End of invention in sight?

[ZunarJ5]

"In reality, how much daylight is there between what humans are capable of vs. what is physically possible for any entity to be capable of technologically?"

This was a response I received when I implied that an alien invasion could involve tech far beyond our own. It got me thinking...

I don't know the answer to the question. It was asked in a rhetorical way in order to squash my comments with its superior insight... and I didn't want to side track the thread it was in.

So that is my question. Where do the laws of physics simply stop our technological growth? Are we almost there? Is there any point to even trying to guess how far down the line the wall rises? I mean, we really can't know what the next break through will open up... can we?

[Noclevername]

Breakthroughs in physics may not be required to create new inventions. Look at nanotechnology-- there's a lot we might be able to do there using only known laws of physics, we just haven't worked out the engineering yet. There are plety of things we know are possible but have not done yet, because we don't have the tools to make the tools, or don't have the industrial development, or the resources, or some other cause.

Electrical resistance was known for decades before Edison & crew got that light bulb filament just right.

[ZunarJ5]

Breakthroughs in physics may not be required to create new inventions. Look at nanotechnology-- there's a lot we might be able to do there using only known laws of physics, we just haven't worked out the engineering yet. There are plety of things we know are possible but have not done yet, because we don't have the tools to make the tools, or don't have the industrial development, or the resources, or some other cause.

Electrical resistance was known for decades before Edison & crew got that light bulb filament just right.

Perhaps I wasn't clear.

Here is an example of where "the wall rises". Physics tells us that no massive object can move through space at the speed of light or greater. So, we will never have FTL rockets or drives because physics says so (not to say we can't eventually get around this).

With this in mind... the answer to the quote at the start of my thread would be? A lot? That was my guess.

[Noclevername]

Perhaps I wasn't clear.

Here is an example of where "the wall rises". Physics tells us that no massive object can move through space at the speed of light or greater. So, we will never have FTL rockets or drives because physics says so (not to say we can't eventually get around this).

With this in mind... the answer to the quote at the start of my thread would be? A lot? That was my guess.

Technological growth doesn't work that way. It finds new ways to apply existing physical properties. It can't rewrite physics. We can't "eventually get around" the rules the Universe works by.

No, we can't exceed C, but we might do other things-- suspended animation, life extension, relativistic travel, ways to "shorten" the travel without actual FTL.

[ZunarJ5]

Technological growth doesn't work that way. It finds new ways to apply existing physical properties. It can't rewrite physics. We can't "eventually get around" the rules the Universe works by.

No, we can't exceed C, but we might do other things-- suspended animation, life extension, relativistic travel, ways to "shorten" the travel without actual FTL.

::sigh:: I seem to have a hard time making myself understood on these boards.

Because of the laws of physics we can only go so fast. Because of the laws of physics we can only make a computer chip so small. Because of the laws of physics tech is bound to certain limits.

The quote in my initial thread seemed to imply that those certain limits were not all that far away.

My question. How far away are those limits? How much longer until we have advanced as far as physics will allow tech to advance?

Are current levels of tech closer to the finish line or closer to the starting gate?

[Noclevername]

Because of the laws of physics we can only go so fast. Because of the laws of physics we can only make a computer chip so small. Because of the laws of physics tech is bound to certain limits.

We're expanding in a lot of directions, each with very different limits. As far as speed goes, we're still at the gate. For computer chips, we're getting closer to the physical limits of what can be done-- more than half, less than 2/3, IMO. A lot of technologies are sill in their infancy, others are closer to adolescence. Very few are anywhere near mature.

[Swift]

As Noclevername said, we are pretty far from most of the physical limits. Yes, we are getting closer, for example, to the limits that one can write lines on a silicon computer chip using the current optical technology. But even that hasn't hit its limit with the current technology. Change materials, change the way you make the patterns, and you push the limits further out.

Much of the gaps we have between the physical limits and the current limit of the technology have to do more with engineering and materials, then the ultimate physical limits.

Even some relatively ancient technologies, like steam turbines and jet engines are probably not at their limits, as we improve materials and engineering.

