The magazine Science News has reached in 2021 one hundred years (a century) of existence. To celebrate this anniversary, the magazine has published a list of what, according to its author, are the ten greatest scientific advances made between 1921 and 2021. This is the list, ordered according to the opinion of the article’s author about the importance of the discovery (from highest to lowest):
Giordano Bruno’s original name was Filippo Bruno. He was born in Nola, in 1548, and died in Rome, in 1600. He was an Italian philosopher and writer, but not a scientist, for he never practiced any science. So why is he often named (incorrectly) as a martyr of science, who for his scientific ideas was condemned and executed by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church?
What follows is based on a summary of his
life taken from my dictionary titled 1000 Great
Scientists, published in Spanish in 1996. To disprove this
mistaken idea, I decided to include him in the list of scientists.
At age 15 he entered the Dominican order and later was a professor in Naples, but in 1576 he had to flee, accused of heterodoxy. He traveled through Italy, Switzerland, France, and England, achieving considerable success with his philosophy lessons in Paris and Oxford.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Isaac Asimov wrote the novel Fantastic Journey, based on the script of the science fiction film of the same title; not the other way around, as many people believe. In the film and in the novel, a submarine and its crew are reduced to microscopic size and injected into an artery of a comatose human being, to perform an operation in his brain from within, which would be impossible from the outside.
Will it ever be possible to do something like this in the future? Or are there limits to what technology can achieve?
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| John MacCarthy |
The term artificial intelligence appears frequently in the media. It is usually used to refer to a computer application that behaves in a way that appears to be intelligent. But is it really intelligent? Or is this a case of meaning displacement, the application of a more appealing term to something not really new?
The term artificial intelligence was invented by John MacCarthy in 1956, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, U.S.A. At that time, the participants made exaggerated predictions about the imminent advances they expected in this field, some of which have not been fully performed 65 years later. Now the predictions are even more ambitious, but it is quite likely that none will come true in the short term, and that some will never come true.
