Welcome to TOE’s Rethinking the Foundations of the Academy: How to Improve Scientific Inquiry with Gregory Chaitin
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Would someone like Einstein flourish in academia’s “Publish or Perish”?
Gregory Chaitin is a pioneering mathematician and computer scientist, renowned for founding algorithmic information theory. Gregory published his first groundbreaking paper at the age of 15 and has been a key figure at the Institute for Advanced Studies, contributing extensively to the fields of metabiology and complexity theory.
LINKED MENTIONED:
– Gregory Chaitin’s previous appearance on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMPnrNL3zsE
– Algorithmic Information Theory (book): https://amzn.to/3BdBMxF
– Sean Carroll on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AoRxtYZrZo
– Stephen Wolfram on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YRlQQw0d-4
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 – Intro
01:20 – Lack of Scientific Progress
06:22 – The Academic System
12:03 – Crisis in ‘Fundamental’ Physics
18:18 – Ancient Societies (Greece, Egypt, Alexandria)
23:05 – European Bureaucracy
27:08 – Albert Einstein
29:14 – Heterodox Experiments (Cold Fusion)
34:34 – Outro / Support TOE
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25 Comments
SPONSOR (THE ECONOMIST): As a listener of TOE, you can now enjoy full digital access to The Economist. Get a 20% off discount by visiting: https://www.economist.com/toe
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 – Intro
01:20 – Lack of Scientific Progress
06:22 – The Academic System
12:03 – Crisis in ‘Fundamental’ Physics
18:18 – Ancient Societies (Greece, Egypt, Alexandria)
23:05 – European Bureaucracy
27:08 – Albert Einstein
29:14 – Heterodox Experiments (Cold Fusion)
34:34 – Outro / Support TOE
Academia is an echo chamber. Very few knows anything the rest regurgitate.
Someone have a valid theory, suddenly everyone's an expert. Walking back on those words later. Not very helpful.
Since we are here mostly talking of fundamental physics, it is a question how much of the actual knowkedge in the field is actually open. We had these landmark discoveries in fundamental physics in the beginning of the 20th century. Than came WWII and it became clear that the new physics had military applications. The leading physicists got enrolled in the military to design nuclear weapons. And then came the cold war, where the race for weapons of mass destruction just continued. Fundamental physics became military secrets in the cold war arms race. And the question is if that ever stopped… Can we be sure that all there is known in fundamental physics is open and public?
The man does have an argument with regard to the superfluousness of most progress reporting.
In 2011, I presented my observations to the ANU for an opinion. The Vice-Chancellor ( degrees in Law and Arts) opined that it couldn't be so and that there was no money in it. He was too lazy to take it down the corridor to the physics department. Now retired, I wish him everything that he deserves. Newton would have grasped it.
If you would find out who the guy is that came up with the design of reading gravitations waves that was built you might get some good laughs. The problems you refer to are mostly industries wanting to control science so they stay the profiteers.
Or maybe they will figure things out and not care whether anybody else did know.
Thing is I wouldn't call dark energy and dark matter energy or matter before I figured out that they were matter and energy. They could just be aspects of dimension, time and space and then we would be wasting time looking for things to be a way you never did prove they were that way.
Nobody has ever even proven them to be energy and matter just that they act like energy and matter. That doesn't prove that they are.
Maybe call them cosmic expansion and cosmic contraction.
Where’s your Mask?
Where’s your Mask?
I think that the face of Academia, the edifice of intellectual expression, is a facade for grafting.
Much like this gent, I am disappointed.
Suppression, conspiratorial suppression, is an ongoing mission of SOMEBODY who likes the control they have.
Me? I'd bet on aliens and colluding governments.
I 100% agree with this, science was subject of fascination before, now its just industrial machine
Such an interesting man.
I see the problem as the ideological straight-jacket scientists usually choose to wear.
Bill Gaede is being censored you should interview him.
Let's create the IUPS international University pseudo-science with it's own acreditation systym.
Populism.
