No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
One of the Wright brothers said that. It’s actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we’re wrong about.
No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
googles
Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:
Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909
No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.
See? I was wrong.
HUMANS
Thank goodness computers are never wrong. :-P
Hey, they always do exactly as they’re told!
Hrm, in that case, now I wonder how they are ever correct!?:-P
As a Software Engineer, I ask myself that question several times per day.
Bc chips are as dumb as rocks, but really really really good at repetition:-).
Easy, think about who decides whether or not they’re correct.
Again, humans.
For now… except managers don’t want to actually think, yet do want to be in control of even the tiniest aspects of every single fucking thing (see e.g. Boeing planes literally falling out of the sky, against the wishes of the engineers bc the managers figured that this way of skipping maintenance and then covering that truth from federal safety commissioners was “better”… for the sake of their profits ofc), so how soon until their unthinking need to “feel like” they are in control leads them to using computers to control the people, without even those humans who hold the admin rights ever making any conscious decisions?
I suspect that a thinking computer may be correct far more often than an unthinking human.:-D
And thank goodness it’s not nearly impossible to convince a computer that it isn’t correct when you don’t have admin rights.
sudo you’re a fucking idiot, computer
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, president of IBM
I cannot stomach much of it, but it is fun to go back and watch older media related to technology - e.g. the six million dollar man has like spinning tape disks, when computers were entire-room affairs.
So he was right, using the definition at that time, though there was also so much potential for more.
Also it is funny to hear them say that technology would literally make the six million dollar man “better”, not just “well again” or “he will have side effects but his capabilities will be far above the norm” or some such. One glance at Google these days, or a Boeing plane, does not inspire me to think of the word “better” than what came before even from those exact companies. Technology moves forward, but I am not so sure that the new is always “better” than the old. It was an interesting bias that they had though, during the cold war and after the moon landing.
Considering we now have a “CD” that stores 125TB of data ( https://www.livescience.com/technology/electronics/new-petabit-scale-optical-disc-can-store-as-much-information-as-15000-dvds ).
Not all older tech are necessarily worse. An LTO-9 tape can also store 18TB of data per tape. It’s still sold today and great for archival.
Other cheaper, less error prone tech usually gets mass market penetration. But I am happy that massive storage niche tech is still there.
Yeah tape is niche, but still serves its particular purpose well!:-)
“We can improve him.”
And I believe tape storage hadn’t even been invented when Watson said that. It may have even been pre-magnetic tape entirely because I believe he said it before a computer was actually invented (unless you count Babbage’s difference engine). It was a prediction of what the world would need if computers existed if I remember correctly.
And it makes total sense, bc the idea of a “PC” hadn’t been tried yet, bc the technology simply wasn’t yet up to the task. And yeah I think I remember the same thing about that quote, though who knows:-P.
Anyway, it was hard for computers to be wrong about simple arithmetic operations, but they’ve come a long way since then, and AIs are now wrong more often than not.
I love this response!
It was a very fitting time to be wrong lol
You were wrong, which proves your point correct. Good job being wrong and right at the same time.
Oh, and to provide numbers:
https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris
That’s 5,837.07 km.
As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer
In February 2006, Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer for the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km).
That’s 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.
As for time:
No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping…
The longest flight by time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager
The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base’s 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.
the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km)
That’s 800 miles (1,400 km) longer than the circumference of the Earth. Humans are a trip.
Plus X-37B has flown round the earth for two and a half years on its longest flight. I know it’s not really what he was thinking about as it’s launched in space from a rocket in orbit but then that just adds even more to the notion tech advancement can be almost impossible to predict.
“Brought in its train” what an interesting phrase, do people still say this? Is it the same as “in its wake” we use today?
It appears to be meant like “retinue” or “followers.”
“retinue”
ret·i·nue
/ˈretnˌo͞o/
noun: retinue; plural noun: retinues
a group of advisers, assistants, or others accompanying an important person. "the rock star's retinue of security guards and personal cooks"
Yes. Think of weddings. The thing trailing behind the ‘fancy’ ones is called the train.
Wilbur clearly didn’t know about in-flight refueling.
It also makes me wonder if trans-atlantic gliding is a feat that could be feasibly attempted with modern technology.