Look at another limit people have thought for a long time: superconducting transition temperatures. For a very long time people thought we had hit the limit with the niobium alloys at about 30K. Then in the 1980s the copper oxide high-temperature phases came a long (along with some changes to our understanding of the physics) and now we are in the 100 - 150K region and are making commercial materials that only have to be liquid nitrogen cooled. I have heard speculation that we are again approaching a limit; though recent discoveries of an interesting family in the Fe-As system have people searching phase diagrams again.

[John Jaksich]

::sigh:: I seem to have a hard time making myself understood on these boards.

Because of the laws of physics we can only go so fast. Because of the laws of physics we can only make a computer chip so small. Because of the laws of physics tech is bound to certain limits.

The quote in my initial thread seemed to imply that those certain limits were not all that far away.

My question. How far away are those limits? How much longer until we have advanced as far as physics will allow tech to advance?

Are current levels of tech closer to the finish line or closer to the starting gate?

It may be too difficult IMO to state a precisely how close a new technology will result from a scientific endeavor.

IMHO--(again) ---there are those who tinker with technology and those attempt to innovate through applied research. There is also pure research--and that is a different ball of wax---all together.

I will attempt to give you one specific example:

pure research: discovery of Buckminsterfullerene --C60 ----this discovery led to nanotechnology (applied research) ---
I believe that C60 was discovered in the late 1980s and the Nobel was awarded almost 10 to 15 years later.

If you look at that as a specific example---> the pure research of the discovery led to a "bustling" period of buckyball research in the 1990s and there have been alot of hit-and-miss applications. i.e. it was found that attaching a buckyball to certain antiviral drugs could block the HIV virus in vivo--but it did lead to a similar propensity of drug affectivness for different classes of symptoms and drugs. One other problem was the toxicity of buckyballs to internal organs. So, currently Buckminsterfullerene is being discussed as a toxic substance---and certain cities have banned its use from within their own city-limits. (That is a different topic)--However, nanotechnology has shown great promise--of late. So, in this instance, we have pure research leading to applied research where the payoffs to technology are closer than before.

If one examines an article from the Reviews of Modern Physics ---October-December 2011----nanotubes are "touched upon" as being used for shielding from Cosmic Rays for space travel in the near future.

It used to be said that the time-lag between pure research (result) and applied technology (product) was approximately 20 years---I am not too sure if that is still the correct generalization.

[Swift]

<snip>
So, in this instance, we have pure research leading to applied research where the payoffs to technology are closer than before.

And often it is more complex than that.

Look at the example I gave, of the superconducting materials. A variety of metal alloys were tested over many years and a theory (the BCS theory) agreed with those results, predicting a limit around 30K. The copper oxide phases were discovered basically by accident, and actually seemed to contradict theory. Over the following decades, theory and experimental results have been bootstrapping each other; it is now to the point that theory can be used to predict compositional variants to try.

But the Fe-As phases I mentioned again seem to contradict some of the current understanding, and once again, things are on the move.

So, sometimes experimental results, either pure experimental research or applied, including accidental discoveries, lead, sometimes theory leads, sometimes it is a little of both.

[John Jaksich]

And often it is more complex than that.

Look at the example I gave, of the superconducting materials. A variety of metal alloys were tested over many years and a theory (the BCS theory) agreed with those results, predicting a limit around 30K. The copper oxide phases were discovered basically by accident, and actually seemed to contradict theory. Over the following decades, theory and experimental results have been bootstrapping each other; it is now to the point that theory can be used to predict compositional variants to try.

But the Fe-As phases I mentioned again seem to contradict some of the current understanding, and once again, things are on the move.

So, sometimes experimental results, either pure experimental research or applied, including accidental discoveries, lead, sometimes theory leads, sometimes it is a little of both.

I can certainly see where you are going with it. I just wanted to keep things simple---maybe too simple---thanks for the correction.

[Ara Pacis]

As the saying goes, there's more than one way to skin a cat. But to paraphrase another saying, "First, catch the cat."

There are hard limits for certain things, like electronics, but we're starting to look at spintronics and the computing power goalposts might change again. A lot is engineering and materials and the strategic use of different materials to create machines with the best abilities. But I suspect that certain rules won't be broken, such as lightspeed, and I doubt we'll really find a loophole to get around it, such as wormholes or warping space, though one can hope.

