"Committees are, by nature, timid. Based on the premise of safety in numbers, content to survive, rather than take risks and move independently ahead"... Dr. Ferdinand Porsche
Very timid, I agree. And they lack human ideals, most of the time. The best thing that’s come out of a board of trustees is Walmart, and that’s almost entirely through happy coincidence that some people will pay double at the Kroger across the street. In the context of science, I think we are buying in to the religion of science, which is not science at all, and that’s why we are confining ourselves to studying dark matter with no regard for alternatives. Really there are so few. We don’t use the colliders for groundbreaking experiments, we’re afraid of what might happen. I want to know what the other spin neutrino is dang it. We could be making anti-fluorine to find out but we are stuck in literal dark ages of religious zealotry masquerading as science.
When I was doing my masters, I was bored and shocked at how much time was spent in group meetings formatting papers and fiddling with the margins so they confirm to the exact demands of the paper they were trying to publish.
@@simperingham Well was there to observe, but, no essentially the entire team, maybe 5 to 8 people in a research group (depending on who was free) would set up regular meeting, and most of the 2 to 3 hour meeting would be going through any paper the group were attempting to publish, and format the paper, while some of the issues were technical, most of it was looking over the publisher guidance for the specific journal they wanted to publish in, and fiddling with the formatting to make it "easier to read". It's was actually understandable as getting it published was important, and no doubt Bourne of experience. I actually blame the journals for their pedantic standards more than the research group who just want to get their stuff through. The people who run the journals are just petty bureaucrats who don't actually understand any of the science they're gate keeping, so they enforce pointless formatting niceties so they can maintain the illusion of elitism by making it difficult to publish in their journal. An absolute rort.
@@GeilerDaddyso don't put to much trust and prestige with people with a high degree, because chances are they only have knowledge, but very little imagination.
@@zleopatra In the Arts, filtering until an act "makes it big" is the work of many minds evaluating its conformity to the trend - and the underlying doctrine too. But depending on what discipline they artistic content can still be the result of the work or at least the ideas and guidance of one or a few...of course always based on previous artists and with usually a great deal of "production" work afterwards.
I think rather what he means is that you shouldn't have a hierarchy of a commitment or univeristy or private company that is organizing the way you do science. Rather one or very small groups of scientists producing proofs,ideas, and experiments and letting the larger scientific audience peer review and check these ideas. Instead of letting ideas be formed before the science happens by previously mentioned organizations.
could it be more that there was a perfect storm of methodology and technology that led to this explosion in understanding and now we're trying to understand things that are so complex that it takes this level of organization to even get there?
@@tonoornottonothey don’t need to be opposed, someone can use advanced te h and have big groups. As long as both work in a creative way rather than going at it like it’s office time, we would have creative breakthroughs.
Because science works very well we have answered the questions which are easily answereable. Now we're left with harder and harder questions. Isaac Newton didn't have to build a gravitational wave detector to further the knowledge. Now we do have to do such things.
@@ThanosSofroniou No he missed the entire point. Scientists are not using more expensive equipment and working in groups because of "prestige & big money... conformism to 'hierarchy of science'". They are not "not thinking freely" anymore. Science has always progressed and checked by making observations of reality, to differentiate between different explanations. Now the observations we have to make to differentiate between explanations are way more complicated to make then in the past. Because obviously easy observations have been made already and the more wrong explanations we had in the past have already been rejected. It's just harder to progress/change now.
Yep. The more we learn, the more specialised we have to be to keep making discoveries. The broader perspectives occur early and then we expound on those with ever more precise focus. No corporation is stopping another Einstein from developing an equivalent to Special or General Relativity. He only required the time to think. And anyone today can publish a paper and argue their case.
As a counterpoint, the problems of science are now too large to be solved by a single creative mind. So a new important skill as a scientist is to foster collaboration and have excellent people skills. This is not what tortured geniuses in ivory towers like to hear.
"foster collaboration and have excellent people skills" Finding this line everywhere myself, in most jobs regular people work you'll find that same ethic. I believe the translation from corpo speak to regular language is: "It's not WHAT you know but WHO you know" However, you would think that with all the talk of "diversity" and "inclusion" today that we would be focusing our efforts at including people who find it harder to connect with social skills, and to find way of embracing the, as you say it, tortured geniuses.
Science is almost never the result of a single creative mind. Einstein's general relativity was probably the only closest example (but still was not true). Newton said he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants. McGrilchrist is a charlatan serving up word salad. He should stick to self help books. Not sure why he is even on the same stage as Penrose.
Ye, his take is retarded when you realise that that was all of the lowest hanging fruit in terms of discovery. Of course a single person could do that.
I disagree. The problems of science now is conformity. Just look at the electric universe theory. It puts the big bang theory to shame, yet it's disregarded as true science because it doesn't go along with mainstream cosmology.
could be true if we didn t lost 50 years in string theory while a russian man living in his mom basement got point carré conjecture solve alone, middled finger everyone and left. How many month of lhc have we lost trying to find those low energy supersimetry, counting particules to see if some gone missing. I think we are witnessing the death rattle of thousand of life lost into the mathematic artefact of string theory
I think he forgets that in the early 1900s the problems being faced in physics were problems that could be addressed at benchtop scales. Problems like the ultraviolet catastrophe or wave-particle duality could be studied at low energies. There are no more major problems at that scale. The unsolved problems are problems of high energy physics. That alone necessitates major collaborations.
I don't think that's true per se, sure the actual experimenting is less "tabletop" but the theory is all the same, nowadays you're either a theoretical physicist or an experimental one, so there's no room for coming up with a theory and then experimenting to (dis)prove that theory sadly
It's a question of how many benchtop-scale problems have been solved vs how little people can creatively solve problems from benchtops when they are kept away from the endeavour by the ever-scaling pursuit of building on the creativity of previous generations.