He also isn’t talking about airplanes, but airships. Sure plenty of planes make the journey every day, but zero airships do because they really are quite useless for it. Obviously he was wrong becauae a few airships did end up making Atlantic crossings, but they were slow, cramped, and dangerous compsred to ocean liners.
So context matter, you say. This is revolutionary! But it will never catch on.
At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC’s 640KB usable RAM limit: “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
That quote was in the context of the 1981 personal computer market, and in that context is correct.
It’s like a game company CEO saying 12GB of video ram is enough in 2024 so we don’t all need an RTX 4090.
12GB of video ram is enough in 2024
And then Stable Diffusion showed up
Im getting away with my 8gb for now.
Its the language/text stuff that really needs like 30gb GPUs.
Im getting away with my 8gb for now.
I don’t think that you can do the current XL models with 8GB, even for low-resolution images. Maybe with --lowvram or something.
I’ve got a 24GB RX 7900 XT and would render higher resolution images if I had the VRAM – yeah, you can sometimes sort of get a similar effect by upscaling in tiles, but it’s not really a replacement. And I am confident that even if they put a consumer card out with 128GB, someone will figure out some new clever extension that does something fascinating and useful…as long as one can devote a little more memory to it…
I do XL all the time, at about 30-45 seconds per image. 8gb is surprisingly enough for SDXL, and I run like 7gb models with 3-6 Lora on top.
I think the context was for computers at the time.
That one is apocryphal if I remember correctly, but even if he did say it, at the time it was pretty much true.
And 100 years later, in one generation, humans land on the moon.
Scientists in the 1800s also proclaimed we figured everything out and science was completed.
*1900s. Max Planck famously pondered whether he should pursue physics or music and was told by his professor that Physics was “done except for a few minor details”. Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-56594-6_11
“except for a few minor details”. Understatement of the millennium.
Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
lol
Thank you for the correction! That’s such a great little story
The most exciting result of scientific discovery is “well that’s odd.”
yo… what
-Science
Peer review is “Hey. You seeing this shit?”
More like “Chat, is this real?” imo.
I still say that’s one of the ugliest sentences ever written.
“Oh no… Oh no… Oh shit… RUUUUUUUUUN!!!”
I never though I’d see a resonance cascade, let alone create one!
You’ll get the noble prize for this posthumously!
When I first began learning HTML (way before CSS and the modern web), my most engaged moments were when things broke. Way more satisfying learning how to fix them than having it work right away. What a great observation / comment.
As a professional dev my reaction to broken things is more like “ah fuck, not again! I hope it’s nothing serious.”.
Two hours later: Damn, used an upper case “A” instead of a lowercase “a” in my variable reference
Dave Jones of the EEVblog always says to beginners “I hope your project doesn’t work.” He thinks it’s a much better learning opportunity that way.
This is amazing news. It’s like being shown that Neutonian physics are wrong, so now we have the ability to come up with a better model, then massive advancements in technology can occur.
We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.
No, Newtonian physics works just fine. Unless things are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow.
At least that’s what a meme I once saw said.
So it works fine on human scales, but for most of the universe it is inadequate. That means it’s wrong. Quantum physics and relativity are also wrong since he are unable to reconcile the two, despite them both being the best models we have for their respective scales. We have known for the past century that we have only just begun to understand the universe, and that all our models are irreconcilable with each other, meaning that they are ultimately wrong.
Just because a model is useful doesn’t mean it is right.
I agree with the essence of your point but personally I’d never use the word “wrong”, only incomplete. Seems weird to call Newton’s laws “wrong” when the only reason that we are willing to accept GR is that it reduces to Newton.
All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
I prefer mine:
literally every model is a metaphor and not a true representation of the actual phenomenon it’s modeling.
The map is not the territory
Why use many words when few will do?
It’s not so much that it reduces to Newtonian predictions but that at human scale and energy levels the difference between Newtonian and general relatively is so small it’s almost impossible to tell the difference.
What you’re describing is literally what it means for general relativity to reduce to Newtonian mechanics. You can literally derive Newton’s equations by applying calculus to general relativity. In fact, if you ever get a physics degree, you’ll have to learn how to do it.
It’s inaccurate, not wrong. Framing things in right and wrong misrepresents scientific progress in a way that leads to ridiculous conclusions like some post-modernist post-truth philosophers came up with.
