A blending of all the Sciences?

[dmill1220]

HI People!

Here's a topic that I have been discussing with my local Club members.
its called the blending of Science.
As is well known, no one person can have all the knowledge and scientific advancements ever, or recently discovered, in their head.
We seem to specialize nowadays, in just about all the Disciplines of Science and Medcine.

Some discoveries are sometimes made when a scientist from one discipline just happens to read a scientific journal written by another seemingly totaly unrelated scientific discipline. and hence forms a new theory, and an experiment to confirm his new theory.

Imagine what could be done to advance our Science, if there was one central depository of all information, and recent breakthroughs,

Which could be monitored by an artificially intelligent program ,with all the present knowledge of Science,
And also, ask all the questions that still have to be answered.

For example, in Astrophysics, and Nano or Micro technologies.
And it could act on such info, by alerting Scientists in their respective fields, that each new discovery would, or may, have an impact on.

I would Imagine that it would take an awful lot of Computing power, not to mention the worlds best Artificial Intelligence program.

One person mentioned, that if we were able to develop such an artificially Intelligent Program, we would quickly be rendered useless, or detrimental as a species to Earth.

And it would be an impossible undertaking, to input all of the knowledge required, to be able to identify, or recognize, when a particular discovery would have an impact on others, and, in which way it is relevant.

Here is the kicker! the study of Cosmology is really a study of everthing in our universe, from the smallest particle to the largest structures, baryonic an non baryonic.
Wouldn't it take all of our acquired knowledge, of all the sciences, to be ideally merged and scrutinized by something with alot more capacity than the human mind is capable of?
Im sure that there are alot of arguments over this idea.
IMHO, that is where our Science fails us.
Some Scientists have open minds and a uncanny ability for abstract thought. those are usually the ground breakers.

Yet some Seem to be stuck in the present understanding of their partcular fields, and refuse to question the mainstay current theories or established facts.

Where would we be if no one listened when such great thinkers said the world is round and not flat, the sun revolves around the Earth, and not the other way around, or the possibility that there are things so small, that the human eye cannot see them such as Bacteria, or that we are not the only Galaxy in the Universe , ETC: ETC:

Remember that these were established facts at that time, and that have been proven wrong, by people that questioned the current mainstay of the Scientific knowledge of their time.

I do have to say that we have advanced tremendously since those days.
Can we be so sure that our current understanding of our Universe be the correct one?
Things are not always what they appear to be! just because something is observed and concurs with theory, and also falls inline with observations and calculations?

Everytime we look for an answer we usually find more questions.
Can we dare be so arrogant, as to say we definitely have our physics right this time? it seems to me that some principles of our science do break down.
1) Black holes
2) Dark Matter
3) Dark Energy
If most of the Universe is, as it appears from observations, that we are missing almost 2/3ds of it, doesnt that leave you wondering?

I do have faith in our current approach, its the only feasible way to learn if we do have it right or not.
but it seems that we should be more careful and not be so sure of ourselves!
we need to merge all of our Sciences more carefully.


Dennis

[Blue Fire]

Wow, that's a whole lot of food for thought, dmill12120! I'm gonna have to ponder a bit more before I can comment to any significant degree, but I do have a couple of initial reactions.

First, I think cross-discipline science is becoming more common these days as folks begin to realize the limits of their specialties and the advantages to be had of other perspectives from other specialists. One example that I like to cite of physics and biology/neuroscience crossover is the explanation for why the sky is blue. Physics tells us that blue light is scattered more than other wavelengths in the atmosphere and so more blue is coming at us from every direction in the sky. Thus the sky appears blue. But that's not the whole story, as I understand it. Because violet is scattered also, per the phsyics of color and associated wavelengths, why don't we see blue AND violet? Well, it turns out that you have to bring in the biologist/nuerologist for the whole story. You see, the cones in our retinas are more stimulated to produce "blue" signals than violet. So, if you are presented with an equal mix of violet and blue, you will still only experience blue. So the story of why the sky is blue is explained only by combining the physics of light scattering and the biology/neuroscience of how our eyes see.

