Michael Nielsen: belief

Transcript context

…One of the things you’ve emphasized as a part of this project of open science, and we talked about it earlier, is collective science, or groups of people making progress on a problem where no individual understands all the logical and explanatory levels necessary to make a leap or a connection. Outside of mathematics, what is the best example of such a discovery? I’m not sure I have a well-ordering of them to give you a best. An example that I think is very interesting is the LHC, where it’s just this immensely complicated object. Years ago, I snuck into an accelerator physics conference. I didn’t know anything at all about accelerator physics, but I was just curious to see what they were talking about. This particular group of people were experts on numerical methods, in particular on inverse methods. Inside these accelerators, you have these cascades. A particle will be massively accelerated, maybe it’ll be collided, and then you’ll get a shower of particles which decays and decays and decays. There’s just this incredible, consequential shower, which is ultimately what you see at the detector. Then you have to retroactively figure out what produced it. There are these very complicated inverse problems that need to be solved. You’ve got this final data, but you need to figure out what produced it, and that’s how you look for signatures of these. Many of these people were incredibly deep experts on simulation methods for following particle tracks. This was really deep and difficult stuff. I was like, “Wow, you could spend a lifetime just learning how to do this and how to solve some of these inverse problems, and you would know very little about quantum field theory, detector physics, vacuum physics, or data processing, all these things that are absolutely essential to understanding, say, the Higgs boson”. I don’t think it’s possible for one person to understand everything in depth. Lots of people broadly understand a lot of these ideas, but they don’t understand everything in the depth that is actually utilized. That’s why there are these papers with well over a thousand authors. Those people can talk to one another at a high level, but they don’t understand each other’s specialties in all that much depth. Things like detector physics, vacuum physics, solving inverse problems, this stuff is incredibly different from each other. To understand it in real detail is serious work. How do you think about prolificness versus depth? Maybe Darwin’s an example of somebody who’s just gestating on something for many decades. There are other examples. Einstein during the year he comes up with special relativity is just doing a bunch of different things. And Pais talks about how they were all relevant to the eventual build-up.…

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