In fact, Lord Rutherford said that “ALL models are wrong, but some are useful” 🙂
While we’re talking about scientific nobility…
“In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.”
– Lord Kelvin
Conversely, just because a model is wrong doesn’t mean it’s not useful.
Some relevant reading: The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov.
I think OP knew that. He was just repeating what he read in a meme.
Isaac Newton made some incorrect assumptions. In most situations on earth the error is small enough to ignore (you don’t need to worry about time dialation to calculate the projectile path of a thrown rock), but there’s depreciencies in the cosmos (like mercury’s weird precession). So in a sense, elementary mechanics never was correct, but it was the best humanity had for awhile until Einstein’s relativity and it’s still useful in many not-extreme contexts.
Really, until we actually find dark matter, we can’t say for sure that relativity is correct either, but that’s just science.
I thought we may have found dark matter already, but we lack the ability to measure it and confirm?
We noticy it’s effects on baryonic matter, but have no known way of detecting dark matter itself. It’s a bit like how a fisherman can know that there is a large fish in the pond by the giant splashes and ripples in the water, but he can’t catch it because it has zero interest in any lures or bait he uses.
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I think the best way to say it is, relarivity can reduce to Newtonian at small (but not sub atomic) scales, or that Newtonian mechanics are incomplete
I think it’s better to say that Newtonian physics is incomplete rather than wrong.
Bingo. All models are “wrong”, good models are useful despite being “wrong”. Relativity is wrong too since it can’t account for anything quantum… Relativity isn’t better, it’s just more accurate under certain conditions - but outside of those conditions it’s more complex than it needs to be, and Newton’s models are good enough.
Ah. So it’s relative.
Ultimately, all science and all knowledge about the universe around us is always going to be relative and incomplete. They are all just models. The only model that’s complete is the universe itself, and we can’t cram that into our tiny brains.
Correction. We can’t cram that into our tiny brains and still be “human”. We would likely be something on a closer level of, say, the “Q” from Star Trek. Or possibly Urza from Magic the Gathering. Which, based on my understanding of the lore of both IPs, I would rather be Q than be Urza.
I think that’s the point they were making.
I’d like them to look for repeats of galaxies. Galaxies that may be the same but slightly different or in different parts of the universe. If the universe was its own black hole we might see like a sort of kaleidoscope effect
The trouble with that is the difference in time. Since the light has to travel such a vast distance, multiple images of the same galaxy will show different stages of maturity. Even the stars will have been recycled. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ever demonstrate that two galaxies separated by billions of light years are actually the same galaxy in a curved Universe.
I believe that would be a Torus-shaped universe that could produce that effect, basically a donut where space loops back in on itself. I think it’s something that’s been considered, though it sounds as if there’s no evidence for or against that idea, and it’s not considered likely.
My money is on a dodecahedron.
Neutonian physics are wrong
Dangerous way of putting that since we have so many easily weaponized idiots who will carry that water, a better way to say it would be “our understanding of neutonian physics is incomplete at the moment”
I agree, it is more accurate that way. English is not my first language, so I missed that detail. In South Africa, we also don’t have a significant anti-science movement, so it does not always occur to me naturally. The scientific approach is generally well respected and understood here.
We have a very limited view of the universe so it’s no surprise that our theories are often wrong or incomplete. The beauty of science is that when a theory proves inadequate, it gets replaced with a more complete one.
yeah, but it’s always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it’s almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.
That’s because alternative models like MOND or string theory end up breaking more things than they solve. Fixing the leak in your roof is great, but doing so by breaking the living room wall isn’t really an acceptable solution.
In optimization problems, you can get stuck at a local maxima. It looks like any direction you go makes things worse. But the only way out of that is to try something that does make things worse and try refining from there to see if you can get to something better. Maybe that living room wall does need to come down in the process.
Isn’t string theory basically dead at this point?
It works perfectly as long as you assume there are a bunch of extra spatial dimensions that can’t be seen…
Don’t dare question dark matter in front of a physicist.
It’s always funny to me when people bring up how science was wrong in the past, as evidence for why we shouldn’t trust it now.
You know what replaced the bad science? Good science.
Or rather, we replace the bad science with the best explanations we can offer, right now.
I’ll take the plumb pudding model over “deity did it, stop asking questions” any day, because you can still do something useful with it.
