What is wrong with science today?

[nec209]

That is not my overall impression, of theoretical and mathematical physics at least. I see far more biology and medical jobs advertised. Even a lot of those I see listed under mathematics and computing are really biology/medical jobs.

 

May be the media has clouded my perception has physics and theoretical physics seem get on shows like TLC ,discovery the news so on .

 

Every one knows of Nikola Tesla ,Stephen Hawking .Bamin Franklin,Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison ,Alessandro Volta,Guglielmo Marconi ,Alexander Graham Bell,Isaac Newton,Leonardo da Vinci ,Galileo and Albert Einstein.

 

And today the media all talk on Albert Einstein,Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku !!

 

And I most say Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla where more advance for the time they where in almost if they where time travels!!.

 

All the above great minds of science and inventors where are the biology/medical great minds that have just a impact like the above .

Edited November 15, 2010 by nec209

[CharonY]

I concur. Biology and medicine are often a lot easier to justify under the "what good is that?" heading.

 

Though I have to add that bio is in decline, whereas biomed is taken over by medical sciences, biochemistry, engineering, bioinformatics and, yes, biophysics (though the latter is rather small addition). To me it appears that classical biology and genetics is in a rapid decline. More engineers are funded for the assessment of health effects of pollutants, for instance, than biologists.

The reason is the same, though. Understanding biological principles does not quickly lead to applications (something that the NIH is strongly interested in).

Edited November 15, 2010 by CharonY

[swansont]

All the above great minds of science and inventors where are the biology/medical great minds that have just a impact like the above .

 

Da Vinci. Darwin. Walker. Cuvier. Mendel. Crick and Watson. Haldane. EO Wilson. Eldredge and Gould.

 

For medicine there's Salk, Christiaan Barnard, Lister.

 

The problem with pharmaceutical discoveries is that there is probably a large team of people involved.

[nec209]

Yap probably there are great minds but the media does not talk about it like the great minds of science and inventors .Give news ,media or TV shows a choice on biology/medical or mega world,theoretical physics or inventions you know what will make air time.

 

 

Just look at the shows on TLC,discovery, discovery science so on.

 

 

Also I think what the problem is with medine is there is massive about of information out there how the human body works but very little understanding on the healing, cause and effect and aging.Put it this way doctors know how you body works very well and can diagnose the problem.But know very little on the aging and healing process.Has for cause and effect on diseases and illnesses this still in its infancy.

 

When science get information on this than we probably be closer to star trek medine and most all diseases and illnesses will have cure.It kinda hard to come up with cure when you don't fully understand the healing, cause and effect and aging.

 

And despite all medical books on cells and stem cells they are not even scratching the surface. On the news on how they got skin cells to turn into blood cells and just on the news yesterday turning fat cells into heart cells. With all this happing well time to rewrite the medical books

 

Not to say of some small cases now and than on TLC,discovery, discovery science of a person cannot walk ,use his had or feet and over time the body repairs the damage or makes no pathways.

 

I'm not bashing medical science but my view is medicine and rocket science is billions of light years away of star trek level.But all other science well is showing much more progress towards star trek level.

 

May be in 50 or 100 years they will fully understand aging and healing process.May be in 100 or 150 years organs grown in labs or artificial organs will be the norm.May be in 150 or 200 years 80% of all cancer types will have cure along with diabetes.

 

Has for rocket science it looks very bad well medical science much more progress .

 

Also when computers more powerful where virtual reality can be used medical science will take off like lighting speed.

[Pangloss]

I've been thinking for a while now that it might be beneficial if Computer Science and Information Technology were to embrace the field of Statistics at a more fundamental level. Currently CS/IT programs tend to treat statistics as a necessary evil. But not only is it important for our own field, but pushing the science forward benefits researchers in other fields too. Especially in the modern world of exabyte-scale "data observatories".

[nec209]

I've been thinking for a while now that it might be beneficial if Computer Science and Information Technology were to embrace the field of Statistics at a more fundamental level. Currently CS/IT programs tend to treat statistics as a necessary evil. But not only is it important for our own field, but pushing the science forward benefits researchers in other fields too. Especially in the modern world of exabyte-scale "data observatories".

 

 

When computers get faster and better than virtual reality will go from scfi to reality.

[nec209]

Okay this makes me so bad today.

 

I think the media has all turn into little grade 7 kids that know nothing of science.