@@puckmin3487 nobody will stop you if you have the required expertise. On that note, it’s probably easier for experimentalists to do theoretical work than for theorists to do cutting edge experiments.
Not really. Science today is so immense today because it needs to be. All the easy questions are answered. It's not because of oooooh hierarchy. You can still make your big brained creative ideas known via theoretical papers.
This guy is brilliant. I was unaware of him until I saw this clip. I have since picked up and read (listened to) his book: The Master and his Emmissary.
What a beautifully succinct way of saying we are going backwards due to conformity... no this is not an ironic statement. He fit alot of points into one small burst of honesty. We have to appreciate this view and take a look at how we are now holding science back. The most important subject in terms of moving humanity forward
It was also an era where many contributors were not included because of status and class and in many cases just plain ego. We acknowledge more people now, and that is because it’s has rarely ever just been one person - but also because of the increasing complexity owing to complex equipment and further involved specialities. It has nothing to do with not being able to ‘think freely’.
This is not the reason there are papers with plenty of authors, has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the fact that there are no clearly defined contributions that you should have to quallify as an author. And therefore, you can sign almost anyone on the paper, and if you sign you colleagues on your paper, they will do the same for you. Guess what, number of citations and number of paper are primary metric used to measure quality of someones scientific work and give grant money. Therefore, those that do not engage in this behaviur are disadvantaged compared to those that do, regrdelss of the quality of their work.
You're right, but you're missing his point. I think his point is about how the insistence on having well cited, scientific style papers in the modern day is stifling peoples creativity. And that many a great discoveries were made by a single individual, and not thousands of people contributing to discoveries
Scientific methodology has morphed over time to become the same rigid, hierarchical and dogma-ridden practice of the papacy of old that scientists so like to claim to despise. Original and creative thinking is spurned in favour of lock-step progression down blind alleys always led by established and tenured self-interests. Feeble concepts like gravitons, dark energy and dark matter are the result.
There has always been hierarchy and conformity in science. Much of which historically came from the church. It takes a uniquely insightful and creative mind to produce novel, groundbreaking work. Same as it ever was.
@@polycrystallinecandy No but that’s the point isn’t it? Why aren’t there better explanations. We’re not told “these are placeholder theories and we have no idea what this stuff is”. We are told “science has figured it out”.
It's not a regression. It's that science builds upon prior science, and in the early 20th century, we were at a tipping point of knowledge that was inevitably leading to massive leaps in science. We may never have such a tipping point again, and it may just be slow steady progression from here, which is fine.
Poppycock. You’re just coming up with a convenient and unoriginal narrative. One that’s generally held by all the drone scientists feeding off the corpse of the Enlightenment.
@@chiphill4856the idea that we've reached some sort of Tipping Point and we know more than we don't know is absolutely ludicrous. The ideas, knowledge and understanding that we have no comprehension of is absolutely unfathomable and we've only made a scratch in the surface.
@@norawheeler2555 Not exactly. If you look around yourself right now, whether you are inside or outside, physics and science under everything you see. Everything is the room or building or forest or field or wherever you are, we understand every macroscopic and microscopic object around us and how it behaves. There are, however, still a few small pockets of mystery.
Artists are also aware of a lack of individual creative epiphany among their own. A lot of art, always churning out, yet nothing truly unique, that was also keenly aware of where the art has been and where it might go. The director of the NY Modern Art Museum said "If the new art made me uncomfortable I knew I was going the right direction." The painter Murakami would give a group of students a kind of class with a hard deadline the students had to meet, all in the hope of creating the right balance of creative freedom and the visceral demands of daily life to foment the possibility of a spark becoming a blaze -- a new genius born. Most washed out, I think. Robert Anton Wilson said it took about 60 years between real acceptance of the implications of the latest state of the art (ie. Einstein's Relativity) and using that knowledge to create theory for the direction of future technology. Think Moore's Law, but for human scientific progress. I dunno... If history is any tell a nobody is sitting in the middle of nowhere working on something that will change the world. Hey, it happens still today!
I think this is true for nearly every human endeavor. At the beginning of anything people are able to do what they like until things become better understood and then become heavily constrained, costly and regulated. People's skills become more and more specialised which also narrows the freedom as we rely so much more on other specialists. Efficiency is one of the biggest constraints as well as everything from equipment and labour is just so costly. It's not just a single guy in the backroom of a university doing an experiment. It's just inevitable. It can be demonstrated from the sciences to the building trades.
Also, the way we admit or advance students to the graduate level is highly filtered. One has to perform a certain way on a specific set of tests, otherwise they are left out. For example, I had a professor once who told the class he was taught to derive everything from foundational principles and not to memorize. But when he took standardized tests, it was expected that those tested had memorized formulas and such so as to have more time to finish. So that test filtered out those who really understood the fundamentals in favor of those who had great memories.
This is simply because the things that were relatively easy have been brought to the surface. You can't expect to be making ground breaking, reality shattering discoveries all the time. We have entered the age of science in the 19th century and shed light on a lot of the fundamentals. I'd even say on most of it. What remains are of course the hardest questions.
Assinations and cover ups veiling the " gnosis" and dumbing us down. Same goes for tech. Hidden inspiration held us back.Deliberate throughout the ages. ❤
Being someone in a big group like that, I see that this is completely true, they’re run by commonly accepted (and typically outdated) truths that are irrefutable
Scientist here. (1) I imagine single author breakthroughs are less common because the lower hanging fruit has already been plucked. As a result, it requires more processing power (people) to make progress in a single field. (2) I do agree that a clunky science machine is obstructing progress. There's so much niche research being produced that it's impossible to sort through it. This, I think, prevents bigger picture breakthroughs from happening since everyone is hyper focused on niche topics for prestige. (3) I personally find the machine stifling and it encourages us to think and communicate like robots.
