Science 2000-2011

[Ahriman238]

I was recently thinking about how much the world and our understanding of it has changed since I was a kid, when there were nine planets, five kingdoms and three states of matter. Then I remember all the things I'd heard about like atomic-scale teleportation, antimatter, and the LHC, that I heard a few times in passing and never heard more of. As well as military projects like railguns, plane-mounted laser weapons, the DDX, the Joint Strike Fighter, the new Ford class of supercarriers with electromagnetic catapults, exoskeletons, the Future Force Warrior, and 'electronic armor' the media was calling forcefields. Some of these failed, many lost their budget, a few I never heard from again. But there were also triumphs like the artifical heart.

So, my question to you is, looking back, what has been the most impressive, awe-inspiring, or important scientific discoveries/inventions of the last decade or so?

[cosmicalstorm]

Well I didn't pay much attention to other sciences than space during my teenage years in the 90's, so the one big body of scientific work that I can clearly recall becoming aware of as it was made public, that was produced during this decade, has been the wilkinson microwave anistropy probe observations. That work is very interesting and would strike me as very fundamental, I wonder if we will see a similar body of work produced this decade. There certainly seems to be a number of interesting candidates such as the guys who are setting up a massive three dimensional map of the local superclusters, the SDSS, JWST and so on.
Lets hope I don't get run over by a car tomorrow

[Skgoa]

Of the top of my head:
- finding much more water on the Moon than anticipated (also, water ice on Mars)
- this little thing called "the Internet" really taking of, fundamentally changing the way we interact and do business
- huge medical advances like replacement organs grown from your own cells
- advances in alternative paradigms of computing, i.e. molecular computing...


Unfortunately, nothing has come from the following things yet, but they look interesting and are being looked at/do work on small scale:
- nanomaterials
- ability to stop/reverse aging on DNA level
- ability to put people in suspended animation
- connecting computers to the brain
- nuclear fusion
- augmented reality

[spaceviking]

I would say the advances in artificial limbs should be added to the list. The stuff they are doing now would seem like science fiction in the early 90's.

[Singular Intellect]

I would say the advances in artificial limbs should be added to the list. The stuff they are doing now would seem like science fiction in the early 90's.

I'd say it's not seeing the bigger picture when focusing on merely one or two fields of technological advancement. Technological progress and knowledge is exploding across all fields, with the critical step of advancement being realization of becoming an information technology and the inevitably exponential progress thereafter.

[Omeganian]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_o ... _computing

[Sarevok]

The 2000-2011 era has not been as striking as say 1940-1950. Most of our developments have been in the field of consumer electronics and entertainments. With the exception of biotechnology everything else has seen only marginal improvements.

[Skgoa]

wha...? have you been paying attention AT ALL in the last decade?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_o ... _computing

And yet, not much has come of it in real world applications.
imho molecular computing will be much more relevant for massively parallel computations than quantum.

[Jon]

^I like to think of the recent purchase of the D-Wave Quantum Computer by Lockheed Martin as a sign of things to come and signal of intent in finding serious and useful applications for the technology.

[Surlethe]

A few significant off the top of my head, which I believe are (pretty close to) this past decade:

• Proof of the Poincare conjecture
• Accelerating expansion of the universe
• Startup of the LHC
• Video of stars orbiting Sgr A*
• Floodgates opening in the extrasolar planet search (launch of Kepler, in particular)
• Results from WMAP -- universe is flat, etc.

Obviously biased by my preferences and knowledge.

[phongn]

Ahriman - many of the things you've mentioned are improvements in technology (most of the military hardware) or engineering but not really advances in science. Even the LHC itself is really an engineering achievement for the moment.

Biology has made tremendous strides (and not just in biotechnology). We've made great strides in both proteomics and genetics, completed the Human Genome Project, etc.

[Thanas]

Post deleted upon request of author.

[someone_else]

Biology has made tremendous strides (and not just in biotechnology). We've made great strides in both proteomics and genetics, completed the Human Genome Project, etc.

Also, modern imaging machinery has been put to use to study better the anathomy of the living (one of the main problems in the past was the limited number of corpses to work on). Now we can get statistically significant data by scanning tons of living volunteers (and harvesting data from people that have to do the scan for their own medical reasons anyway). It's literally a fuckton of material.
And as the scanning machines get better and better, you can examine finer and finer details without working on the dead (that can study much less corpses in the same amount of time, and with much less accuracy).

Again, imaging tech has been put to work on the brain, and while it isn't ended yet, it will have an effect comparable to the Genome Project.

[Edi]

Cancer research has also gone forward in leaps and bounds. A friend of mine who goes by the name of Kaljamaha on these forums is a biologist and cancer researcher and it's pretty amazing what they can do now.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I think someone further up mentioned this but the quality of optical imaging technology for astronomy has kind of exploded.

In 2000, a CCD above about 1MP was a realtively rare thing, and you only really saw them on big government-funded telescopes. The first CCD put on the Faulkes Telescopes (which I get to use hehe) had a resolution of 9 pixels. As in 3x3. Now, we have bloody 8 MP ones in phones, that you can pick up for a few hundred quid. That's progress.

Um, I would also like to point out stuff like TFT and LCD screens. To the best of my knowledge, these were virtually unknowns in 2000 (I was 8 at the time so don't quote me on that). Nowadays, commonplace.

There was also a massive jump in HDD capacity. And solid-state memory seems to have emerged very recently as well. Case in point, as recently as 2004 a 128 MB was considered massive, and a 300 GB HDD was the biggest you coudl get without spending shitloads. Now, you can get 300 GB SSD's and 2.5 TB HDD's for quite reasonable prices.

And now moving to my knowledge of cars gleaned entirely from Top Gear....stuff like flappy-paddle gearboxes are pretty recent right?

[Iroscato]

I would say the creation of the LHC, an astonishingly advanced machine, the ISS, which, while not being used to its full potential, is still an impressive and highly useful structure. Stem cell research, artificial body parts being grown, and the deeper forays into quantum research are also very impressive to me.

Oh, and the anit-microwave cloaking device they made a couple of years back. I'll have my romulan warbird yet, you'll see

[Ahriman238]

Heh, I've had to look most of these up. Particularly Proenomics. It's ture, the more you know, the more you realize exactly how much is out there you don't know.

Ahriman - many of the things you've mentioned are improvements in technology (most of the military hardware) or engineering but not really advances in science. Even the LHC itself is really an engineering achievement for the moment.

Ah, fair point. I was sort of rambling and mentioning everything I could think of related to science/technology/progress. I promise I know the difference between hard and applied sciences. I really do.

Okay why don't we expand it a bit. What would you say has been the greatest step forward in your lifetime?