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March 30, 2011
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Charles Q. Choi is a frequent contributor to Scientific American. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Science, Nature, Wired, and LiveScience, among others. In his spare time, he has traveled to all seven continents. Follow on Twitter @cqchoi.
Welcome to a new regular feature called "Too Hard for Science?"
The idea here is to interview scientists about pet ideas they would love to explore that seem impossible to investigate in real life. Perhaps they involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun; perhaps they would be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people; perhaps they would be too expensive, or require centuries to run, or could never find volunteers to participate, or are in some way unprovable.
This feature aims to look at the seemingly impossible dreams, the most intractable problems in science. However, the question mark at the end of "Too Hard For Science?" suggests that nothing might be impossible. Perhaps these very interviews could spur brainstorms that actually make these ideas a reality.
In the coming weeks you’ll read about ideas such as manufacturing brains using printers; neutrinos from the Big Bang; the sense of meaning in dreams; the genetic foundations of intelligence; recreating what killed Pompeii; and what renowned scientists Freeman Dyson and E.O. Wilson think might be too hard for science.
Stay tuned!
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If you have a scientist you would like to recommend I question, or you are a scientist with an idea you think might be too hard for science, email me at toohardforscience@gmail.com.
Follow Too Hard For Science? on Twitter by keeping track of the #2hard hashtag. Follow Scientific American frequent contributor Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi.
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My vote is for simulating economics and/or politics on global scales with realistic accuracy that could be verified by experiment. Quantifying and modeling the trillions of daily interactions between people containing hundreds of trillions of synapses each is the ultimate unattainable goal of anyone on Wall Street, let alone sociopolitical humanitarians who want to optimize societal structure.
With such a chaotic system, more than just people have to be taken into account in order to know if a policy will work as intended. If a butterfly causes a hurricane, a meteor levels the rainforests, an earthquake cripples a country, a biological agent wipes out people with particular genes, or faulty equipment spreads misinformation, all of these ad infinitum can cause such drastically different long-term results that a rigorous solution is simply intractable without having to build a world simulator with infinite moving parts.
Link to this@yevoc: My plan is definitely to interview supercomputer researchers I’ve interviewed before about complex simulations of all kinds. Are you, by the way, a scientist working in this field yourself?
Link to thisI would love to produce a Phase-Response Curve to a variety of potential cues (pulses of light, temperature, humidity, several chemicals from tree sap, etc.) on 17-year and 13-year periodic cicadas.
Monitor several cycles to produce a baseline, then apply the pulse, than monitor several cycles to measure the phase effect. Repeat for many different phases.
This would take many centuries do finish.
Link to thisThe real world IS an economics experiment. We just need/have sophisticated statistical tools to seperate the wheat from the chaff. Modeling as seperate interactions is as unnecessary to understanding the entire system as individual partical interactions are to the ideal gas law.
Link to thisTransferring a mind to another brain or computer
Link to thisOK, so here’s something I’ve been wondering about. My understanding of physics is that there is a smallest unit of length, the Planck-meter (about 1.6 x 10^-35 m). So let’s say you have two spaceships. One is equipped with a very high-energy laser that fires a beam with a wavelength just barely larger than a Planck-meter. I imagine that if such a beam were to hit the second spaceship, it would do considerable damage due to its high energy. But imagine if the second spaceship is moving towards the first, at such a velocity that the beam coming towards it gets blue-shifted (Doppler effect) enough so that the wavelength of the oncoming beam is now less than a Planck-meter. What will happen? If the beam’s wavelength is less than a Planck-meter, will it cease to interact with matter? Can the second spaceship defend itself by moving towards the beam? Or is there some aspect of physics that says the beam the second spaceship sees can never fall below a Planck-meter in wavelength?
Hope that wasn’t too confusing.
@Matthewt69: Yeah, an article on the possibility of mind uploading (as it’s called) could be interesting.
Link to thisThe wavelength problem doesn’t appear at all difficult to me, especially given the wave/particle duality of electromagnetic radiation. Surely the Doppler effect only causes a fluctuation in perceived wavelength not in the actual wavelength. So each laser pulse (one complete wave cycle) maintains its original wavelength and energy even though the frequency of collisions is increased.
But, of course, there is a basic principle of physics that can’t be violated, the speed of light or to be more precise the relative speed of light. The very reason for theorising a minimum length is bound up in relativity and the fact that the velocity of incident ‘lasers’ is unaffected by the speed of an object travelling toward it or indeed in any other direction.
Link to thisHow about something really tough, like where do all the socks disappear to when I wash them?
Really though, I’d love to see science take on Religion in this sense: Take all the things people list as positives about religion (ultimate truth, sense of purpose, rules to live by, charity work, etc, etc) and make a clear, compelling case for how to achieve those same ends in a demonstrably better way than religion/faith offers.