It would help if schools designed the science curriculum to help people to understand science instead memorizing science. Less classroom time, more hands on experimentation. The curriculum should also include experiments that revolutionized the fields. Principia mathematica should be mandatory reading. Euclid's elements should be mandatory reading. A basic understanding of all major fields of science and how they relate should be mandatory for all science curriculum. I skipped over half of my attendance in college and I got degrees in chemistry and math. It's a joke especially for the cost
Bravo, this comment is spot on. There is so much tunnel vision it's insane, the current day scientist completely forget to look past their microscopes.
Back in those days, us DIY'ers were people like Franklin, Hooke, Newton, Leibniz, Einstein. Now, you cannot just go get some uranium to experiment with. The average person that is not involved with a university is not taken seriously. This is a huge mistake.
Collaborative working and communication are getting more rewards in modern days. That's why the rate off innovation is slowed down, I hope with AGI it again increases in future. Everything needs refferences to reach the top, so the opportunity for middle men to get diamond rich.
I think the speaker confuses fundamental theoretical work with experimental/observational projects. Also, I'm certain that original insights are possible in large groups, since they work in many sub-groups of different sizes. Furthermore, big empirical projects require the processing of vast amounts of data with meticulous attention to statistics.
The questions have gotten more harder and to find those proofs has become exponentially more difficult, thus, more people how to come together to make the slightest advancement on x fiel of science. What we need is way more funding and incentivize science even more, but we’re getting comfy. While science is the only thing that can guarantee men a future.
Very clever! It is insane about this 'references'. I was MS, MD at University Clinic, writing some sci. papers. Once you needed cca 20, today cca 200! Mostly just vasted time...
Right! That argument of Ian could surely be questioned. With "an enormous number of names attached to research papers" makes it very difficult for fallacies/mistakes to slip through, would be one counter argument ...
Science makes huge progress still. It always has been collective - with all the imperfections attached. Restoring the cult of the genius is not an ambition for science.
The scientific advancement does experience the law of diminishing returns, which is a concept from economics that describes the point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested. This concept can be applied to scientific progress, as the ease of discovering new elements or making technological breakthroughs tends to increase with each successive discovery or breakthrough, but the rate of progress slows down over time. For example, phosphorus was discovered relatively easily compared to the difficulty of discovering plutonium or higher elements. Similarly, the rate of technological advancement, as measured by the number of U.S. patents per million people per year, has been declining since around 1915, despite the exponential growth in computer processing power.
I agree. I feel as though, working alone or exploring alone is looked down upon, but I also think it comes from business. It almost seems as if research funds are only rewarded when a big business needs smart people to dig deeper into a subject and only if that subject has the ear of many people in a domain. Otherwise, the types of discoveries we need to make now are expensive and most requires some sort of funding. You can be an absolute genius interested in quantum computing, but you can’t make any breakthrough unless you have funding behind your exploration.
The difficulty of obtaining knowledge does not remain the same. There are easy discoveries, and difficult discoveries. The easy ones get discovered first, leaving the difficult ones.
@@chiphill4856 no, and it wasn't early either. it was much more difficult than newton's, and so took hundreds of years, but it's probably not as difficult as a unified theory
It’s a balance of both. Of course, theorists will be mostly in small numbers, collaborating in pairs or small groups. But on the experimental side, as the questions have become deeper and experiments more ambitious, it’s necessitated larger and larger projects with massive equipment, which requires collaboration on an immense scale. Take large colliders, for example-high energy physics is an area that requires many, many names.
We are probably in one of the most creative periods in scientific history. I suspect future historians will look back on this as a renaissance. In numerous fields, there is alternative thinking: consciousness studies, neuroscience, social sciences, quantum biology, nutrition studies, etc. But one wouldn't know that if all they knew about science was what big biz MSM is reporting.
Creativity never comes from one mind, because thinking never harpenden in a vacuum. Even thinkers in the humanities are in constant conversation with the texts that their thinking is built on.
I don’t think the group part is the issue, but rather a pressure into working in a certain way. You can be incredibly creative even in a group, if everyone is participating in it and is not forced to do research and brainstorming like office work and corporate meetings.
It’s hard to imagine what Prof. Penrose was thinking during this talk. He’s done it all and seen it all over his many years of brilliant and diverse work.
There is definitely something to this argument but it neglects the possibility that we may have reached a threshold where the discoveries ahead of us are less likely to be able to be solved by a single human in a single lifetime.
No it’s not. It’s because we have peaked, science is dead, comedy is dead, cinematography is dead, rock is dead, dance music is dead, hip-hop is dead, music itself is dead, the art of writing is dead. We have become more superficial, shallow, chaotic, divided and violent. We have peaked plain and simple. We are on a downward trajectory. It could be a lull but it’s more likely the canary in the mine for civilisation because let’s face it, we don’t deserve this beautiful earth.
But I totally agree with the scientific method. There may be too many people stirring the pot but consent is really important. Science has become so much larger than it was in 1911
We've entertained the illusion that Science could be farmed through PROCESS. It has only led to progress in... process. Scientific discovery is a spark that can't be farmed. It has to be charmed.
My take is that every one of those 1000 would love to be the person who found the anomaly that opens up the next physics. And its going to take the data from the giant machines. If Mr Gilchrist thinks there are unexplored, cheaper avenues then go for it.....there are any number of willing acolytes out there.
