Ah, it’s one of those often mis-attributed sayings then. Rather ironic if it was indeed Michaelson, since the Michaelson-Morely experiment had already been done, in 1887. Putting the nail into the coffin of the luminiferous ether & paving the way for special relativity…
Wow, this sort of spins into a couple of directions?
It’s not me you need to convince!
First, I’m absolutely in favor of fundemental research. Better that than $600 toilet seats!
And historically, it usually seems to pay off sooner or later in useful technology.
As for more fringe things… I guess we have to heed the maxim “It’s important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out”. Lots of crackpots like to claim that some real science was once regarded as dreamer’s nonsense.
Unfortunately, for every Wegener, there are probably hundreds of (maybe even sincere, but ill informed) people who claim that their “new Theory” proves Einstein was wrong…
So who do you fund? Of course an actual experiment is really the only way to go.
As for AI… not sure if I’m reading @abcdefghij correctly? Was the implication that AI is ‘woo woo’?
Not at all, of course, It’s producing scary good results.
I’m not sure if you would call it an actual breakthrough: it looks to me as if it is essentially a super-massive scaleup of trigrams with enormous computing power and storage thrown at it?
But perhaps to the point where emergent behaviour starts to emerge from sufficient complexity?
(The following is a reference to White Wolf’s Old World Of Darkness.)
Greyfaced Rat Bastards! But quantum mechanics and dark matter are OUR work and we’ll see who has the last laugh!
Sind sie spinne oder schlange?
Please keep it in English or provide a translation with it.
I was being flippant, but taking Sam_Stone’s and Ruken’s numbers at face value, the notion of spending on AI the equivalent of the entirety of the Basic and Applied R&D expenditures screams of hype cycle. Yes, a lot is impressive, but a lot is just stupid, and much of the rest is glorified curve fitting with no underlying intelligible model.
Sounds like something out of Fritz Leiber “Change War” stories…
Yup. If you’re ever walking in a dark alley and hear this from the shadows, think carefully about your reply…
“Are you Spider or Snake?” - the two sides in the Change War stories by Fritz Leiber.
Yes, there does seem to be a bandwagon going on here.
There are fashions in these things, of course: remember when Catastrope Theory was going to be the key to everything?
Often followed by “Fools! I’ll destroy them all!”
A common mistake. But we Sons Of Ether love humanity and are working for a better brighter world.
2.2 seconds of high confinement and plasma density:
Brian