Second, as a kind of side thought, I think that the human mind/consciousness is the real "final frontier", not space. We began to make significant progress in developing artificial intelligence only after programmers and computer scientists got together with the psychologists and neuroscientists in order to get programs to mimic the "intelligent" behaviors of humans like playing chess or diagnosing medical conditions. Of course computer scientists had to quiz real chess experts on their method of thinking "intelligently" in order to develop software that can now beat 99% of all humans on the planet.

But although we seem to be able to get computers to do "intelligent" things, we are still a long way from creating a "consciously" intelligent computer. We first have to define awareness, consciousness, and subjective experience in ourselves as humans a whole lot better than we've been able to do so far. And even philosophers are getting in on these problems and helping to define what we can and can't expect of studying ourselves. For example, if we were able to replace each cell and nerve in our visual cortex with a silicon based "chip" that would replicate exactly the function of the cell/neuron it replaced, would our subjective experience of "blue" be exactly the same? Would an entire brain that is replaced by artificial constituents still have the same emergent effect of "mind" and consciousness, or is there some ineffable quality to emergent biological processes like "mind" that cannot be reproduced artificially? Internal experiential states like the subjective experience of "blue" can be verbalized by the experiencee but that experience can't be directly measured or tested yet. And it may not be a matter of "yet", it may turn out to be a matter of being impossible even in principle, sort of like it being impossible even in principle to measure both the speed and location of an object with arbitrary accuracy as the uncertainty principle tells us.

[dmill1220]

HI Blue Fire!
You are absolutely correct!
its a very interesting idea and topic amongst my engineering circle of friends.
The Idea of such a program or data base would be a massive if not an impossible undertaking, or at least the intelligence, of recognizing which discovery would have an impact on other Sciences.
A Scientist or Engineer with an open mind thats not constrained for fear of ridicule from his peers is an invaluable commodity.
Just take a look at The Hawking Paradox, he dropped a bomb on the scientific world years ago, that had them thinking that their physics needed to be modified,
I believe there is going to be a TV show on the Science Channel on Sunday OCt 22nd on how he shook up the scientific world and had everybody up in arms over his Deductions.
have you ever heard of Hawking Radiation?
Yes, we have improved our cross science but why not have, at least a centralized database of new theories or discoveries?
When I was working, in order to stay on the cutting edge of my field, I was always hungry for new concepts and different approaches, of which there was really no centralized location for such information, they were all scattered about.
I cant tell you how many times I've had to go to a job site, only to see a crafty technician or Installer come up with a quicker and cheaper way to do a Task, that, which in turn, resulted in a modification of my design.
I was always looking for new ideas and approaches. Ironically I found that there was more Ideas and concepts from the people in the field doing the work, that required my rethinking of an egineering solution to simplify and reduce costs and Materials.
It seems that each specific Field of Science has its own publication or published Journals.
It would be great if we could centralize all of them in one or more duplicate databases.
we may not be able to acheive the level of artificial intelligence needed to analyze all of this Information, but it sure would be awsome if it could be achieved.
Im Just pondering! Its amazing what goes thru your head when you can no longer work!
LOL!
Dennis

[Dragon Star]

Slightly off basis, but I would like to comment on the blending of science with my .02...

Blending of science is a beautiful thing...when done correctly. Often not because connections are made between science and pseudo-science which sparks defensive debate between the actual science that really is there. Much in the same respect of Religion and Science, in a perfect world it goes together, in this one it doesn't. At least not yet.

So while it is great, it can also be risky to science it's self, especially with Cosmology and Astronomy with the fact that the interest level is...not so great because the direct affect to the individual is considerably low. If we turn science into a soap opera it's not going to advance as much as if we work together instead of trying to pop each-others balloons as science and man often like to do.