Doesn’t even matter if our understanding is wrong and will be updated later.
Science is the best philosophy 💪
I’ve always liked the adage: science doesn’t tell us what’s true, only what isn’t.
We don’t know the best way to treat cancer, but we know leeches don’t work.
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” --Isaac Asimov
TIL Columbo was the ultimate scientist.
“Oh, just one more thing…”
The scientific spirit at work!
The Hubble constant seemed determined not to be constant.
Sounds like a quote from the Hitchhikers Guide
Get your freaking towel and get outta here, man!
Now that’s a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is
The Hubble Suggestion just doesn’t sound the same.
It’s called Webb-constant now.
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Dogulas knew:
I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
– Arthur Dent, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series.
Sounds more like Arthur knew…
Maybe Maybe there’s something seriously wrong with the Universe? Why is it always US who are wrong?
Hey, it’s me, the Universe. I just wanted to say, this is no longer working for me. And if it makes you feel better, sure it’s not you, it’s me. Please don’t call.
The universe is, frankly, a complete shitshow.
I’ve heard this has made many people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move
I mean it’s got some valid points but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I like to think that whenever we discover something new, the universe just got an update and we discovered the patch notes.
It seems odd to me that the universe would be expanding at the same consistent spherical shape. I’ve seen plenty of explosions and they never look like that. The big bang, which consisted of literally all matter in the universe would surely be no different.
Except it’s not that they are finding the expansion rate is different in some directions. Instead they have two completely different ways of calculating the rate of expansion. One uses the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The other uses Cepheid stars.
The problem is that the Cepheid calculation is much higher than the CMB one. Both show the universe is expanding, but both give radically different number for that rate of expansion.
So, it’s not that the expansion’s not spherical. It’s that we fundamentally don’t understand something to be able to nail down what that expansion rate is.
It’s because CMB stopped for coffee, obviously.
(That was a great explanation, btw.)
It just wraps around, like a videogame. Duh…
Just to confirm, the expansion is the same in different directions under both methods of measuring?
Under the CMB method, it sounds like the calculation gives the same expansion rate everywhere. Under the Cepheid method, they get a different expansion rate, but it’s the same in every direction. Apparently, this isn’t the first time it’s been seen. What’s new here is that they did the calculation for 1000 Cepheid variable stars. So, they’ve confirmed an already known discrepancy isn’t down to something weird on the few they’ve looked at in the past.
So, the conflict here is likely down to our understanding of ether the CMB or Cepheid variables.
I wish the article had broken it down the way you did. Thanks!
Ah ok. Thanks for the correction.
The only thing spherical is the visible universe from earth that we can see. Both in time and distance. Due to the expansion of space that volume is increasing.
The entire universe could be infinite and take on any number of infinite shapes. Our local universe could be completely different from the rest of the universe and we’ll never be able to know…it’s wild.
Recent experiments trying to determine what the curvature of space-time is in the visible universe has concluded that it’s pretty much flat But it’s entirely possible that we’re just on a very very very large (infinite?) curved surface of spacetime that just looks flat to us…
I would bet on it in fact. It makes logical sense to from my perspective.
I’m no way an expert in this, but I’ve been told it’s wrong to think of the expansion of the universe like an explosion where everything moves away from a single point, but rather that the space between each object is expanding, comparing it to the way the surface of a balloon expands (if you were to paint multiple dots on the surface of a balloon they would all move away from each other when you inflate the balloon), though I like to think of it as yeast bread expanding since that’s 3d.
Have you considered the universe may actually be a torus instead of a sphere, eg: bagel-verse?
Dodecahedron. Fight me
Yes that sure is an option, but it doesnt fit in my pastry-centric theories of the universe.
Spherical? We don’t know if the universe is of finite size.
As far as we know, it could just as well be infinite, and the expansion happens everywhere.
Everything is relative so the only thing we know is that the distance between galaxies increases. But we don’t know if there’s a “border” of the universe or not.
The big bang (if it is still a valid theory) would have been unlike any explosion you have ever witnessed. The big bang was not an explosion of only matter, since time and space were both created during this event as well.
Really, calling it an explosion is not right in the first place. It’s one of those unfortunate cases of bad naming in science, another being ‘The God Particle’ (which was originally supposed to be The Goddamn Particle.) Physicists prefer using the word ‘expansion.’
