Works and Days

I have taken the title of this post from Hesiod's book. Although I won’t talk about works here, I will talk about days. The word day has two different meanings: the whole day (24 hours) and the part of the day when there is sunlight. Thus, it could be said that

day = day + night

which seems absurd, for a mathematician could deduce that the night does not exist. Instead of that equation, and to make it clear that there are two kinds of days, we should use this expression:

day₁ = day₂ + night

Here, day₁ is a natural cycle, the period of the Earth's rotational motion around its axis. But then a problem arises: when can we say that the Earth has made one complete rotation around its axis? The problem is, to define the period of a moving object, it is necessary to have a reference point. The results will be different depending on which point is chosen.

My 10 Favorite Scientific Discoveries of the 20th Century

In a post published two weeks ago, I commented on an article in Science News that tried to answer this question: which were the ten most important scientific discoveries of the last century? Some of my readers asked what is my personal opinion. This is my answer.

To begin with, I will point out that scientific research can advance in four different ways:

1. Theoretical science, which tries to discover fundamental laws in the universe.
2. Experimental science, which confirms or falsifies theories by carrying out experiments.
3. Observational science, which instead of experimenting, observes. Astronomy, for instance, uses these methods, as experimentation is almost never possible.
4. Technology, the practical application of science, whose goal is to build devices that work.

Will we be able to build conscious beings?

I use the term conscious beings, because the term conscious machines has materialistic connotations that I do not share, while artificial intelligence has been burned and abused by generalist media.

Before trying to answer this question, I want to make a few previous clarifications:

1. We are now capable of building conscious beings: our children. Four billion years of evolution have led to the appearance of a type of beings (us) endowed with self-awareness and capable of reproducing. This was a natural process, which we have not designed ourselves, but has been given to us since before we existed. However, when someone poses the question in the title of this post, it is usually interpreted thus: will we be able to build artificial conscious beings, by means other than natural, devised and developed exclusively by ourselves?

The top ten scientific discoveries of the century

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, martyr of science?

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.

The Incredible Shrinking People

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?

Artificial intelligence or computer algorithms?

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.