The natural sciences are not just a tool to predict the future.
They are a reminder that the lives that we live daily are mere illusions, religious concepts such as Maya and Samsara come to mind.
We as individuals perceive nothing about the materials that we touch every day really work, nor more importantly how our brain and cell work.
Everything is magic out of our control.
The natural sciences allow us peek, with huge concentrated effort, into tiny little bits a little of those unknowns, and blow our minds as we notice that we don't know anything.
For all practical purposes in life, there is a huge macro micro gap. We are only able to directly perceive and influence the macro events. And through those we try to affect micro events. Because for good or bad, micro events reflect in the macro world.
It is as if we live in a different plane of existence above molecules, and below galaxies. The hierarchy of Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" puts that nicely into perspective, shame it only starts at the economical level, not going up to astronomy.
The great beauty of science is that it allows us to puncture through some of the layers of reality, either up or down, away from our daily experience.
And the great beauty of artificial intelligence research is that it allows to peer deeper into exactly our layer of existence.
Every one or two weeks Ciro Santilli remembers that he and everything he touches are just a bunch of atoms, and that is an amazing feeling. This is Ciro's preferred source of Great doubt. Another concept that comes to mind is when you see it, you'll shit bricks.
Perhaps, the feeling of physics and the illusion of life reaches its peak in molecular biology.
Just look at your fucking hand right now.
Do you have any idea of each of the cells in it work? Isn't is at least 100 times more complex than the materials of the table you hand is currently resting on?
This is the non-science fiction version of the lotus-Eater Machine.
Alan Watts's "Philosopher" talk mentions related ideas:
The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
The toddler of a friend of Ciro Santilli's wife asked her mum:Our perception of the macroscopic world is so magic that children have to learn the difference between living and non-living things.
James Somers put it very well as well in his article I should have loved biology by James Somers, this quote was brought to Ciro's attention by Bert Hubert's website[ref].The same applies to other natural sciences.
I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail:For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.
Alan Watts' "Philosopher" talk (1973)
Source. Lecture given at UCLA on 1973-02-21. Some key quotes from the talk:The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
Nothing makes the fact that your life is an illusion clearer than animations of molecular biology processes. You just have no idea what is going on inside your own body right now!
And yet, we live, oblivious to all of it.
Amazing creators:
ATP synthase in action by HarvardX (2017)
Source. Electron transport chain by HarvardX (2017)
Source. This actually explains how mitochondrions use sugar derivatives and oxygen to transform ADP into ATP.Goes along: if you could control your life multiple times to be perfect, you would eventually get tired of paradise, and you would go further and further into creating uncertain worlds with some suffering, until you would reach the current real world.
Very similar to The Matrix (1999) when Agent Smith talks about the failed Paradise Matrix shown at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qs3GlNZMhY:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your "perfect world". But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" must again be cited.
The opposite of from first principles.
It does not matter how, if it is exact, or numerical, or a message from God: a number has to come out of the formulas in the end, and you have to compare it with the experimental data.
Many theoretical physicists seem to forget this in their lectures, see also: Section "How to teach and learn physics".
And most important of all: you should not start learning phenomena by reading the from first principles derivation.
Instead, you should see what happens in experiments, and how matches some known formula (which hopefully has been derived from first principles).
Only open the boxes (understand from first principles derivation) if the need is felt!
E.g.:
- you don't need to understand everything about why SQUID devices have their specific I-V curve curve. You have to first of all learn what the I-V curve would be in an experiment!
- you don't need to understand the fine details of how cavity magnetrons work. What you need to understand first is what kind of microwave you get from what kind of input (DC current), and how that compares to other sources of microwaves
- lasers: same
Physics is all about predicting the future. If you can predict the future with an end result, that's already predicting the future, and valid.
Unit of mass.
Defined in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units via the Planck constant. This was possible due to the development of the Kibble balance.
Highlighted at the Origins of Precision by Machine Thinking (2017).
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact