Is Science & Technology coming to a standstill?

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Thank you.

I accept, but what matters more to me is understanding what the mistakes were, so that one knows how to avoid them in the future. :-)

Putting together my words and not-my-words in the same clause was not offensive in itself. The clause is innocent in isolation. It doesn't imply anything false, by itself.

But when the additional words "I never said that" were appended to the front of it, the resulting denial implies that there is some reason why a reader might think that you had said that. (Why would you deny something without there being some reason to make the denial? You wouldn't, presumably.)

One possible reason might have been that a reader could reasonably have been expected to conclude that you had said or implied that you thought that the majority of scientists think that we "cannot afford to deal with other problems at all". But there's no basis for that possible reason, because you'd made no previous reference to "majority of scientists".

The other possible reason for a reader to have thought you might have said that (the majority of scientists ... other problems at all") was that someone else (me) had previously claimed that you had said that (the majority of scientists ... other problems at all"). So your denial implies that someone else had previously claimed that you had said that (the majority of scientists ... other problems at all") -- a false implication.

That's where the mistake occurred, and it arose from implying that someone had previously claimed something ("the majority of scientists think ...") that that person hadn't claimed at all. See?

Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, I can see how that might have been misunderstood. I think what happened was that there was a bit of a disconnect between my line of reasoning in my head, and what had actually been stated in the thread.

[MooooMoo]

Originally Posted by mart_r

Hmm.
What about HD-TV? Motion capturing for animated movies?

The first public HD-TV broadcasts occurred in the 90's:

http://www.allbusiness.com/electroni...7691367-1.html

Motion capture for animated movies appeared in the late 80's and early 90's:

http://www.motion-capture-system.com...s/History2.htm

http://www.siggraph.org/education/ma...e/history1.htm

[xilman]

As far as I am aware, all implementations of Shor's factoring algorithm on quantum computers have been made in the last decade.

Many advances in quantum logic gates have been made since 1999. Something like a dozen different technologies have already been invented to realise qubits.


Paul

[Primeinator]

Originally Posted by fivemack

Genetics has gone from the human genome being a multi-billion-dollar project to the announcement of a whole-mammal genome being mentioned at the back of the science pages only if the mammal involved is photogenic - we've got data coming out of our ears. The various proteomics are pretty much all new, and give vast volumes of data about what seems to interact with what. Protein crystallography has gone from something that takes a whole thesis to something that might get one frustrating chapter if the protein turned out not to crystallise easily.

But I don't know to what extent the flood of data has turned into medicine yet. We're incredibly good at seeing how drugs bind to proteins, but 90% of things designed to bind well to what's know to be a target protein involved in an interesting disease still turn out to be mouse poison.

I suspect ubiquitous keyhole surgery is one of the bigger advances over the last decade.

I notice that a lot of the obvious advances have 'ubiquitous' at the beginning; of course, from this close up it's much easier to see advances due to vast amounts of money going into perfecting an idea (and at least the first seven years of the 2000s were superb times for directing vast amounts of money at an idea; Global Savings Glut &c) rather than new fundamentals.

I should have clarified and I apologize. Many of these medical treatments I am referring to are experimental for the time being. Example: a new process called lethal mutagenesis will begin human trials this year or next to combat HIV. It works by using a string of DNA that looks nearly identical to the virus DNA would after the virus undergoes reverse transcriptase (HIV is a retro-virus). The virus "sees" this, uses that piece of DNA to replicate. The only problem is that this DNA contains errors, a trojan horse if you will. After several generations of the virus, it is effectively dead, having lost the ability to replicate. Instead of using a drug with many potential side affects, much more targeted approaches are being developed. This is only one of many.

And for another advancement- How about the recent solution of the Poincare Conjecture?

[MooooMoo]

Originally Posted by xilman

As far as I am aware, all implementations of Shor's factoring algorithm on quantum computers have been made in the last decade.

Hmmm, it looks like I chose a bad title for this thread. It should have been called "Is Progress in Science & Technology Slowing Down?" instead of "Is Science & Tech coming to a standstill?" Anyway, Shor's algorithm was discovered in 1994 and quantum computers were built before 2000, so putting those two together probably wasn't such a huge milestone. Grover's algorithm was executed on a quantum computer in 1998, so it was clearly possible to run programs on quantum computers before this decade.

And for another advancement- How about the recent solution of the Poincare Conjecture?

Is this advancement as important as those in previous decades (Fermat's Last Theorem proved in the 90's, Four-color theorem proved in the 70's, etc)? I don't know enough about higher math, so maybe someone will comment on this.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by MooooMoo

Anyway, Shor's algorithm was discovered in 1994 and quantum computers were built before 2000, so putting those two together probably wasn't such a huge milestone. Grover's algorithm was executed on a quantum computer in 1998, so it was clearly possible to run programs on quantum computers before this decade.

If you read the literature, you find that it was a huge milestone.

Your claim is comparable to saying that the concept of stored program computers was developed by Babbage and Lovelace in the 19th century, and semiconductors have been used in electronic devices since the very early twentieth century, therefore developments in IT since then probably haven't been a huge milestone.


Paul

[mart_r]

Looking at the list of the largest known primes, I remembered this thread. No megaprime has been found since August last year. It's the longest lack of megaprimes since 2006.

In fact, there hasn't been a change among the Top-40 primes in the past eight months. I would bet this hasn't happened ever since there are websites devoted to prime numbers.

Is it the economic crisis? Was Riemann wrong? Questions galore...

[philmoore]

We found a couple at Five or Bust, we just can't prove that they are prime yet!

[philmoore]

Borys (Cruelty) just turned up this gem yesterday, 59*2^3408416-1 (1026038 digits)
http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpos...9&postcount=20
Hopefully, our dearth of new mega-primes has ended!

[science_man_88]

science:The collective discipline of study or learning acquired through the scientific method;

technology: applied science;


this means one can not grow without the other

without knowledge of something how can we ask how could this be used ;



technology(used to gain some insight),science(the insight), thought process, loop again

[ewmayer]

With a few more folks like science_man_88 hanging about, the answer to the question this thread poses will be "definitely, yes."