This quote really drives home the point that the overwhelmingly vast majority of scientific discovery and progress throughout history has come with humanity's entirely self-inflicted handicapping, like a V8 engine running on only 1 cylinder. Can't help but wonder what our knowledge here in 2025 would be like had we, as a species, tapped into our full potential by empowering women and people of color (to name just a few categories) earlier. You can almost see it in action with the people mentioned here as time went on.

Wonderful set of videos.

What really drives progress, I think is production and technology. Like better telescopes. For the cosmic distance ladder, the clever mathematical tricks are nice, and necessary, but the real important part is the precise measurements. And for that, we need precise instruments. And precise instruments need good quality materials, skilled tradesmen, good tools, etc... The tools themselves need the same, and the tools to make the tools, etc... A lot of the measurements involve travel and long distance communication, which wasn't trivial either. Mounting an expedition to the other side of the world requires a ship, a crew, etc... Then we need to collect these data, and people have to write these books, we need librarians, archivists, etc... All that so that finally, one guy can look at the data and do the maths.

And all that is far from the whole story. Skilled craftsmen and sailors need food and shelter, and the raw materials to practice their craft of course. They need farmers, miners, lumberjacks, etc... Farmers, miners and lumberjacks need their tools too. Advancing in the cosmic distance ladder is the work of millions of people over several lifespans, and some of them worked in cotton fields. We could wish the guy in the cotton fields was treated better, but it doesn't change the fact that in order to advance science, we actually need more people in cotton fields than people doing maths.

With technological progress, we can afford to have more people doing maths and provide them with enough data to be useful, but that's a very recent development.

There isn't a shortage of smart people or opportunities to make technological progress. The handicap is powerful humans looking at new approaches and saying "No" with the firmness of a man who sees a threat to their position. Even today I have a list of things that from an engineering perspective would probably result in improved prosperity, it just isn't possible to get them through the political process (nuclear power springs to mind, but I'm sure there are less controversial examples - Uber v. the Taxi industry maybe).

There's a lot of discussion on this online and some folks speaking past each other. Yeah, there has been the invention of the internet, faster computers, the blue LED, sequencing the human genome...etc, but that is argued to mainly be engineering innovations on already understood physics. Where is the next discovery on the level of general relativity? Are we just at diminishing returns now where all the low hanging fruit has been found? How many physicists wasted away researching string theory? Were we just putting resources in the wrong place?

I do strongly think that modern research has become so beauracratic that it gets in the way of actual progress. The endless paperwork, presentations, teaching...etc isn't very conducive to discovery. Your average professor is more like a project manager than what Newton did.

You need a certain amount of motivation, grid, etc. If these skills would be broadly available and the situation also, we would have a lot more Einsteins today.

There is plenty of things which do not require global projects building multibillion devices.

Mathematic thinking for ML for example.

DeepSeek paper for example.

The people on the bleeding edge of science and technology aren't just sitting in futuristic labs, surrounded by holograms and AI tech assistants, spouting one brilliant insight after another.

They are spending most of their days arranging various types of poorly formatted data, be it scientific metadata, purchase orders, journal proofs, grant proposals, interview schedules, their shopping list, or maybe (for a brief moment) actual scientific data. The real productive geniuses are the ones who figure out a way to ignore all this noise for along enough to get something done. It all comes down to logistics in the end.

A huge fraction of this work could conceivably be automated, or just trivial if people migrated to a better data structure. Maybe LLMs will help us bring order here, but that's only half the battle: part of learning to format data is thinking about the formal structure, what consumers will actually need, what parts are duplicated, etc.

20 years ago Tim Burners-Lee was advocating to clean this up via a better structured web [1], but, for various reasons, we haven't made much progress. I suspect a big reason is that the vast majority of people would struggle to understand the purpose of structured data: like basic literacy it's only useful if other people in your community use it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

I think the word "genius" best describes a body of work, or an accomplishment that changes the world in a surprising way, that is, genius is not just intelligence, it is being in the right place at the right time, with the right people around you (Einstein's wife was reportedly brilliant as well), and then being driven to understand and describe the world back to people through new science or art. It means that a person has enough resources and few distractions that occupy their minds.

In other words, 'genius' to me describes a situation, not just the person.

Intelligence + circumstance is key, I agree, but I don't think you should devalue the intelligence part. Plenty of people face similar circumstances but don't move the world.

I liken intelligence to a catalyst in chemistry: nothing happens if the ingredients aren't there, but if they are, it's remarkable. Without the catalyst, the progress of a reaction that has all of the right ingredients might not even be perceptible.

In the SciFi book "Children of Memory", Tchaikovsky at least splits intelligence into reasoning and recall. People also talk about system size and working set.

