It's the aerial view vs the address book difference. The intent is to draw dependencies as underground pipes: you select a building and see what it's connected to.
This isn't a startup: it's just a side project that I've spent maybe 12 hours on.
It's been like that since the Stone age. The reason it's like that is the fundamental forces that drive humans: greed, cruelty, ego and all that. Hard to expect someone in power to not get more power if he's blinded by greed. How many people do you know that voluntarily spend 25% of their income on those who are lower on the social ladder? I don't know anyone, myself included.
So space expands itself at every point at a certain rate. There is an elephant in the room here: how do all the parts in space coordinate to expand at about the same steady rate? Why don't we see radically different expansion rates in different parts of the universe, e.g. stars on the left are getting further apart 10x faster than those on the right? We often use the air balloon analogy, but an air ballool is inflated by the same force which equally applies to every part of the balloon. My point is that, there is probably a simple underlying mechanism that drives space expansion and the clever nature of this mechanism would explain the relativity axiom used in GTR.
No, the evidence suggests that the rate is time-dependent; that is, the expansion is accelerating.
> how do all the parts in space coordinate to expand at about the same steady rate?
This is a good question!
The answer is: the coordination happens in the much earlier much denser universe in our past, just like the coordination that happened among the fields of the Standard Model that led to the earliest atoms and molecules.
Let's first take the case where there is no accelerated expansion (which is unlikely with current evidence). In this case, the mechanism can simply be inertia, with an enormous early impulse like those in the family of cosmic inflation theories. There must be a fine balance between the density of matter in the earlier universe and the impulse, because gravitational interactions will decelerate the expansion from the early impulse until the matter-density drops/dilutes-with-expansion to a critical point after which the rate of expansion will be constant.
Observations support an early deceleration and subsequent fixed-rate expansion, but about 8 billion years ago the expansion began to accelerate, as seen in images of galaxies with redshifts less than about z ~ 0.5.
> a simple underlying mechanism
This is what the study of dark energy is about: a simple explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Typically one starts with a field that fills the whole of spacetime, with enormous energy-density in the early universe, with that energy-density decaying at later times. In extremely high-quality vacuum and far from structures like stars and black holes, the decay of this field is faster than near those structures (too near and the field becomes locally stable; the solar system, for example, is not expanding). When the field decays, it gives a local increase to the inertial expansion rate described in the no-dark-energy case a couple paragraphs up. Because there is so much empty space outside galaxy clusters, there is a lot of local, and the amount of local increases over time, so larger regions of the field decay at faster rates as the unvierse gets older.
There are other approaches too, but the effect is the same: the amount of space outside matter structures increases at an accelerating rate in the late universe, and this corresponds in a frame-dependent way to an energy-density that remains constant as the energy-density of the fields of the Standard Model decreases. That is, in such a frame of reference, matter and radiation dilute away with the expansion MUCH faster than dark energy does.
Another approach is literally the cosmological constant, which if zero gives the inertial picture above, but if it takes on a small positive value, it produces a late-time acceleration of the expansion. No known fields behave like this: matter-density varies by location in spacetime (clumpier in space, tending to diffuse apart (especially light) or collapse gravitationally (especially baryons) over time), gravitational fields vary with position in spacetime and typically with the distribution of matter. By contrast, the cosmological constant is literally identically everywhere-and-everywhen. More likely we will find evidence for something which closely approximates the cosmological constant at large scales, with differences in the density of the "cosmological not-quite-constant field" lining up very closely with observed differences in the density of matter.
> clever nature of this mechanism
Cleverness shouldn't be expected of the mechanism itself, although it will probably take some cleverness to describe the mechanism in a tractable/scalable-yet-accurate-in-detail manner.
WRT your final sentence, General Relativity works just fine in the total absence of dark energy, and dark energy as the cosmological constant has been captured as the factor \Lambda in the Einstein Field Equations. That's like saying that all matter has been captured as a factor in the Einstein Field Equations, though: it has taken a lot of work including things like studying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_inelastic_scattering to work out many of the finer details of the stress-energy tensor. A comparable program likely is needed to work out the finer details of \Lambda, which might lead to a formal explanation along the lines of the informal one a few paragraphs above.
Unless we create a link between two points nearby ahead of time, wait for a billion years and then use this link to jump between the two points. In fact, I think that such links exist everywhere between any two points in space, but they remain latent in the form of quantum entanglement.