 

1.That look at US space program most people think we can live on the moon or mars this is just a joke.

2.Most people think we can do space mining or space colony again what a joke

3.Most people think we can go to mars in 5 or 10 years from now again what a joke

4.Most people think we can have moon base or base on mars in 10 to 15 years again what a joke

 

Now that look at other science .

 

1.Most cancers out there there is cure what a joke !!!!

2.Most autoimmune diseases we can treat the problem again what a joke

3.Most trips to ER we can treat or cure it what a joke .

 

It is more 1 in 3 in ER we can treat or cure .

 

What is wrong with people today and the media.

Edited March 11, 2011 by nec209

[JohnB]

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned "Publish or Perish".

 

If a gov has been pouring money into a "Cancer Research" centre, then that centre had better be producing some sort of results or the money will dry up. If you can't find a cure, then a new treatment will do as a substitute. If you can't work out a new treatment, then a report "linking" something, anything to cancer will still get a pass mark. If you can't show some progress somewhere, the money ends.

 

Govs think that "long term" funding is about 4 years, in reality they generally don't think past the next budget and will always have an eye on the next election. Some areas of research are not compatible with this timeframe.

[CharonY]

Thing is, money is going to dry up regardless. Publications may put one on track to get the next grant, however, there are other factors that (especially for the big initiatives) are more likely to succeed.

Publish or perish is more relevant to pre-tenured faculty.

[nec209]

a gov has been pouring money into a "Cancer Research" centre, then that centre had better be producing some sort of results or the money will dry up. If you can't find a cure, then a new treatment will do as a substitute. If you can't work out a new treatment, then a report "linking" something, anything to cancer will still get a pass mark. If you can't show some progress somewhere, the money ends.

 

 

I'm sorry what do you mean? Are you saying the money going to cancer treatment is fake ? saying little to no Medical community progress in cancer treatment in the past 10 to 15 years?

Edited April 6, 2011 by nec209

[JohnB]

Sorry if I gave that impression nec, it wasn't what I meant at all.

 

I was thinking more of the pressure applied to researchers. Serious basic research can take many years or decades because they're flying blind. You might think a method will work and it takes 2 years to find out it actually won't. Basic research should be funded by the decade due to this problem. However funding is political and runs on a much shorter time span. In the minds of many, finding 15 ways not to solve the problem doesn't count as progress and funding would be cut. This puts pressure on the researcher to find something, anything that can count as "progress" in the eyes of detractors. This is a distraction that wastes time, energy and money.

 

Put it in the context of Edison and the light bulb. After 2,000 tries he hit on the right combination and later said "I didn't fail 2,000 times. I found 2,000 ways not to make a light bulb." Let's say that you could design and test 100 designs per year and your funding for the "Light bulb" project was on a 5 year basis. After 5 years you are going to ask for more funding and your progress is that you've found "500 ways not to make a light bulb". After 10 years you've found "1,000 ways not to make a light bulb". Do you really think the third round of funding is going to arrive? Really?

 

The pressure would be on to find anything that you could use as "progress" to prevent the funding drying up. What political powers often fail to understand is that negative results can be as important as positive ones because it saves other people from wasting their time on fruitless lines of research.

 

It's not that we haven't made any progress in (for example) cancer research, it's that we would have made much more progress if the researchers weren't constantly being asked to justify their existence to satisfy political masters.

[Marat]

The problem with the massive stagnation in clinical medicine over the last thirty to sixty years can best be pictured in terms of a jammed funnel. On the feeder side of the funnel there is a huge build-up of basic science data about the physiology of cancer cells, the pathology of vascular beds in diabetes, and the toxic effects of middle molecules in uremia, but then there is an extreme narrowing of the funnel which should channel all that basic science information into material for progress in clinical medicine. As a result you have a massive back-up with encyclopedias full of data on the biochemistry of lung cancer on one side and no change in the dismal cure rates for lung cancer over the last decade on the other.

 

Perhaps science needs some creative superficiality rather than more basic science? When Copernicus developed the foundation of modern astronomy, the basic physics required to account for his picture of the solar system did not yet exist, and it wouldn't be developed until the work of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton ending two centuries later. When Newton adopted gravitational action-at-a-distance to account for the observed motions of the planets in his astronomy, there was no basic phyics to explain how action-at-a-distance was anything other than magical, because ever since Descartes the only acceptable explanatory model was particles in motion. When aspirin first began curing fevers in 1879 (and before that, its plant source had been used as a drug since the Middle Ages) there was no basic science to explain how it worked, and the full account was not worked out until the 1970s.