Persistence is another thing I've come to view differently. The mind is willing to entertain a problem as long as progress feels possible. I wonder if that feeling of possible progress is trainable. Another view of 'possible progress' is rational faith (lower case f, sorry I don't have a less loaded term, after all, many consider faith to be irrational).

But mainly, I think we are still in the dark ages of psychology, brain function, and theory of the mind. Thus it is important to me to be humble about how I talk about what intelligence might mean.

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By the way, I love the Children of Time series, but I had to really defocus my mind and suspend my disbelief and scientific critique to try to imagine other intelligences.

I'm not sure these are cleanly separable or observable. Reasoning is assisted by recall, and if there is some distinct reasoning ability then one can use it to make up for poorer recall by deriving knowledge.

In computational terms: you can gain speed up computation via memoization (trade off memory for more computation), but you can also trade off computation speed for memory with suitable compression. If you only had a black box, how would you distinguish these different internal mechanisms? I don't think you can, increasing either recall or reasoning ability will both improve performance on any conceivable intelligence metrics.

Agreed. I do not mean that these facets are completely separable, but that they can be evaluated as their own "thing"/schema/clade/subgens. After all, even though a von Neumann computer needs both memory and computation to function, you can benchmark them separately.

I really wish I had better ontology words. Ontolographs.

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Also, I'm doing the book a great disservice by simplifying it so much.

Journeyman physics isn't all bad, and in fact can be quite good. Not only do you not have to worry about the social, administrative, political and funding headaches of academia, you are also not suffused in the always reasonable-sounding groupthink that persistently tells you what can and cannot be done, what should and should not be questioned. I strongly believe that the next truly big shift in physics, if it ever comes, must come from an outsider. (And if that happens, ironically, we'll have another period of fruitful professional academic physics, and later another iteration of this same discussion).

The biggest such evidences are still there: The pyramids and other huge monuments, which took 100s of thousands or more of manhours to build. Many cultures had temples with ample evidence that people spent a lot of time engaging in religious activities there. Everywhere you evacuate, you see art pieces that had to be made by people spending time. The dead were often buried with weapons and food. There is plenty of evidence of people engaging in massive yearly festivals with lots of food, drinks and music.

How is all of this happening if humans were like cattle spending all their looking for food?

Sure, in some places and times there was enough slack to allow common people to celebrate festivals or partake in elaborate religious activities. But I think you underestimate how costly education was when every book had to be painstakingly copied by hand.

We are so good, that we have an epidemic of people consuming too many calories.

There is no way for me right now to get social security and being allowed to be in university. But i would be able to get social security.

Officially universities throw you out after x years, but no one will bat an eye if you sit in a big lecture because there is plenty of space. But the documents/video recordings etc. is protected by some passwords for no particular reason.

Imagine were you could go to a campus for a few years and have enough for feeding yourself, paper, pen and books and basic oversight (not blocking the space for someone who would use it to learn while you only sit in your room gaming).

That's quite a claim; is there a basis for it? Is there data? Research? Did manual labor really leave no time for other things - I've heard otherwise too.

And why do all those people working need an elite few taking most of the capital for themselves, e.g., to build massive homes and to guild their castles and churches? That capital could have been invested in the population and greatly improved the standard of living, technology (reducing the need for labor), knowledge, etc.

The elite few spent a lot of that capital fighting each other over power and land, not only consuming capital but destroying it - destroying much of what that labor built. They also use it to oppress many who could have raised humanity to greater fredom, knowledge, and prosperity.

We reside in a living example of the far, far more successful alternative - no authoritarian country, now or in the past, comes close to the prosperity of free, advanced democracies.

The justications for authoritarianism are popular these days.

How is that reconciled with (from GGP):

> for thousands of years, the human labor required to feed, clothe, and shelter a family wouldn't have allowed anyone to learn, preserve, and advance human knowledge without the labor of many being exploited one way or another by an elite few.

That seems to advocate for or justify exploitation of the poor by the wealthy?

Like even being born in the wrong country, one lacking in food or academic mobility, for example. Right off the bat, how many millions of gifted humans just died of starvation, malnutrition, in poverty, in isolation, violence, etc. All that potential just lost to time.

Can't speak for women, but we did tap into the potential of people of color. White race(s) getting ahead is a story of only the last few centuries, and they did benefit quite a bit from the work of "colored" races of the past.

Also, keep in mind that in that time period, plenty of "colored" races were independent, and capable of many of those advances. That they didn't achieve it should give you a clue that justice and equality overall play a very tiny role in these advancements. There are just so many other (random) factors that go into creating an Einstein that have nothing to do with treating people fairly.