[dgavin]

Yes the computer chip industry is rapidly reaching the limits of smallness. IBM have recently annouced 14nm scale withint the next year, thier new z-198 is currently a 20nm scale, Intel is at 22nm scales, and AMD is at 32nm scales, though the next Opteron is supposed to be a 28nm scale. AMD in Collaberation with IBM were the inventors of the multi layers (3d) 32nm, with the Phenom processor. Intel did not catch up in that aspect until thier i9 processors, as they chose to focus on reducing to 22nm scale first.

Rumor has ARM/IBM collaberating on reaching 8nm by 2020, which they think will be the ultimat limit on size reduction with silicon.

Multilayer desigs have a significant benefit in the speed they can be ramped up to, with less heat, even at the same nm scale as a non multilayer. This is the main reason AMD and IBM still use this as thier main design scale.

IBM also has funtional HDSD (Holographic Data Storage Devices now available as an option on thier new z-198 based mainframes) and the z-198 is also the first mainframe that can host Windows OS on it without a CPU instruction translation layer, and capable of hosting upto a predicted 3000 quad core Windows server instances, in about the same space as an i-seires IBM blade rack uses, which peaks out at about 100-250 windows VM's.

HDSD is not fast enough to replace real memory yet, however, it's speeds at initial lauch are comperable to the fastest RAID-10 drives. HDSD for pc's is not expected to be practical until 2020's some time. However the storage desity in the salt crystals(cubs) IBM uses, is already far past the storage density one could achive with even 8nm silicon.

I expect that before the 8nm limit is truely reached for PC platforms, that IBM will be annoucing thier 20 year (so far) goal of a totally laser light based proccessor with HDSD real memory and storage. The buzz comeing out of IBM the last few years is that they may have solved the light swithing problem (a crystaline version of a transistor). If they have, this will significantly alter CPU's in the future.

So there is some technology in the works already thay make eventualy make miniturization on silicon, something thats not nessasary after a decade or so. IBM is slowly transitioning to Salt based laser/holographic systems. I expect we won't see a true laser computer until IBM designs something that will make thier new z-198, look like a z-80a processor.

[Swift]

Thanks for the detailed update dgavin. But that got me thinking about another aspect of this. At some point, the need to advance a particular technology decreases.

Look for example at the automobile. How radically different is today's car from a car from 20 or 30 years ago, particularly if you don't count things like hybrids? The CPU in your computer might be 10 or 50 times faster than it was 10 years ago, but your car isn't any faster than it was even 50 years ago.

It seems probably to me that at some point the need for computers to work ever increasingly faster or have more computational power will diminish. At the point that I can get information as fast as I can perceive it, and do anything I reasonable want to on my home computer, then I have no need for a faster computer. Personally, I seem to be already approaching that point.

Sure, there are some computer applications (computational physics, for example) that it is hard to imagine ever having "enough" power, but that is a very specialized application, as a tank or a race car is a very specialized application of the automobile. We don't all need to be driving race cars.

Now, just because one area of technology has reached a practical, not a theoretical or physical limit, doesn't mean that other technologies do not continue to advance.

[R.A.F.]

::sigh:: I seem to have a hard time making myself understood on these boards.

You seem to think that technological advancement has something to do with physical laws, your "example" being the limiting factor of the speed of light.

That some here disagree with that has nothing to do with "being understood".

[Jens]

Personally I think it's a serious issue to consider, and I do personally think about this. Going to the issue about the superconductors, I had a chance to listen to a lecture by somebody who is working in that field, and he sort of lamented the fact that since the late 1980s, there has not really been any improvement in high-temperature superconductivity. There seems to be a limit at 130 K or whatever, and nobody has been able to improve on that for more than 20 years now. And certainly the speed of light is an example of a real physical barrier to technology.