 

What we see in all these cases is scientific progress being achieved by a brilliant connection, by the discovery of a pattern, operating purely over the surface of things, but with absolutely no idea of the basic science to support it. Perhaps our basic science orientation, with its dull, crabbed, compulsive assembling of more and more data about underlying causes and mechanisms, is in some ways counter-productive.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I'm not sure how you can quote a few exceptional discoveries and claim their method is more successful than the method that has led to the vast majority of other scientific discoveries.

 

Your example is also faulty, as there have been a number of interesting discoveries in the past few years, precipitating decreased mortality rates.

[Marat]

I think all the decreased mortality rates in cancer are artifacts of improved diagnostics allowing an earlier identification of the development of cancers, which then makes it seem as though there is now a longer survival time because of progress in treatment, even though the period between initial development to death is constant.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

And your evidence is?

 

There have been numerous advances in cancer treatment in the past decade or two. Targeted therapy, for example, only became feasible in the late 90s, and it's now shown advances with numerous cancer types.

 

Regardless, my point still stands; you are quoting a few exceptional cases as the model the rest of science should follow, despite its successes in many other cases.

[Ophiolite]

1.That look at US space program most people think we can live on the moon or mars this is just a joke.

2.Most people think we can do space mining or space colony again what a joke

3.Most people think we can go to mars in 5 or 10 years from now again what a joke

4.Most people think we can have moon base or base on mars in 10 to 15 years again what a joke

What is your evidence for saying that most people have these beliefs. I think you may be guilty of committing the same errors that the media makes when reporting scientific studies: you are generalising and misinterpreting from inadequate or poorly understood information.

 

As to the claims themselves, what makes you think we could not live on the Moon or Mars?

Why do you think space mining is a joke?

When you suggest a trip to Mars is not possible in ten years, do you mean politically and economically impossible, or technically impossible? the same question for the Moon base or Mars base?

 

I don't think these questions are off topic, but address your OP. You seem to be forming your opinions based upon a minimum of information of questionable reliability. That would explain why you have little confidence in science: you are not being directly exposed to any.

[nec209]

What is your evidence for saying that most people have these beliefs. I think you may be guilty of committing the same errors that the media makes when reporting scientific studies: you are generalising and misinterpreting from inadequate or poorly understood information.

 

As to the claims themselves, what makes you think we could not live on the Moon or Mars?

Why do you think space mining is a joke?

When you suggest a trip to Mars is not possible in ten years, do you mean politically and economically impossible, or technically impossible? the same question for the Moon base or Mars base?

 

I don't think these questions are off topic, but address your OP. You seem to be forming your opinions based upon a minimum of information of questionable reliability. That would explain why you have little confidence in science: you are not being directly exposed to any.

 

There is a difference can we go to moon or Mars in 10 to 15 years or do we have the money.Has of now the space program is dead.

 

Has for space mining or space colony that is scfi to the cost of going in space goes down alot and I mean alot.

 

 

 

And no one knows how to bring the space cost down not even on paper in theoretical science class.The only theoretical theorings floating around is space elevator ,laser propulsion ,fission or fusion.

Edited May 2, 2011 by nec209

[Ophiolite]

If you are going to move the goalposts each time I point out the logical inconsistencies of your posts we shall have a very short dialogue.

[nec209]

If you are going to move the goalposts each time I point out the logical inconsistencies of your posts we shall have a very short dialogue.

 

Can you elaborate on this.

 

 

What I'm posting that is bad.

 

 

Also read this thread why no cure for cancer than post back. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/51782-cure-for-cancer/page__st__20

Edited May 20, 2011 by nec209

[Ophiolite]

Can you elaborate on this.

Certainly.

 

You made four statements. I challenged those four statements. You responded with statements that were not relevant to the truth or falsehood of your original statements.

There is a difference can we go to moon or Mars in 10 to 15 years or do we have the money.Has of now the space program is dead

.

 

I'm having a hard time working through the flawed grammar of that to determine what you mean, but I'm reasonably sure it is not relevant at this point.

 

You seem to have clarified one of your positions: our inability to reach the moon or Mars in ten years is an economic one and therfore ultimately a political one. So your disbelief is based upon a presumption that the political situation will remain unchanged. A remark by a former Prime Minister, popular in the UK with media and politicians alike, is "A week is a long time in politics."

