Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] predicting the future

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Mike Miller wrote:
> On Mon, 1 May 2006, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>
> > I believe that the reason why we haven't yet found the cure for cancer 
> > or mental illness is because these are extraordinarily difficult 
> > problems to solve.  I for one am very impressed by how far we have come.

I am by no means an expert, but I have attended a seminar or two on 
biochemistry.  I do get the feeling that our knowledge of the internals 
of how cells work is underdeveloped, but we are right on the cusp of 
major discoveries.

I think that the comparison made - where people say that if we simply 
put the effort into curing cancer that we put into the space program - I 
think this comparison is unfair.  If we had tried to make the space 
program work in the 1930's, there is no way any amount of dedication or 
effort could have made it work.  Technology had progressed to the point 
where it was feasible in the 1960's to get a man on the moon.

So it is with cancer.  I just don't think that we have the knowledge of 
how a cell works to cure it.  But what is very exciting is that I do 
think that we are at the point of knowing what it is we need to know 
about the cell.  That is, we have at least got to the point where we 
know what we don't know.

For this reason, I really do think that a cure for cancer is going to be 
available in a decade or two or three.

And in the meantime, I simply don't get the impression that people are 
being lax about searching for these cures.


> I think that's a lot of it.  Even if we were to get our social act 
> together -- no more religious mysticism, etc. -- and started really 
> educating people well from early ages forward, we might still find 
> ourselves short of the really brilliant people you need to solve these 
> kinds of difficult problems.
>
> It's hard to say though.  The extent to which religion and other social 
> problems have been crushing our intellectual/cultural development is 
> hard to gauge.  It's also hard to know what bad things rapid social 
> change could bring.  Religion is doing good things along with the bad.

I think that this question is much more complex than you give it credit 
for.  I think that the idea that the universe is controled by a few 
universal mathematical laws is an amazing idea that took genius to 
discover it.  Most cultures simply did not make this discovery, and my 
guess is that our culture did so only because a few really talented 
people like Galileo and Newton pushed the envelope.

I think that these people were motivated in large part by faith.  I am 
not necessarily talking about religious faith, although perhaps in the 
case of Galileo and Newton it did play a large role.  But even in such a 
person as Einstein, who was closer to Spinoza's notion of God, I think 
that he was driven by a tremendous faith that his formulae would just 
work out.  I think that this is particularly true of General Relativity, 
in which he spent many many years pondering the idea gravity could be 
explained by curvature in space and time - in order to figure this out 
he had to learn new branches of mathematics (fortunately figured out by 
Riemann and his likes), and even then it took years of deep thinking. 
In the end all he came up with was a few pages of formulae, that just 
happened to totally revolutionize the way we think about physics.

This faith also drove him in his later years, unfortunately then it 
turned out that his faith was ill-founded because he wanted to find a 
theory of everything that did not use quantum physics.

Nevertheless, I would contend that without being driven by the initial 
faith that some simple physical laws can explain gravity, that he would 
never have had the shear mental drive required to search for them, and 
general relativity would only have been discovered decades later if it all.

Stephen

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