Agreed, the academic field has become ridiculously tedues and unworthy the time and effort. My Master was horrible experience it exsusted me to the point where I let go my PHD ambition, and indulged my self in the work market where ironically no one asked what degrees you have obtained
The answer to this is that nobody thinks out of the box . The hard questions mentioned below were as “hard”to past scientist- they simply just did not thought they new and questioned the right things. Things today like : How did this evolve has this redicoulous answer which everybody agree to: From a big explosion based on that nothing can travel faster than light. We stopped by questioning MATTER something we can measure with matter . How can something material be moved by something immeterial? That is like what Newton asked - when he asked himself: how can some invisible thing move something visible? Oh boy we have still so far to go and everyone thinks we are there alredy - thats why we dont get anywhere. Richard Feynman aknowledge it when he said from a question about consciousness : “I only talk about what we can meassure”
Its one thing to create conformity. It's another thing be drawn to conformity. But it's not a question, humans are individuals as well as multi-individual organisms. But again, this construct is one of the mind and not the physical so we are back to the mind, and being free to think.
Scientific breakthroughs aren’t linear with time. They maybe linear with the number of people working on stuff and not forgetting serendipitous breakthroughs.
I think in the past they didn’t have credit to the people they shared their knowledge. They just represented it it’s all one person. No research can be done without getting outside resources.
In the old days there were other hurdles, barriers and issues, such as not nearly as many young men OR WOMEN had the opportunity to persue education to anywhere near the level we have today. Conditions have bottlenecked and it sucks, but it will eventually evolve and produce solutions and something we probably can't imagine. If you're in an advanced field you wanted, don't despair. It's very likely you'd be on a farm or in a laborious job or have died of disease instead of being involved at all in science100+ years ago.
I beg to differ on this viewpoint. While it’s true that great advances were made by individual contributors in the fields of science, we have come to a stage where we are asking questions that are way bigger for only the individual contributors to solve. Collaboration is the way forward to answer deeper questions of the universe, to understand its true nature. Look what Internet has done to humanity, isn’t that just a prime example of collaboration.
Oft the Billitary BeDustrial complex is built by "science" upon a comfortable accumulation of misinterpretations and misbeliefs. Why? The conversation rewards and entertains, and invites refreshments.
He is right. Let's not forget the power of ONE in science - An individual genius like Newton, Einstein, Lemaitre, Faraday, Tesla, etc. One who can think independently and come up with breakthrough ideas with practical industrial applications for the greatest benefit of humankind. We need more like these lone idividual geniuses especially since the 17th century up to now, the problem of TRUE NATURE OF GRAVITY has not been solved. But one man, an individual lone researcher, has solved this gravity conundrum in 30 years. Check his published papers at two science journals ACADEMIA and REAL TRUE NATURE or google the name of the author ROEL REAL ROVIRA. Thank you.
"Committees are, by nature, timid. Based on the premise of safety in numbers, content to survive, rather than take risks and move independently ahead"... Dr. Ferdinand Porsche
The thing was maybe it about cost some R&D is really expensive to do...
Very timid, I agree. And they lack human ideals, most of the time. The best thing that’s come out of a board of trustees is Walmart, and that’s almost entirely through happy coincidence that some people will pay double at the Kroger across the street. In the context of science, I think we are buying in to the religion of science, which is not science at all, and that’s why we are confining ourselves to studying dark matter with no regard for alternatives. Really there are so few. We don’t use the colliders for groundbreaking experiments, we’re afraid of what might happen. I want to know what the other spin neutrino is dang it. We could be making anti-fluorine to find out but we are stuck in literal dark ages of religious zealotry masquerading as science.
@@khairulnaeim756it’s only expensive by choice.
When I was doing my masters, I was bored and shocked at how much time was spent in group meetings formatting papers and fiddling with the margins so they confirm to the exact demands of the paper they were trying to publish.
Galileo who could have ground his own lenses, versus the Hubble telescope, both can see the moons of Jupiter
Surely that only needs one person??
Unless some of you were there to learn and make sure everyone understood the requirements.
@@simperingham
Well was there to observe, but, no essentially the entire team, maybe 5 to 8 people in a research group (depending on who was free) would set up regular meeting, and most of the 2 to 3 hour meeting would be going through any paper the group were attempting to publish, and format the paper, while some of the issues were technical, most of it was looking over the publisher guidance for the specific journal they wanted to publish in, and fiddling with the formatting to make it "easier to read".
It's was actually understandable as getting it published was important, and no doubt Bourne of experience.
I actually blame the journals for their pedantic standards more than the research group who just want to get their stuff through. The people who run the journals are just petty bureaucrats who don't actually understand any of the science they're gate keeping, so they enforce pointless formatting niceties so they can maintain the illusion of elitism by making it difficult to publish in their journal.
An absolute rort.
In law that's what paralegals are for
The guiding documents for my masters thesis had one page of real directions and eight pages of formatting requirements.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein
so what?
@@GeilerDaddyso don't put to much trust and prestige with people with a high degree, because chances are they only have knowledge, but very little imagination.
@@typhooni3149 That doesn't make any sense at all. Could it be that you're stupid or something?
Not true you can imagine but if you have no action discipline it’s worthless. Imagination is another word for illusory.
M=E/c², God's creation equation not getting something from nothing but getting something physical from something not physical ie God's spirit energy.
Love how Penrose laughs at the beginning and the timing 😂
He laughed because he knows its BS that "art is the work of one mind" - such an ignorant statement.
- but you have no idea of why he laugh - do you ?
@@zleopatra
In the Arts, filtering until an act "makes it big" is the work of many minds evaluating its conformity to the trend - and the underlying doctrine too. But depending on what discipline they artistic content can still be the result of the work or at least the ideas and guidance of one or a few...of course always based on previous artists and with usually a great deal of "production" work afterwards.
His laugh expreses HIS emotion at the moment. It means nothing (more).