But it's more than that. Certainly there are areas of science where lots is still going on. But I do worry that there may be diminishing returns, and I don't know what conclusions have been made about this. But there is certainly a huge scientific research community now, trying to make new discoveries and what now, but we don't seem to have the sort of blockbuster discoveries that happened in that past. I'm thinking sort of like, about 100 years ago Michelson and Morly basically used a table-top device to discover that the aether doesn't exist. Now, we have this billion-dollar device that demonstrated that a particle that was theorized to exist actually does exist. To go any further than that, we are going to require even bigger colliders, that may be impossible to pay for.

[Paul Wally]

There's a mutual interaction between science and technology, so it goes both ways. Technological advances could lead to new scientific instruments which could of course lead to new scientific discoveries. So we don't know what will be discovered in the future and what new technological possibilities such discoveries could open up.

[korjik]

Known physics isnt even close to fully utilized yet, so there is no telling what is just over the horizon. Add on top of that the massive holes in current theory, and your guess at what life will be like in a couple centuries is as bad as mine.

Plus, at the very least I dont think you would get a physicist to say we are even close to saying we are nearly done with physics. We got burned by that one big time a bit more than a hundred years ago.

[Van Rijn]

Keep in mind that there's a lot of stuff left within known physics that we can glimpse but have yet to approach. We aren't there until (at least) our machinery is self building and self repairing, there is general purpose 3-D printing, aging is optional, and we have built AIs at least as sophisticated as what a human brain can manage. Whether we can get there without making a really big mistake or how long it would take are unknowns, of course.

But, I wouldn't assume that science and technology can continue improving forever. We might have already found most of the major, technologically applicable physical principles. We don't know that, but it's certainly possible.

[HenrikOlsen]

And once you look at areas like medicine we're still at the "barely scratched the surface" level, with what's really mainly a vague comprehension of how things may work.

[captain swoop]

Speed of light? there isn't even a supersonic passenger aircraft in service.

[Swift]

And once you look at areas like medicine we're still at the "barely scratched the surface" level, with what's really mainly a vague comprehension of how things may work.

Yes. And as for Jen's "blockbuster" discoveries, how about the mapping of the human genome, as well as the genome of many other organisms. A few years ago, doing such a mapping was a very big deal and a huge research effort. We are rapidly approaching the point where it has become fairly routine in biological or paleontological or similar research.

[JustAFriend]

Speed of light? there isn't even a supersonic passenger aircraft in service.

And the fastest probes are speeding out of the solar system at 36,000mph or .00005c

We are ants still trying to define the rules of the Universe, far from understanding or applying them.

[HenrikOlsen]

Yes. And as for Jen's "blockbuster" discoveries, how about the mapping of the human genome, as well as the genome of many other organisms. A few years ago, doing such a mapping was a very big deal and a huge research effort. We are rapidly approaching the point where it has become fairly routine in biological or paleontological or similar research.

And we're just starting to realize how little part knowing the genome is of understanding the whole story of how an organism actually works.

We're still a long way from predicting how things work in vivo, just look at the billions spent on false leads to get a drug all the way through Phase III (a study on money spent by drugs companies on development and research, showed 1-9 billion dollars spent per single drug that makes it to FDA approval, that's excluding marketing but including money spent on developing the failed candidates).

[trinitree88]

Speed of light? there isn't even a supersonic passenger aircraft in service.

captain. And the speed of light is limiting for objects with rest mass. Since we stand on the precipice of the Higgs origin of rest mass, we stand on the precipice of the Higgs origin of inertia too by the principle of equivalence. If we learn to modify one it will modify the other which is why anecdotes from primitive peoples with no understanding of the principle of equivalence, of objects that do both, are curious indeed.

[primummobile]

"In reality, how much daylight is there between what humans are capable of vs. what is physically possible for any entity to be capable of technologically?"

This was a response I received when I implied that an alien invasion could involve tech far beyond our own. It got me thinking...

I don't know the answer to the question. It was asked in a rhetorical way in order to squash my comments with its superior insight... and I didn't want to side track the thread it was in.

So that is my question. Where do the laws of physics simply stop our technological growth? Are we almost there? Is there any point to even trying to guess how far down the line the wall rises? I mean, we really can't know what the next break through will open up... can we?