I think it gets more spherical the larger it gets. The initial explosion from nukes are fairly spherical if you look at the old film. https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/09/28/130183266/abomb
One of the images from that slideshow begs to differ.
There’s some interesting ways of understanding “dark energy.” This is just one.
I feel (intuitively (which is almost certainly wrong)) that it’s expanding like a fluidic wave. Think lighting a gasoline puddle on fire.
Yay! We are learning something new!
This is what I was very very excited for. The Hubble photos were more exciting because they’re visual spectrum. The James web is all about discoveries.
But moooom, I hate learning new things
TLDR: Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. We can now confirm it’s not measurement error.
It’s not a matter of where we look, it’s the method we use to calculate the expansion. The 2 methods to calculate the expansion rate give us different results. For a good explanation, here is a YouTube playlist of videos by Dr. Becky Smethurst where she discusses & explains the “Crisis in Cosmology”: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn
Oh. Well. That’s. Terrifying?
don’t worry, we’re expanding with it!
I’m not expanding! It’s just my big bones, y’know!
Uh, why?
I’m afraid of things I can’t understand.
You can make a religion out of that!
Over and over again. That scope is really opening things up.
It was the same for the Hubble telescope back in the day (and still!)
Good riddance, the answer can never be too simple.
The human need for ‘constants’ may already be too simple. Gravity for example is treated as a constant value in Physics but is actually variable.
I might have missed something, but AFAIK, gravity is the same everywhere. Bigger things, bigger gravity, sure, but two equal things in different locations don’t have different gravitational attraction
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Your understanding of what constitutes “Physics” (tip: it’s not a bunch of kids in a classroom) tells me that we can safely ignore your opinion.
Yay, progress!
But maybe the measurement methods are not correctly understood either, as profen by the brightness of white stars used to determine age, lately.
The
cakeBigBang is a lie.
original source :
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad1dddsee also :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble’s_law
Hubble tension
In the 21st century, multiple methods have been used to determine the Hubble constant. “Late universe” measurements using calibrated distance ladder techniques have converged on a value of approximately 73 (km/s)/Mpc. Since 2000, “early universe” techniques based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background have become available, and these agree on a value near 67.7 (km/s)/Mpc. (…)
(…) The most exciting possibility is new physics beyond the currently accepted cosmological model of the universe, (…)Can someone give me the spark notes I started reading but I’ll never get through that or probably even understand all of it
As I understand it, there are two measures of cosmic distance/expansion rate in which we are pretty confident.
One is using supernovas as a measure. Since one kind of supernova has very particular characteristics, it is easy to calculate the distance. It is like knowing that everyone has the same kind of candle, if you see a bunch of lights around you, you could make certain assumptions about how far they are from you by how bright they are. Also, with more precise measurements, we can use the doppler effect to know how fast they are moving. We have observed the area around or Galaxy and have come up with a very precise measurement for how fast the universe is expanding.
The other measurement is by looking at the cosmic wave background. This is the “first” thing we are able to see after the big bang. I don’t really understand the details of this one, but scientists have also been able to calculate the expansion rate of the universe very accurately with this radiation.
As we have done more experiments to measure these two numbers, instead of converging on the same number, the results are actually diverging. Recent results have even made it so the error bars no longer overlap.
So, we have some big questions -
- Are our measurements wrong? There are no strong candidates for alternative understandings of how we measure things, so we don’t really know how.
- Are the expansion rates at the beginning of the universe and current times different? Maybe, but again, we don’t have any theories for why.
- Does the Universe expand at different rates in different places? Maybe, but again, we don’t have any strong candidates that we can test.
All of this is called the Hubble Tension. It is probably one of the biggest questions in cosmology currently.
Thanks this is both an uncomfortable and exciting thing to read.
Basically,
Everything you know is wrong.
Black is white, up is down, and short is long
And everything you thought was just so important doesn’t matter. Everything you know is wrong. Just forget the words and sing along. All you need to understand is, everything you know is wrong.
I wish I had more upvotes for the random Yankovic!
It’s simple, imagine you’ve got two smart friends that both have an opinion about a TV show you didn’t watch - you can’t tell who is right but the fact they disagree suggests they might be wrong when they say you can’t have flying cars and time travel.