I think the main issue of science is relaying truths, creativity comes into play when passion is involved.
PASSION WHO, WHERE?!?!?!
they had a breakthrough in the "science" of how to get money
And ego.
😂
Exactly and is how $$$ controls outcomes like now with GW
Tale as old as time. We can never seem to get out of our own way.
Maybe we've specialized so much in each field. We need experts from different fields to work on one problem.
So like more collaboration 😂
Within mathematics, Langland's is a good start.😊
I think rather what he means is that you shouldn't have a hierarchy of a commitment or univeristy or private company that is organizing the way you do science. Rather one or very small groups of scientists producing proofs,ideas, and experiments and letting the larger scientific audience peer review and check these ideas. Instead of letting ideas be formed before the science happens by previously mentioned organizations.
No it’s Politics.
Except typically they are all from one or very closely related fields.
could it be more that there was a perfect storm of methodology and technology that led to this explosion in understanding and now we're trying to understand things that are so complex that it takes this level of organization to even get there?
Yea dude jump through any mental gymnastics you can to avoid the fact science has become a corrupt dogmatic institution
these ideas are obviously opposed to one another but they both have some merit to me.
@@tonoornottonothey don’t need to be opposed, someone can use advanced te h and have big groups. As long as both work in a creative way rather than going at it like it’s office time, we would have creative breakthroughs.
Because science works very well we have answered the questions which are easily answereable. Now we're left with harder and harder questions.
Isaac Newton didn't have to build a gravitational wave detector to further the knowledge. Now we do have to do such things.
Issac had falling apple that is enough
@@subhuman3408he had nothing, probably copied to from someone and did modification.
That's how since worked back in the days 😂😂
You missed the entire point
@@ThanosSofroniou No he missed the entire point. Scientists are not using more expensive equipment and working in groups because of "prestige & big money... conformism to 'hierarchy of science'". They are not "not thinking freely" anymore.
Science has always progressed and checked by making observations of reality, to differentiate between different explanations. Now the observations we have to make to differentiate between explanations are way more complicated to make then in the past. Because obviously easy observations have been made already and the more wrong explanations we had in the past have already been rejected. It's just harder to progress/change now.
Yep. The more we learn, the more specialised we have to be to keep making discoveries. The broader perspectives occur early and then we expound on those with ever more precise focus.
No corporation is stopping another Einstein from developing an equivalent to Special or General Relativity. He only required the time to think. And anyone today can publish a paper and argue their case.
As a counterpoint, the problems of science are now too large to be solved by a single creative mind. So a new important skill as a scientist is to foster collaboration and have excellent people skills. This is not what tortured geniuses in ivory towers like to hear.
"foster collaboration and have excellent people skills"
Finding this line everywhere myself, in most jobs regular people work you'll find that same ethic.
I believe the translation from corpo speak to regular language is: "It's not WHAT you know but WHO you know"
However, you would think that with all the talk of "diversity" and "inclusion" today that we would be focusing our efforts at including people who find it harder to connect with social skills, and to find way of embracing the, as you say it, tortured geniuses.
Science is almost never the result of a single creative mind. Einstein's general relativity was probably the only closest example (but still was not true). Newton said he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
McGrilchrist is a charlatan serving up word salad. He should stick to self help books. Not sure why he is even on the same stage as Penrose.
Ye, his take is retarded when you realise that that was all of the lowest hanging fruit in terms of discovery.
Of course a single person could do that.
I disagree. The problems of science now is conformity. Just look at the electric universe theory. It puts the big bang theory to shame, yet it's disregarded as true science because it doesn't go along with mainstream cosmology.
could be true if we didn t lost 50 years in string theory while a russian man living in his mom basement got point carré conjecture solve alone, middled finger everyone and left. How many month of lhc have we lost trying to find those low energy supersimetry, counting particules to see if some gone missing. I think we are witnessing the death rattle of thousand of life lost into the mathematic artefact of string theory
I think he forgets that in the early 1900s the problems being faced in physics were problems that could be addressed at benchtop scales. Problems like the ultraviolet catastrophe or wave-particle duality could be studied at low energies. There are no more major problems at that scale. The unsolved problems are problems of high energy physics. That alone necessitates major collaborations.
cool ,thanks ,....🤔
I don't think that's true per se, sure the actual experimenting is less "tabletop" but the theory is all the same, nowadays you're either a theoretical physicist or an experimental one, so there's no room for coming up with a theory and then experimenting to (dis)prove that theory sadly
Electric Universe
It's a question of how many benchtop-scale problems have been solved vs how little people can creatively solve problems from benchtops when they are kept away from the endeavour by the ever-scaling pursuit of building on the creativity of previous generations.
@@puckmin3487 nobody will stop you if you have the required expertise. On that note, it’s probably easier for experimentalists to do theoretical work than for theorists to do cutting edge experiments.
❤ Brilliant observation.
Not really. Science today is so immense today because it needs to be. All the easy questions are answered. It's not because of oooooh hierarchy. You can still make your big brained creative ideas known via theoretical papers.
This guy is brilliant. I was unaware of him until I saw this clip. I have since picked up and read (listened to) his book: The Master and his Emmissary.
@@JohnS-zv7hf based on this 1 video, no he isnt.
@@CS.AtheistChannel.VoteBidenAOC you’re proving his point 😂
@@JohnS-zv7hf He's a twit discussing stuff of which he is ignorant.
Sometimes isolation is the best form of creativity
What a beautifully succinct way of saying we are going backwards due to conformity... no this is not an ironic statement. He fit alot of points into one small burst of honesty. We have to appreciate this view and take a look at how we are now holding science back. The most important subject in terms of moving humanity forward
It was also an era where many contributors were not included because of status and class and in many cases just plain ego. We acknowledge more people now, and that is because it’s has rarely ever just been one person - but also because of the increasing complexity owing to complex equipment and further involved specialities. It has nothing to do with not being able to ‘think freely’.
