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Yeah, apparently the Teller-Ulam design for a Hydrogen bomb relies on some clever insights and is not fully public. So it seems plausible that there are some really dangerous ideas out there, ready for an AI to discover.
Agreed.
Well I think they are used to owning mathematics like a medieval guild. Which makes sense (or at least used to make sense) given that you need gatekeepers to keep out idiots and cranks.
FWIW I have a professional physicist in my family and he is pretty much resigned to the idea of studying physics out of love for learning more about the way the universe works. Which I guess is a good attitude, but if it were me I would be kind of disappointed if I suddenly had effectively no chance of discovering and publicizing something significant. Because the AI is going to beat me to the punch.
I suppose one option available to physicists (but not available to mathematicians) is to keep their experimental data to themselves for a year or two so that they have a chance to analyze it with their own AI in a proprietary way.
I'm not sure if that would be enough. Einstein famously didn't need experimental data to come up with relativity, he just thought about it really hard.
That's the exception rather than the rule. I've heard it said, for example, that science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.
We still don't really know how many pharmaceuticals work.
In general, theoretical knowledge flows from experimental data and not vice versa. And even Einstein was not operating in a vacuum.
That’s because throughout almost all of human history, technology preceded science. One of the prevailing secular dogmas people have in the 21st century is the assumption that science drove technology, when in reality it’s the other way around; and science comes in after the fact and explains how it works.
As a side note to Einstein, not many people know among relativity experts, aspects of his theories are still hotly debated in niche areas as it relates to other aspects of physics relativity is related to. Just as there are a dozen or so some odd interpretations of quantum mechanics, there are different interpretations of general and special relativity as well; especially when you get to debates about cosmic time and absolute simultaneity. The tensed, neo-Lorentzian; “A-theory” interpretation of special relativity overcomes some of the very difficult problems implied by the EPR paradox in ways the orthodox B-theory interpretation we use today doesn’t.
IIRC, Einstein didn't win the Nobel Prize for relativity because many people at the time considered it to be in the realm of philosophy rather than science.
I certainly didn't know that!
Most people aren’t aware of it and the arguments are often too complex for the average/uninitiated layman. Unless you’re someone who makes heavy use of the theory professionally or in your day-to-day, it isn’t really relevant to know about in most cases.
One of the quirks of Einsteinian relativity is that it doesn’t disprove the existence of absolute space, but rather the foundations of the theory presuppose its non-existence; because the claims of the theory of special relativity which says that absolute space doesn’t exist, rests on the untenable assumptions of the verificationists of the school of Logical Positivism. The ontology of space-time becomes wholly reduced to what our measurements tell us. Einstein simply redefined simultaneity in terms of clock synchronization by light signals.
Per the earlier point about Lorentz I was making, Lorentzian relativity is fully equivalent Einsteinian relativity and the cutting edge of physics is actually more palatable to the former view of relativity than the latter. The experimental evidence that was produced by Bell’s Theorem actually suggests that relations of absolute simultaneity do exist, because the implications of the experiment says that in order to explain the results, one of two things has to be true:
There are faster than light causal influences between particles.
Particles are somehow non-causally correlated, so both particles instantaneously take on determinate properties.
In layman’s terms what that means is: the relativity of simultaneity postulated by the special theory of relativity has to be given up. It’s why Bell himself wrote when he was reviewing the implications of the experiment that there actually may be an “aether.” It’s not without problems though, since Lorentz frames implies things can go backwards in time, etc.; but there’s a real causal sequence that’s defined in the aether. And so Bell’s Theorem marked out a massive division between the two different interpretations of special relativity that’s still very much debated today. What it all ultimately means is that if action at a distance does occur, you have to give up Einstein’s interpretation of special relativity and return to Lorentz interpretation and also restore Newton’s concept of absolute space-time. You don’t have to give up the mathematical formalism, only Einstein’s interpretation of it.
These aren’t the only debates as such, but you get the gist of it.
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FWIW that's not what I was taught in my history of science class in college. What I was taught was that in the late 19th century experimental physicists did what was known as an "ether drift experiment" and famously found that light seems to travel at the same speed regardless of the motion of the reference frame. And that subsequently Einstein started with this assumption and worked out the seemingly bizarre theoretical implications. Is this an accurate account? I am always skeptical of what I am taught in school, but it seems plausible to me that you can't do physics in a vacuum, so to speak. Even Isaac Newton had to start by looking at the motion of the planets and earth-bound objects, kind of a rudimentary form of experimental data.
Arguably the experimental data of today is more easily gate-kept. It's the observations of some orbiting telescope or readouts on some huge particle accelerator. Even so, if most of what the physicist is doing consists of feeding the experimental data into the AI and asking "Is there anything interesting in here? If so, write it up in a paper," it's, well, not quite the same as starting with the ether drift result and putting together a theory of relativity.
No experimental data is overstating it, but he didn't need to collect any fresh data tailored to his ideas. Someone else (presumably) would have eventually gotten to relativity if they ran a series of experiments narrowing down what the heck is happening with time and lightspeed.
He simply figured it out with the data from experiment N-1 (or maybe N-2 or N-3), where a "normal" researcher would need the data from experiment N. If a future AI can pull off the same trick but better, then researchers will need to stay more than one dataset ahead of the public releases if they want to make a discovery first.
I basically agree with this but my impression is that modern experimental data is far more expensive and time-consuming to obtain than the data of the past.
That would make the gains to intelligence more important, not less.
If you can use the data from the Large Hadron Collider to make findings that most researchers would need the Future Circular Collider (its proposed successor) to find, then you've saved about $10B. Decades ago you couldn't have saved that much because people didn't spend that much.
I think this is probably correct, but my point is about a different issue, which is the issue of an AI company swooping in, making the discoveries, publishing them, and foreclosing the opportunities of the human researchers to make and publish the discoveries. This seems to be what is likely to happen in mathematics, if it's not happening already.
Arguably, with physics one could prevent this kind of scoop by keeping the data close to the vest. I'm pretty sure that even before AI got big, there were blackout periods with astronomical data. Although one can ask whether the situation is really that much better for individual researchers if most of what they are doing is feeding the proprietary data into their own AI.
But to your point, yeah, it seems that for scientific progress as a whole, AI analysis of experimental data would make things faster and more efficient.
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I also recall being taught in school that Einstein's development of the postulates of special relativity (particularly that the speed of light is equivalent in all inertial reference frames) was influenced by the results of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, which failed to identify expected changes to the measured speed of light when the Earth's motion changed relative to the position of the sun.
However, this discussion suggests that Einstein's development of special relativity was probably not significantly influenced by the MM experiment, and was mainly influenced by assymetries in classical electromagnetism.
Thanks for posting this. It's perspectives like this that make me skeptical of the pat facts I was sometimes taught in school. To be sure, it's possible that Einstein was mistaken or even lying about the influence of ether drift experiments on his thinking.
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