"5:40" Ask for a research project? Told their research project… many grads are made to drive professors' personal research. US college system sucks.
Is that his wife on the wall?
Thanks Robert Maxwell and the Europeans for being so demoralized after the war that they let "pragmatic", marketing oriented Americans destroy fundamental science
Fantastic guy! Love his attitude.
I cannot find anywhere, Aristotle was not Greek.. born , died in Greece.. not even Asia Minor…
The current system.
To get to a place where you can start working on "your" field of interest, you have to go trough so many irrelevant subjects.
Some of our greatest scientists pre 1900 worked in a single field, had no "SAT" focused education etc.
These days, it is not as extreme as when I grew up, but there is still a massive barrier to entry for higher education in math and physics.
The subjects are so bloated, and in "ordinary" education (pre university courses) would hardly amount to 10% of your total even if that is your focus.
The problem in education is that higher education only skim the top of the "average" student while only the prodigy or genius gets past the filter in a specific field.
By that you can use the argument that only 10% of the average student are able to step beyond being a student.
and only 10% of those again are able to break free of the box they have lived in for 10-20 years of education.
and only 10% of those again are able to innovate.
Innovation beyond 1920 scientific breakthroughs require not memorized knowledge, but a whole different mind map of these knowledge subjects.
To innovate, if you need to use a calculator for anything but verification, there is a field in the whole you don't understand well enough to see where you can innovate.
But that problem springs out of the fact that most students only spent 5% – 10% of their total educational path on the subject.
While Newton, Einstein, etc. spent most of their time on a "single" subject.
Point being, if you are a math "genius", but suck at language, you will spend all your time bringing your language skill to an A while your math skill will in the mean time stagnate.
You slowly become a master of none due to barriers such as the SAT, as you spend the time once allocated to mastery on bringing your average to the "starting point"
If I remember correctly, ultraviolet and infrared and electro magnetism was discovered by a man who once a boy grew up stirring the pot at the royal metallurgy lab…
While he died young due to heavy metal poisoning, he spent so much time mastering one thing, "innovation" was inevitable.
Periods of creativity happen, usually, during the uproar as a new dominant technology (mostly a communication technology) sweeps away the mentality of a previously dominant technology. Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt identified the fundamental components of this process in what they called the TETRAD. These components are active simultaneously as part of a fundamental resonance that they called the "resonant interval" or the "resonant node." The components of this process, or the TETRAD are: ENHANCEMENT (innovation, extension, etc.), OBSOLESCENCE (self explanatory of the old package of perceptions called a mentality), RETRIEVAL (of a formerly obsolesced mentality, i.e. this is what happens in a renaissance), and finally REVERSAL (as the old mentality or technology that produced it is pushed past its inherent limitations the benefits or services turn into costs and disservices).
Print media replaced the manuscript in the 15th century, initiating the pre-electrical industrial revolution. This was obsolesced in the mid 19th century by the telegraph, which was the first electrical mass medium. This progressed through radio/wireless and finally television. This mass electrical media environment is now busily producing reversals or flips. TV initially obsolesced racism of the radio era, but has, now that it's being pushed to far, begun to produce an "anti racism" that is really nothing more than a new and toxic form of racism.
Now, as we leave the era of mass electrical communication with the introduction of the computer and the internet we've entered a new "de-massing" mentality. The accepted term for this king of group to group, or many to many mentality is DISTRIBUTISM.
Percept always trumps concept.
Big business is suppressing science research. Scientists are doing research only where they are getting funded from.
The problem will end when the usa finally breaks apart. Because in 'muricuh, "science" has NOTHING to do with the scientific method. Instead it is a religion and a "scientist" must dedicate their life to find new ways to do the same crap over and over! We don't want innovation to dethrone Richie Rich and his POS rich buddies! Just look at the smithsonian's decades of lies and cover-ups as that doesn't require much digging.
It all started right from the burning down of Tesla's laboratory and the stoppage of funding of his Wardencliffe tower.