This
AGREE 100%
Many contributors? You exaggerate I think.
A Brilliant man . Honest and brave , free thinking and insightful who brings new thinking .📯
This is not the reason there are papers with plenty of authors, has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the fact that there are no clearly defined contributions that you should have to quallify as an author. And therefore, you can sign almost anyone on the paper, and if you sign you colleagues on your paper, they will do the same for you. Guess what, number of citations and number of paper are primary metric used to measure quality of someones scientific work and give grant money. Therefore, those that do not engage in this behaviur are disadvantaged compared to those that do, regrdelss of the quality of their work.
So the whole field is toxic, gotcha.
This seems wholly consistent with what he was saying 🧐
Not that i know hes right or anything
Wouldn't that eventually damage people's reputations though? Adding their names to low quality or even fraudulent papers?
You're right, but you're missing his point. I think his point is about how the insistence on having well cited, scientific style papers in the modern day is stifling peoples creativity. And that many a great discoveries were made by a single individual, and not thousands of people contributing to discoveries
@@0ptixs I dont really think that was the point tbh.
Scientific methodology has morphed over time to become the same rigid, hierarchical and dogma-ridden practice of the papacy of old that scientists so like to claim to despise. Original and creative thinking is spurned in favour of lock-step progression down blind alleys always led by established and tenured self-interests. Feeble concepts like gravitons, dark energy and dark matter are the result.
Thank you! You appear to be one of the few sane commenters here.
There has always been hierarchy and conformity in science. Much of which historically came from the church. It takes a uniquely insightful and creative mind to produce novel, groundbreaking work. Same as it ever was.
"feeble" concepts like dark matter and dark energy? You have a better explanation for gravitational observations at the scale of galaxies?
@@chiphill4856 same but different. It’s a lot more about money and jobs now, “filling in the gaps”.
@@polycrystallinecandy No but that’s the point isn’t it? Why aren’t there better explanations. We’re not told “these are placeholder theories and we have no idea what this stuff is”. We are told “science has figured it out”.
It's not a regression. It's that science builds upon prior science, and in the early 20th century, we were at a tipping point of knowledge that was inevitably leading to massive leaps in science. We may never have such a tipping point again, and it may just be slow steady progression from here, which is fine.
Poppycock. You’re just coming up with a convenient and unoriginal narrative. One that’s generally held by all the drone scientists feeding off the corpse of the Enlightenment.
All lies!
It's true that as we progress , there is less to learn and it's sometimes es harder to understand that last small hidden percentage.
@@chiphill4856the idea that we've reached some sort of Tipping Point and we know more than we don't know is absolutely ludicrous. The ideas, knowledge and understanding that we have no comprehension of is absolutely unfathomable and we've only made a scratch in the surface.
@@norawheeler2555 Not exactly. If you look around yourself right now, whether you are inside or outside, physics and science under everything you see. Everything is the room or building or forest or field or wherever you are, we understand every macroscopic and microscopic object around us and how it behaves. There are, however, still a few small pockets of mystery.
Artists are also aware of a lack of individual creative epiphany among their own. A lot of art, always churning out, yet nothing truly unique, that was also keenly aware of where the art has been and where it might go.
The director of the NY Modern Art Museum said "If the new art made me uncomfortable I knew I was going the right direction."
The painter Murakami would give a group of students a kind of class with a hard deadline the students had to meet, all in the hope of creating the right balance of creative freedom and the visceral demands of daily life to foment the possibility of a spark becoming a blaze -- a new genius born. Most washed out, I think.
Robert Anton Wilson said it took about 60 years between real acceptance of the implications of the latest state of the art (ie. Einstein's Relativity) and using that knowledge to create theory for the direction of future technology. Think Moore's Law, but for human scientific progress. I dunno...
If history is any tell a nobody is sitting in the middle of nowhere working on something that will change the world.
Hey, it happens still today!
A new society of thinkers from all disciplines must be established
McGilchrist is a true genius and polymath of our time
Not a polymath. Smart, sure, but not as genius as made out to be.
I think this is true for nearly every human endeavor. At the beginning of anything people are able to do what they like until things become better understood and then become heavily constrained, costly and regulated. People's skills become more and more specialised which also narrows the freedom as we rely so much more on other specialists. Efficiency is one of the biggest constraints as well as everything from equipment and labour is just so costly. It's not just a single guy in the backroom of a university doing an experiment. It's just inevitable. It can be demonstrated from the sciences to the building trades.
Also, the way we admit or advance students to the graduate level is highly filtered. One has to perform a certain way on a specific set of tests, otherwise they are left out. For example, I had a professor once who told the class he was taught to derive everything from foundational principles and not to memorize. But when he took standardized tests, it was expected that those tested had memorized formulas and such so as to have more time to finish. So that test filtered out those who really understood the fundamentals in favor of those who had great memories.
This is simply because the things that were relatively easy have been brought to the surface. You can't expect to be making ground breaking, reality shattering discoveries all the time.
We have entered the age of science in the 19th century and shed light on a lot of the fundamentals. I'd even say on most of it. What remains are of course the hardest questions.
Damnit he didn't give me time to guess the Rutherford paper only had one name...I was going to guess Rutherford! 😤
Assinations and cover ups veiling the " gnosis" and dumbing us down. Same goes for tech. Hidden inspiration held us back.Deliberate throughout the ages. ❤
this is one of the reasons why people should question the orthodoxy and never, ever simply "trust the science".
What?
@@lekebabfrancais9018 Kinda speaks for itself. Did you hear what the man said?
Never trust science, but do science.
Being someone in a big group like that, I see that this is completely true, they’re run by commonly accepted (and typically outdated) truths that are irrefutable
Academic freedom is the most pertinent issue facing the university, thank you for platforming this discussion! 👍
Scientist here. (1) I imagine single author breakthroughs are less common because the lower hanging fruit has already been plucked. As a result, it requires more processing power (people) to make progress in a single field. (2) I do agree that a clunky science machine is obstructing progress. There's so much niche research being produced that it's impossible to sort through it. This, I think, prevents bigger picture breakthroughs from happening since everyone is hyper focused on niche topics for prestige. (3) I personally find the machine stifling and it encourages us to think and communicate like robots.
It would help if schools designed the science curriculum to help people to understand science instead memorizing science. Less classroom time, more hands on experimentation. The curriculum should also include experiments that revolutionized the fields. Principia mathematica should be mandatory reading. Euclid's elements should be mandatory reading. A basic understanding of all major fields of science and how they relate should be mandatory for all science curriculum. I skipped over half of my attendance in college and I got degrees in chemistry and math. It's a joke especially for the cost
Bravo, this comment is spot on. There is so much tunnel vision it's insane, the current day scientist completely forget to look past their microscopes.
Great video
Back in those days, us DIY'ers were people like Franklin, Hooke, Newton, Leibniz, Einstein. Now, you cannot just go get some uranium to experiment with. The average person that is not involved with a university is not taken seriously. This is a huge mistake.
Spot on.
Collaborative working and communication are getting more rewards in modern days. That's why the rate off innovation is slowed down, I hope with AGI it again increases in future. Everything needs refferences to reach the top, so the opportunity for middle men to get diamond rich.
I think the speaker confuses fundamental theoretical work with experimental/observational projects. Also, I'm certain that original insights are possible in large groups, since they work in many sub-groups of different sizes. Furthermore, big empirical projects require the processing of vast amounts of data with meticulous attention to statistics.
The questions have gotten more harder and to find those proofs has become exponentially more difficult, thus, more people how to come together to make the slightest advancement on x fiel of science. What we need is way more funding and incentivize science even more, but we’re getting comfy. While science is the only thing that can guarantee men a future.
Science discoveries is not a linear process. We need an unknown time between big discoveries. It may take thousands of years for the next big one.
Thank you! The public wants answers!!
Agreed, innovative breakthroughs have reduced precipitously.
Very clever!
It is insane about this 'references'.
I was MS, MD at University Clinic, writing some sci. papers. Once you needed cca 20, today cca 200! Mostly just vasted time...
ROFL You didn't let Pembrose reply? I could practically see him giggling at that nonsense.
Right! That argument of Ian could surely be questioned. With "an enormous number of names attached to research papers" makes it very difficult for fallacies/mistakes to slip through, would be one counter argument ...
@@kjelladrian3205 Group think would be a counter the counter,
We are simply too dang smart to behave so stupidly. Thanks you for raising our awareness Sir.
Brilliant.
Bravo
Our new masters don't want to finance anything exploratory, that'd rather look for scientists who build things which are derivatives of former works.
I heard Penrose give a short speech at the opening the Oxford University Press warehouse in Cary, North Carolina, USA.
I asked the same question to my science teacher in school and to my professors in university. Never got a clear answer as this.
Science makes huge progress still. It always has been collective - with all the imperfections attached. Restoring the cult of the genius is not an ambition for science.
The scientific advancement does experience the law of diminishing returns, which is a concept from economics that describes the point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested. This concept can be applied to scientific progress, as the ease of discovering new elements or making technological breakthroughs tends to increase with each successive discovery or breakthrough, but the rate of progress slows down over time. For example, phosphorus was discovered relatively easily compared to the difficulty of discovering plutonium or higher elements. Similarly, the rate of technological advancement, as measured by the number of U.S. patents per million people per year, has been declining since around 1915, despite the exponential growth in computer processing power.
Now we know why Penrose was asleep in the other clip.
❤
I agree, a lot of people dont even know what they are think unless they ask somebody😅
I agree. I feel as though, working alone or exploring alone is looked down upon, but I also think it comes from business. It almost seems as if research funds are only rewarded when a big business needs smart people to dig deeper into a subject and only if that subject has the ear of many people in a domain. Otherwise, the types of discoveries we need to make now are expensive and most requires some sort of funding. You can be an absolute genius interested in quantum computing, but you can’t make any breakthrough unless you have funding behind your exploration.
The difficulty of obtaining knowledge does not remain the same. There are easy discoveries, and difficult discoveries. The easy ones get discovered first, leaving the difficult ones.
Do you consider general relativity an easy problem?
@@chiphill4856 no, and it wasn't early either. it was much more difficult than newton's, and so took hundreds of years, but it's probably not as difficult as a unified theory
It’s a balance of both. Of course, theorists will be mostly in small numbers, collaborating in pairs or small groups. But on the experimental side, as the questions have become deeper and experiments more ambitious, it’s necessitated larger and larger projects with massive equipment, which requires collaboration on an immense scale. Take large colliders, for example-high energy physics is an area that requires many, many names.
All I’ve meditated on the last few weeks.
You are correct
Everything has become less creative. Music, Art, literature, and science.
Also isolation is important. Developing ideas is not linear, but in the global academia there is a convergance towards one solution, good or bad.
We are probably in one of the most creative periods in scientific history. I suspect future historians will look back on this as a renaissance. In numerous fields, there is alternative thinking: consciousness studies, neuroscience, social sciences, quantum biology, nutrition studies, etc. But one wouldn't know that if all they knew about science was what big biz MSM is reporting.