That's an easy one. We hold the same chain and the distance between us is 100 links. The chain has a curious property: its links subdivide like living cells and on average 1 link takes a minute to split into 2. Thus, every minute the distance between us doubles and half hour later we'll be 1 billion times further from each other. We can replace the chain with a net or even with a 3d net.
Our awake experience is also subjective. When we look at a car, we see how it slides on 4 wheels. A deeper look reveals that the wheels aren't sliding, but rolling. What we see in our mind is simplified models, while the objective reality is much more complex, messy and not comprehensible.
Fwiw, after a certain amount of pain, brain "transcends it": everything disappears, there are some curious colors here and there, but there is no pain. Experienced that during an in ear infection.
How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.
And I disagree violently. The deepmind folks are on salary and every year they need to prove that they are worth the money. This applies to Demis himself: he needs to prove that his org deserves this gaziliion of dollars per year.
I don’t think all papers are pointless but it’s been shown that many are not reproducible, so those are worthless and pointless. There was that guy a few months ago who tried to reproduce the results of 130 papers on financial forecasting (using ML and other such techniques) and found none of them could be reproduced and most were p-hacked or contained obvious flaws like leaking results data into the training data. An academic friend of mine who works in brain computer interfacing also says that a large number of papers he reviews are borderline or even outright fraudulent but many get published anyway because other reviewers let them through.
So I definitely wouldn’t dismiss all papers as pointless, but there certainly is a large percentage that are, enough that you can’t simply accept a published papers results without reproducing it yourself.
The need to generate publishable papers means that a researcher can only participate in activity that leads to such a paper. He can't try to work on that idea for 5 years, because if no big papers follow, he's toast /he'd probably lose funding long before that).
You have to earn the right to work on your idea for 5 years and get paid. Otherwise we would be funding all kind of crackpots. First you demonstrate you're a good researcher by producing good results. Then you can work on whatever you feel like (either by getting hired at places like DeepMind, or by finding funding sources that want to pay for what you want to work on).
This is what I meant. In our society, only very few, usually already rich, can try their own ideas. Most of us have to stick with known ideas that bring profit to business owners or meaningful visibility to universities. When I was in college, I had to work on ideas approved by my professor. Now I have to work on ideas approved by my corporation. But if I had money, I'd work on something completely different. Sure, in 15 I will be rich and can start doing my own stuff, but I'll also be old and my ability will be nowhere near the peak at 25 years.
What would you work on if you could? Would you say you deserve to be paid for 5 years of uninterrupted research? Do you think you have a decent chance to make a breakthrough in some field? These are the questions I ask myself.
I have some interesting ideas about managing software complexity in general (i.e. why this complexity inevitably snowballs and how we could deal with that), or about a better way to surf the internet (which may be a really big idea, tbh). But all these are moonshot ideas that gave a slim chance of success, while I need to pay ever raising bills. On the other hand I have a couple solid money making business ideas that I'm working on and that will bring me a few tens of millions, bit will be of no use to society, and I have a fallback plan: a corporate job with outstanding pay, but that brings exactly nothing to this world (it's about reshaping certain markets to make my employer slightly richer).
Do I deserve to be paid for 5 years for something that may not work? "Deserving" something doesn't have much meaning: we, the humans, merely transform solar energy into some fluff like stadiums and cruise ships. Getting paid just means getting a portion of that stream of solar energy. There is no reason I need to "deserve it" as it's unlimited and doesn't belong to anyone. A better question to ask is how can we change our society so that all, especially young, people would get a sufficient portion of resources to not think about paying bills.
Chances to make a breakthru are small, but that doesn't matter. It's a big numbers game: if chances are 1 to million, we let 1 billion people try and see 1000 successes. The problem currently is that we have these billions of people, but they are forces by silly constraints of our society to non stop solve fictional problems like paying rent.
When you have tenure, you can work on whatever you want for as long as you want. Nobody works on an idea for five years without publishing anything, though. Progress is made step by step.
Take Albert Einstein as an example, who arguably made one of the largest leap in physics with his theory of general relativity. He never stopped publishing during that time.
When you have tenure, you can work on whatever you want for as long as you want
Not quite. When you are a professor, you essentially become a manager for a group of researchers. You don't really do research yourself. Therefore, your main obligation becomes finding money to pay these researchers. So in reality you can only support the research someone is willing to pay for (via grants, scholarships, etc).
