Ciro Santilli is a fan of this late 2010's buzzword.
It basically came about because of the endless stream of useless software startups made since the 2000's by one or two people with no investments with the continued increase in computers and Internet speeds until the great wall was reached.
Deep tech means not one of those. More specifically, it means technologies that require significant investment in expensive materials and laboratory equipment to progress, such as molecular biology technologies and quantum computing.
And it basically comes down to technologies that wrestle with the fundamental laws of physics rather than software data wrangling.
Computers are of course limited by the laws of physics, but those are much hidden by several layers of indirection.
Full visibility, and full control, make computer tasks be tasks that eventually always work out more or less as expected.
The same does not hold true when real Physics is involved.
Physics is brutal.
To start with, you can't even see your system very clearly, and often doing so requires altering its behaviour.
For example, in molecular biology, most great discoveries are made after some new technique is made to be able to observe smaller things.
But you often have to kill your cells to make those observations, which makes it very hard to understand how they work dynamically.
What we would really want would be to track every single protein as it goes about inside the cell. But that is likely an impossible dream.
The same for the brain. If we had observations of every neuron, how long would it take to understand it? Not long, people are really good at reverse engineering things when there is enough information available to do so, see also science is the reverse engineering of nature.
Then, even when you start to see the system, you might have a very hard time controlling it, because it is so fragile. This is basically the case of quantum computing in 2020.
It is for those reasons that deep tech is so exciting.
The next big things will come from deep tech. Failure is always a possibility, and you can't know before you try.
But that's also why its so fun to dare.
Stuff that Ciro Santilli considers "deep tech" as of 2020:
- brain-computer interface
- fusion power. The question there is, when is "deep", "too deep"?
Nature is a black box, right?
You don't need to understand the from first principles derivation of every single phenomena.
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.
These are "original" thoughts that Ciro had which at some point in the past amused him. Some would call them pieces of wisdom, others self delusion. All have likely been thought by others in the past, and some of them Ciro thinks to himself after a few years: "why did I like this back then??".
After Ciro's colleague was doing that in a project:
Chuck Norris can parse pseudocode.
On the theory vs practice of computer science:
Whereas Turing completeness is enough for mathematicians, humans need "run-on-Debian-complete".
On how human perception of media is completely unrelated to the computer's transmission mechanism:
Media for humans is not byte streams. It is magic.
On how you make the best friends in life when dealing with hardships together.In Ciro's case, this in particular means going through high school/universities studies and work projects, though of course war would apply particularly well. Perhaps inspired by as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
The bond between men is like the bond between two metals: it is better made under fire.
This is of course just another version of one picture is worth a thousand words.