Creativity never comes from one mind, because thinking never harpenden in a vacuum. Even thinkers in the humanities are in constant conversation with the texts that their thinking is built on.
The harder the idea, the more people you need. Particle accelerators aren't made by 1 person.
It is also because frontier has advanced much further and things are more complex needing complex equipments and support of other scientists.
Always 2 sides to a coin .
The wise know better.
Age and Wisedom don't always go hand in hand
I don’t think the group part is the issue, but rather a pressure into working in a certain way. You can be incredibly creative even in a group, if everyone is participating in it and is not forced to do research and brainstorming like office work and corporate meetings.
It’s not just the Sciences.
It’s hard to imagine what Prof. Penrose was thinking during this talk. He’s done it all and seen it all over his many years of brilliant and diverse work.
He’s thinking, “Oh, bollocks.”
For him to say this has not happened to the arts is indigenous and telling
👍👍❤️❤️
There is definitely something to this argument but it neglects the possibility that we may have reached a threshold where the discoveries ahead of us are less likely to be able to be solved by a single human in a single lifetime.
No it’s not. It’s because we have peaked, science is dead, comedy is dead, cinematography is dead, rock is dead, dance music is dead, hip-hop is dead, music itself is dead, the art of writing is dead. We have become more superficial, shallow, chaotic, divided and violent.
We have peaked plain and simple. We are on a downward trajectory. It could be a lull but it’s more likely the canary in the mine for civilisation because let’s face it, we don’t deserve this beautiful earth.
There was a time need is the mother of all invention , now business is the mother if all inventions
Very true Sir 🤘🏻
Schwarzschild wrote his theory in a tent on the battlefield. There are no many man like that
But I totally agree with the scientific method. There may be too many people stirring the pot but consent is really important. Science has become so much larger than it was in 1911
We've entertained the illusion that Science could be farmed through PROCESS. It has only led to progress in... process. Scientific discovery is a spark that can't be farmed. It has to be charmed.
My take is that every one of those 1000 would love to be the person who found the anomaly that opens up the next physics. And its going to take the data from the giant machines. If Mr Gilchrist thinks there are unexplored, cheaper avenues then go for it.....there are any number of willing acolytes out there.
I think the slow down is coming form secrecy the potential military advantage on the cutting edge
Agreed, the academic field has become ridiculously tedues and unworthy the time and effort. My Master was horrible experience it exsusted me to the point where I let go my PHD ambition, and indulged my self in the work market where ironically no one asked what degrees you have obtained
yup...Elon musk deserves a Nobel prize... but probably his corporation will get it..or a team of engineers...
The answer to this is that nobody thinks out of the box . The hard questions mentioned below were as “hard”to past scientist- they simply just did not thought they new and questioned the right things.
Things today like : How did this evolve has this redicoulous answer which everybody agree to:
From a big explosion based on that nothing can travel faster than light. We stopped by questioning MATTER something we can measure with matter . How can something material be moved by something immeterial?
That is like what Newton asked - when he asked himself: how can some invisible thing move something visible?
Oh boy we have still so far to go and everyone thinks we are there alredy - thats why we dont get anywhere.
Richard Feynman aknowledge it when he said from a question about consciousness : “I only talk about what we can meassure”
Epic music
Absolutely true, ten fingers is controlled by one mind, not the other way around.
Its one thing to create conformity.
It's another thing be drawn to conformity.
But it's not a question, humans are individuals as well as multi-individual organisms. But again, this construct is one of the mind and not the physical so we are back to the mind, and being free to think.
Creativity is not the priority. Veracity is.
A new idea, model, theory has to be created before it can be verified bud
Scientific breakthroughs aren’t linear with time. They maybe linear with the number of people working on stuff and not forgetting serendipitous breakthroughs.
He is 100% right!!
I think in the past they didn’t have credit to the people they shared their knowledge. They just represented it it’s all one person. No research can be done without getting outside resources.
No its just simply that the more advanced something is the harder it is to make progress and the MORE collaborative effort is needed
Today we can not even define WHAT IS A WOMAN
Electrical engineering essentially stopped at the invention of the meter.
Ian is a true genius and inspired me to go back to uni
In the old days there were other hurdles, barriers and issues, such as not nearly as many young men OR WOMEN had the opportunity to persue education to anywhere near the level we have today.
Conditions have bottlenecked and it sucks, but it will eventually evolve and produce solutions and something we probably can't imagine.
If you're in an advanced field you wanted, don't despair. It's very likely you'd be on a farm or in a laborious job or have died of disease instead of being involved at all in science100+ years ago.
I beg to differ on this viewpoint. While it’s true that great advances were made by individual contributors in the fields of science, we have come to a stage where we are asking questions that are way bigger for only the individual contributors to solve. Collaboration is the way forward to answer deeper questions of the universe, to understand its true nature. Look what Internet has done to humanity, isn’t that just a prime example of collaboration.
You build people preciselly like you want to act.
Oft the Billitary BeDustrial complex is built by "science" upon a comfortable accumulation of misinterpretations and misbeliefs. Why? The conversation rewards and entertains, and invites refreshments.
This is why theoretical physics is the way
music in background?
so true
He is right. Let's not forget the power of ONE in science - An individual genius like Newton, Einstein, Lemaitre, Faraday, Tesla, etc. One who can think independently and come up with breakthrough ideas with practical industrial applications for the greatest benefit of humankind. We need more like these lone idividual geniuses especially since the 17th century up to now, the problem of TRUE NATURE OF GRAVITY has not been solved. But one man, an individual lone researcher, has solved this gravity conundrum in 30 years. Check his published papers at two science journals ACADEMIA and REAL TRUE NATURE or google the name of the author ROEL REAL ROVIRA. Thank you.
I agree with you