The world could use being a little more rational :)
As always! But I think I'm learning the trick of indifference to unimportant things -- which, if you believe the Stoics, is the same thing as peace of mind.
Progress in computing, in turn, causes progress elsewhere. The one thing I can most readily think of is science.
Heh, I was careful to say "technology" and not "science". A great deal of science has no, or at least no immediate, technological application -- most of general relativity and particle physics, for instance. Also, the gain experience by science by a gain in computing power is way sublinear -- I'd say it's logarithmic, at a guess. That is, as computing power grows exponentially, the number of scientific advances that can be made with that power grows linearly.
...I think spending a year and a half as a computational physicist left me a bit doubtful about the ability of computing to help science -- I mean, it does, but the problem of chaos shows up everywhere. (Also, I think you'd enjoy this tidbit: looking at the class of dynamical systems that are finite-dimensional and Hamiltonian, the set of non-chaotic systems are countably infinite, while the set of chaotic systems are uncountably infinite. That's stretching it a little -- the distinction is actually solvable versus unsolvable, which itself is a technical definition -- but I probably lack the ability to explain better.)
I really do hope I can make this career work, though... it would be nice to have one of the increasingly rare jobs that isn't the equivalent of pushing bits of paper around. I want to take part in actual progress, not consume false progress.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-10-06 09:22 am (UTC)As always! But I think I'm learning the trick of indifference to unimportant things -- which, if you believe the Stoics, is the same thing as peace of mind.
Progress in computing, in turn, causes progress elsewhere. The one thing I can most readily think of is science.
Heh, I was careful to say "technology" and not "science". A great deal of science has no, or at least no immediate, technological application -- most of general relativity and particle physics, for instance. Also, the gain experience by science by a gain in computing power is way sublinear -- I'd say it's logarithmic, at a guess. That is, as computing power grows exponentially, the number of scientific advances that can be made with that power grows linearly.
...I think spending a year and a half as a computational physicist left me a bit doubtful about the ability of computing to help science -- I mean, it does, but the problem of chaos shows up everywhere. (Also, I think you'd enjoy this tidbit: looking at the class of dynamical systems that are finite-dimensional and Hamiltonian, the set of non-chaotic systems are countably infinite, while the set of chaotic systems are uncountably infinite. That's stretching it a little -- the distinction is actually solvable versus unsolvable, which itself is a technical definition -- but I probably lack the ability to explain better.)
I really do hope I can make this career work, though... it would be nice to have one of the increasingly rare jobs that isn't the equivalent of pushing bits of paper around. I want to take part in actual progress, not consume false progress.