The reason I would classify this as possibly "too hard for science" is that it is pretty vague and squishy, but if religions claim to offer a complete guide to living a fufilled life, I would like science make a compendium that does the same thing, with infinitely greater clarity, facts, and reason behind it. Peferably using our understanding of how people’s minds work (through science!) to put the results in terms that reach the masses and offer them a useful and better replacement to religion… as opposed to results that only appeal to those already "converted". Use science to figure out what is optimal and true, then use science to figure out how to put it in a way that humanity will accept it and use it to make living better for all of us.
Link to thisI’d like a scientist to observe my wife whining about unimportant situations and provide a hypothesis as to why this happens. Perhaps a trip to the collider to discover that anti-whining actually exists and can be applied to practical events.
Link to thisAstrophysicists will have many experiments they would like to do, but are physically impossible or require waiting millions of years. Social scientists will have at least as many, some of which could be done, but are morally unacceptable. To me, the most interesting aspect of this issue is what the scientists are doing to work around the problem to get the answers they want.
Link to thisI myself am not a scientist however there are a couple of things I’d like to see science determine. I you were able(and allowed) to clone a human being and it survived all stages of growth, would it just be an empty shell? or would it be able to function as a normal human? I understand that it has been tried but if it succeeded what do you think would happen?
Second: Computers have developed over the years and they’ve gone from basic programs to incredible ones and I was thinking. People have pondered what AI could turn out to be and I was wondering if given an infinite amount of time is it possible for anyone to truly create consciousness in something? Anyway thanks for your time.
Link to thisI haven’t actually done any numbers on this problem but my first approach to it would be that there is probably a relativistic length change as a result of the relative motions that would exactly cancel out the change in wavelength.
Link to thisI haven’t actually done any numbers on this problem but my first approach to it would be that there is probably a relativistic length change as a result of the relative motions that would exactly cancel out the change in wavelength.
Link to thisWhile I am not 100% sure about this, I think the Planck-length is the wavelength that a photon with enough energy to collapse itself into a black hole would have (I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for fun once that gave a wavelength very similar to the Planck-length, off by 1/sqrt(2pi) or something similar). But of course, what does that even mean, especially in light of Hawking radiation? Of course, the energy involved here is still absolutely enormous: E=hf, h=6.626e-34 Js, f=c/1.616e-35 m, –> E=1.229e10 J/photon. That is roughly equal to the amount of energy produced by a large coal or nuclear power plant in 10 seconds packed into each photon. But assuming you could get this kind of power, I have to wonder what it would do. My personal first guess is that if you somehow got it down to the Planck-length, the photon would collapse into a quantum black hole and instantly evaporate back into high-energy radiation, but in a spherically symmetric way, so instead of one super-photon going up you would get an expanding shell of gamma-rays going in all directions. But this is all speculation, I’m only a second year Physics student who happens to know a few formulas, I don’t really have any authority here, I suggest finding a Professor to ask about this.
Link to thisOK live.the.future; The target spaceship will percieve the laser flash at it original wavelength, the Plank-meter. I know this because it fits the weirdness logic of quantum physics. However if it was accelerating away, when it was receding at half the speed of light it would only then perceive the laser wavelength at 2 plank-meters. Quantum logic! Receding at 2/3 C flash would be then be seen as 3 Plank-meters long.
Link to thisIf the original flash was many, many Plank-meters long, then, as the second space-ship accelerated away it would perceive the successive flashes in a continuous red-shift.
I would bet that a pulse as short as one Plank-meter would be impossible because it would have infinite energy. I don’t know for sure, I’m just guessing, but such would fit the logic of relativity.
prove, one way or the other: is there a god in heaven ?
Link to thisJust another thought about this problem. Is it possible to generate gamma rays with a wavelength short enough to blue shift below the Planck length? If there is no physical process to produce such rays then the question is meaningless.
Link to thisThis is a bit cheeky of me, but I propose that this has already been accomplished. It’s called Buddhism, the science of the subjective mind.
Link to thisI have studied the whiney wife phenomenon extensively and have determined that in most cases the root cause is the husband being an insensitive, self absorbed dolt.
Link to thisI am a photonics researcher who commonly uses supercomputers for simulating optical devices which defy all known approximations, so we resort to brute force numerical calculations of Maxwell’s equations. While simulating the possible space can take days, weeks, or even months, I wouldn’t call my field too hard for science as the devices invariably work as we expect (unlike politics or economics).
I have a history of using supercomputers for artificial intelligence and advanced control systems, but again, those problems weren’t too hard for science. I generally make it a habit to work on problems I have at least a slight chance of solving without people being able to question the fruits of my hard work (i.e. global warming, economics, and politics to name a few).
Link to thisGotcha. I just interviewed Luis Bettencourt regarding modeling such complex systems. Should be interesting…
Link to this