As a random data point - my ancestors came from a society that did not value science and the accumulation of knowledge. It's why they were colonized, and also why that society continues to fare poorly today (long after the colonists left). Even today, amongst my relatives who live there, your are somewhat of a social outcast if you want to get deep into engineering/science. You're "supposed" to get that engineering degree to earn an income, and if you try to take it further (e.g. hobby), then you are "immature".

(Sorry for that tangent, but it's not a tangent).

If you want to be deeply inspired, read about his life, his book Somnium, what happened to his mother. It's all so profoundly motivating.

What is particularly wild is that Kepler had to wait for Tycho Brahe to die to steal his data before Brahe's heirs got their hands on it. Not only that, but Kepler was very close to making epicycles work but he was not satisfied with the (relatively small) predictive errors. So, if not for Kepler's combination of...flexible morality and unsatified nature, physics as we know it would have been delayed or perhaps never discovered at all!

Kepler made a huge contribution to the development of physics, but "the new physics" was already in motion by the time he published his work, and I think it's an exaggeration to say progress of physics would have stopped without Kepler.

Would Kepler’s absence have stopped scientific progress? Probably not. But some very, very important parts of it would not have proceeded as they did.

The heliocentric model was an old idea anyway(Aristarchus), what Copernicus did was not that impresive since it was wrong.

> what Copernicus did was not that impresive since it was wrong

What a statement. Copernicus was more right than anyone else of his time. His model revolutionized astronomy and led to the development of modern physics.

Another class of variables that aren’t mentioned are the solar like oscillators, driven by convection on the surface of the star.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-like_oscillations

Our sun is one such example and has a period of 5 minutes!

There is no scientifically imaginable form of life that could evolve or survive in or on stars. (So to be clear, this is all a flight of fancy)

Anthropic bias suggests that liquid water and carbon are essential to life.

BUT! I do think it's fun to imagine what assumptions a solarian biologist would make about the world. What would Solarian Bias look like?

What might be easier for a solarian physicist to understand? Would they have a different view of gravity?

They would start with a better understanding of astronomy than us, assuming they could make observations of the 'sky'; As the band Mogwai says "The Sun Smells Too Loud". All manner of EM observations would be more obscure (or rather their instruments would be dazzled). They would have to find some kind of Spot on the Sun where it's dark enough to see out. Maybe they could learn to ride the flares!

They would definitely start with a better version of the atom - there's no way to ignore fusion and fission if you live on the sun!

Or! What if it were possible to make observations of gravity from the surface of a neutron star. We have math and observations from here that make sense to us, but perhaps there's something that would just 'click' if you lived next to one.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TEDx talk.

A regular interviewer would have left the inaccuracies as they are because it’s too tedious to go over all of them when you have a casual conversation.

My domain block list is approaching 1,000 domains and I don't think I have a single .xyz or .biz in there. There's a few .top. But the overwhelming majority is .com.

> In principle, using the measurements to all the planets at once could allow for some multidimensional analysis that would be more accurate than analyzing each of the planets separately

(from the blog post)

I'd also love to see this idea expanded further. Intuitively it feels like adding Venus into the calculations should dramatically help constrain the orbit of Mars, but how exactly that would work out I'm not sure.

I'm an experimental particle physicist by training and know that feeling. We never see the particles directly, but reconstruct them in a complex chain. Hits in a detector become tracks, tracks are assigned to particles according to our expectation of how those particles behave. Bunches of tracks are interpreted as decaying heavier particle. Sometimes I wonder if we missed something important in the early days of quantum mechanics and particle physics, and some of the things we think we are investigating don't actually exist, or are subtly different than we think. But we look at the data though our lens, and see what we are expecting to see. My gut feeling says everything is consistent, and experiments match the theory so incredibly closely that it can't be a coincidence, but I don't think there is a mathematical proof. It could be that our theory is just so flexible that it lets us see Higgs particles and top quarks, even though the actual entities are something different. Like when people thought planets move in epicycles.

I know it is likely nonsense, but it is what motivated me every now and then to go back and revisit the basics of our field, like how is a particle state defined in QM, how does it interact with the experiment, how do we reconstruct larger objects, and so on.

Even mathematical proofs don't have mechanized, verifiable proofs, so physics has a ways to go. Once most mathematicians are using formal tools like theorem provers, maybe they will be usable and general enough to trickle down to physicists, and you'll have a more verifiable chain of reasoning from top to bottom for machines and observations. It probably will turn up a few minor issues, but I wouldn't expect anything drastic.

Having parallax measurements to that distance helps to build multiple versions of the next rung in the ladder (such as Cepheids and the tip of the red giant branch).

Similarly I now have a much clearer idea of how (say) the main sequence of star formation and standard candle stars fit into the historical picture.

It did make me wonder though how effectively you could lean on AI to flesh out a list of questions, but I think in this case he has the expertise to write each response quickly and he'd be conscious that this is overall a piece of content doing properly.