 

If we can finish the discussion of your original statments first, I will then entertain further discussion of your new points.

[Marat]

To an extent, the money and the science issues merge, since if the science were more advanced then trips to Mars would cost less and we might actually be going there. In the 1960s there was a cartoon called '1999' which showed people travelling around the universe, each in his own spaceship, and this must have seemed reasonable at least to some people at the time.

 

The OP seems to be asking why scientific advance hasn't kept pace with public expectations, which didn't seem unreasonable when they were first formed. I know at least that the stagnation of medical science has been widely recognized and discussed for at least the last five years. The lead editorial in the journal, 'Diabetes Care,' in 1990 expressed its astonishment that diabetes care hadn't been significantly improved or the disease even cured by then, and here we are now nearly a generation later and still no cure is in sight, with next to no clinical improvement achieved either since 1990.

 

Ironically, I wonder whether we have paid a very high price, yet without noticing it, for all the advances made in information technology over the last 40 years. True, we have become much better at filing, sifting, searching, and arranging information, but has this cost us a huge diversion of scientific effort into organizing information rather than generating new discoveries? Historical eras in science seldom perceive their stagnation until after they have gotten past it, so I wonder if we are deeper into a phase of substantive stagnation in science than we recognize? The last major disease to be conquered in medicine was polio nearly 60 years ago; the great expansion of physics was over by the end of the 1930s; the foundational mathematics leading to the development of the computer was finished by the mid-1950s, etc. A person born in 1870 and living until 1950 would have seen the invention of the typewriter, telephone, television, radio, car, airplane, jet, x-rays, refrigeration, atomic power; the development of dialysis for renal disease, insulin for diabetes, the successful treatment for diptheria, tuberculosis, adrenal insufficiency, thyroid insufficiency. But a person born in 1930 and living until 2010, the same lifespan, would hardly have seen comparably dramatic changes. What's happening to us? Shouldn't we have been able to build on the progress up to 1930 and continue to develop at an even faster rate? Instead the curve of scientific progress seems to be flattening out dramatically.

[nec209]

To an extent, the money and the science issues merge, since if the science were more advanced then trips to Mars would cost less and we might actually be going there. In the 1960s there was a cartoon called '1999' which showed people travelling around the universe, each in his own spaceship, and this must have seemed reasonable at least to some people at the time.

 

 

 

The 60's and 70's and little in 80'a was years of space race.The money going into NASA and DOD was unreal the late 80's was year of cut backs and now the space program is dead.

 

The people perception of having moon base by 1990 and by 2002 having mars base and by 2015 people living on mars and small star trek enterprise by 2020 and big star trek enterprise by 2050 is on a linear growth in space technology.

 

But unlike computers and electrons that are linear growth the space technology is not.The rocket propulsion system does not allow it it is fixed technology.The space capsule smaller than you room with 3 people to go to moon on rocket bigger than high rise apartment is dead through way has not change.Meaning it takes big apartment just to take up 3 people in small space capsule smaller than you room .

 

Where people perception is going to mars in big 20 story apartment and the engine room no bigger than the basement of apartment and no through away of any thing.

 

In the real world chemical rockets does not work this way and not some thing that is going get more fuel efficient where we can take up more and more payload and less and less rocket just to take up the payload .

 

The moon trip by 2015 or 2020 before it got cut was by critics was called apollo on steroids do to not much inprovement in rockets and mostly the interior design and electrons that shine.

 

The rockets of 2011 or rocket of 1959 is not that much better.And chemical rockets is not some thing that will get more fuel efficient where we can take up more and more payload and less and less rocket .

 

Ion or plasma rocket can only be used in space and cannot be used to take up payload same with space sail.The fusion rocket or antimatter rocket is beyond today's level of technology if it even works .And space elevator and laser propulsion is still 50 or 100 years out before we can test it see if it work or not.And with energy so costly the laser propulsion may not be that much better than chemical rockets.

 

 

I thing in order for scfi to be real like what you see in movies you need ion lifters or anti gravity or levitation or magnetic monopoles or other exotic space propulsion system to make what you see in movies or what UFO can do real or if none the above is real or work than what see in movies and scfi will always be scfi and UFO will always be a spirit and not a alien .

 

Has chemical rockets ,Ion rocket,plasma rocket ,fission or fusion rockets do not do this .