Michael Nielsen: belief

Transcript context

…Today, I’m speaking with Michael Nielsen. You have done many things. You’re one of the pioneers of quantum computing, wrote the main textbook in the field of the open science movement. You wrote a book about deep learning that Chris Olah and Greg Brockman credit with getting them into the field. More recently, you’re a research fellow at the Astera Institute and writing a book about religion, science, and technology. I’m going to ask you about none of those things. The conversation I want to have today is, how do we recognize scientific progress? It’s especially relevant for AI because people are trying to close the RL verification loop on scientific discovery. What does it mean to close that loop? But in preparing for this interview, I’ve realized that it’s a more mysterious and elusive force, even in the history of human science, than I understood. I think a good place to start will be Michelson-Morley and how special relativity is discovered, if it’s different from the story that you get off of YouTube videos. I will prompt you that way, and then we’ll go in there. Michelson-Morley is the famous result often presented as this experiment that was done in the 1880s that helped Einstein come up with the special theory of relativity a little bit later, changing the way we think about space and time and our fundamental conception of those things. And there’s a big gap, I think, between the way Michelson and Morley and other people at the time thought about the experiment and certainly the way in which Einstein thought or did not think about the experiment. In actual fact, he stated later in his life he wasn’t even sure whether he was aware of the paper at the time. There’s a lot of evidence that he probably was aware of the paper at the time, but it actually wasn’t dispositive for his thinking at all. Something else completely was going on. What Michelson and Morley thought they were doing was testing different theories of what was called the ether. If you go back to the 1600s, Robert Boyle introduced the idea of the ether. We know that sound is vibrations in the air. Boyle and other people got interested in the question of whether light is vibrations in something, and they couldn’t figure out what it was. Boyle did an experiment where he tested whether you could propagate light through a vacuum. He found that you could. You couldn’t do it with sound. He introduced this idea of the ether, and for the next two hundred or so years, people had all these conversations about what the ether was and what its nature was. The Michelson and Morley experiment was really an experiment to test different theories of the ether against one another, in particular to find out whether or not there was a so-called ether wind. The idea was that the Earth is maybe passing through this ether wind. And if it is passing through the ether wind and you shoot a light beam parallel to the direction the ether wind is going in, it’ll get accelerated a little bit. If it’s being passed back in the opposite direction, it’ll get slowed down a little bit, and you should be able to see this in the results of interference experiments. What they found, much to their surprise, was that in fact there was no ether wind. That ruled out some theories of the ether, but not all, and Michelson certainly continued to believe in the ether. This is what was a shocking part of reading this story from the biography of Einstein that you recommended by... what was his first name?…

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