Comment by zkmon

20 days ago

For thinkers of that time, there was a vast unexplored green field infront of them, to plough and harvest. It's not hard to imagine ploughing skill of one field could help ploughing others too. My friend used to say, if you have quick enough reflexes to play table tennis, you can be good at other sports too.

I wonder if the people in 100 years will refer to the current time period (now) the same way as we sometimes do to about ~100 years ago. As in did the scientist and curious minds in the last century really have this golden period to just wander around in all these greenfields, whereas nowadays the fields are not so green anymore. Or is this just a normal phenomena of any time period?

  • It certainly was easier to get an academic job circa 1960. Things have gotten more difficult in physics because the experimental frontier has moved further away, I mean, you can make whatever theory you want and it is meaningless because we don’t have a machine that can measure the neutrino mass, observe neutrino decay, confirm physics at the GUT or string scale, detect the darkon, etc.

    Even something like Mandelbrot’s work was disappointing if you were in grad school in the 1990s because it was not like enough progress was made in fractals post-Mandelbrot that you could get a job working on fractals or chaos.

  • There is a third type: rabbit. This is a golden age of rabbit holes. A quick rabbit jumps through complicated holes and tunnels to escape from something or chase something.

    We can also call someone chasing a rabbit a fox. Like all the ones chasing LLM agents now.