing engineering and technology with fundamental research.
This pretty much gives away that you aren't a scientist. The vast majority of fundamental research opens up new ground in highly specialized areas. It slowly trickles out as improvements that you don't seem like "game changing concepts" but they required game changing concepts at a low level to get things done. That's scientific progress and that's the game changer.
> Game changers don't just mean you can make stuff cheaper, they mean you can imagine completely new kinds of stuff that were literally unthinkable before the game changed.
And I don't think you've ever dealt with transitioning science from the lab to industry. The game changer is the cost and availability. There are plenty of amazing things that don't matter in real life because they aren't practical. They aren't game changers.
> Before you can improve batteries you have to invent the concept of a battery. Which means having some basic understanding of electricity. Before you can improve computer vision you have to invent the concept of a computer. Which requires inventing a theory of computability.
You definitely don't need computability to invent a computer. And you've got the discovery of the battery exactly backward. First Volta made a battery by trying to replace frog parts with paper and brine. Then we could go back and understand electricity; that was Volta's real lasting contribution. Before we had batteries electricity wasn't understood at all.
> The point is there really hasn't been a lot happening at the game changer level for a long time now. Refinement is fine, but it's unwise to confuse it with fundamentals.
This is nonsense. Who are you to decide what is or isn't fundamental? Why are scientists and engineers supposed to bow to your aesthetic sense?
No. All that matters is results. And the result is, 3x productivity increase in 50 years. And all of those other things I showed you, hundreds of x improvements in all sorts of practical engineering areas that make daily life far better. What matters are all of the incremental gains because they enable technological revolutions.
Nonsense. Szilard thought chain reactions were possible and worked years to prove this is the case. The bomb was an immediate and obvious consequence.
Science fiction writers don't push physics or science forward. Physics and science push science fiction forward. As we discover more, what we can imagine also grows.
> Like a bunch of science fiction writers could think of something called “warp drive” and it took decades for some dude in Mexico to imagine a theoretical potential method to do this?
People 5,000 years go could imagine flying. But that doesn't help you with flying at all. Just because someone wrote a cute story about how nice it would be to fly, doesn't mean you're any closer to doing it.