I was arguing your POV in another thread. Personally, I think that we are pretty far from what we are capable of accomplishing. Humanity, as a whole, definitely deserves a pat on the back for accomplishing what we have so far. But it took us a really long time to get here (relatively speaking) and our knowledge is built on the minds of the billions who came before us. We have more time now to dream than what our ancestors had, but I don't think we've even come close to dreaming everything that is possible. We can't dream of all the engineering that is needed when we don't even know what we would engineer.

[Ara Pacis]

Thanks for the detailed update dgavin. But that got me thinking about another aspect of this. At some point, the need to advance a particular technology decreases.

Look for example at the automobile. How radically different is today's car from a car from 20 or 30 years ago, particularly if you don't count things like hybrids? The CPU in your computer might be 10 or 50 times faster than it was 10 years ago, but your car isn't any faster than it was even 50 years ago.

It seems probably to me that at some point the need for computers to work ever increasingly faster or have more computational power will diminish. At the point that I can get information as fast as I can perceive it, and do anything I reasonable want to on my home computer, then I have no need for a faster computer. Personally, I seem to be already approaching that point.

Sure, there are some computer applications (computational physics, for example) that it is hard to imagine ever having "enough" power, but that is a very specialized application, as a tank or a race car is a very specialized application of the automobile. We don't all need to be driving race cars.

Now, just because one area of technology has reached a practical, not a theoretical or physical limit, doesn't mean that other technologies do not continue to advance.

But so many other things have changed with cars. They do go faster, but you're not allowed to drive them that way. They are safer. They are lighter. The engines are more efficient. The tire and their treads are better.

Advances in computing mean that a single computer can do more, which means more multi-tasking, which means smaller machines, which means lower power requirements, which means smaller batteries, which means less weight, which means more portability, which means you'll be more likely to carry it around, which means you're more likely to use it, which means a better return on investment in purchasing one. And then we can put new functions on it.

[Swift]

But so many other things have changed with cars. They do go faster, but you're not allowed to drive them that way. They are safer. They are lighter. The engines are more efficient. The tire and their treads are better.

Advances in computing mean that a single computer can do more, which means more multi-tasking, which means smaller machines, which means lower power requirements, which means smaller batteries, which means less weight, which means more portability, which means you'll be more likely to carry it around, which means you're more likely to use it, which means a better return on investment in purchasing one. And then we can put new functions on it.

Very good points.

But OK, how much smaller do we want to make them. Until we get to the point of direct data transfer to/from the computer to my brain, I at least need a screen I can see and something that will fit my fingers. Heck, some of the phones have keypads that are already too small for my fingers. Is something like a smart-phone the endpoint?

I only used computers and cars as examples. I'm sure the argument will be made why we would not want our computers and other inventions to continue to "improve" forever, but I'm not convinced we would even want such, for all technologies.

[eburacum45]

To allow cars to go significantly faster in safety, they must be controlled by something faster than a human brain. AI control of passenger transport is just one of the areas where we have barely scratched the surface.

Biotechnology is another area where current knowledge is far from complete. Exploration of that field will not stop until it is possible to design a living being to order, or a mechanical system as if it were a living being.

Forget faster-than-light nonsense, forget antigravity, forget perpetual motion; there the physical limits are well understood. Biotechnology and information science promise great unexplored fields of possibilities ahead.

[Solfe]

We have a long way to go with the technology we already hav... the internet ain't even been spelled check yet. I think that means all this is a rough draft at this piont.

[SkepticJ]

Very good points.

But OK, how much smaller do we want to make them. Until we get to the point of direct data transfer to/from the computer to my brain, I at least need a screen I can see and something that will fit my fingers. Heck, some of the phones have keypads that are already too small for my fingers. Is something like a smart-phone the endpoint?

You wrote the answer yourself: direct data transfer to your brain.

Right now things seem to be going the other way from tiny buttons: smartphones with large touch screens, tablet computers that function as cell/video phones . . .

Augmented reality glasses will come along in the coming years, layering computer constructs over the real world.

I'm sure the argument will be made why we would not want our computers and other inventions to continue to "improve" forever, but I'm not convinced we would even want such, for all technologies.

Why wouldn't we?