Cool Worlds: Wendy Freedman, Hubble Tension, multiple distance markers and methods
Cool Worlds: #2 Wendy Freedman – The Crisis in Cosmology, Standard Candles, Future of Cosmology at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iva024YXSAA
Wendy Freedman, David Kipping,
Very helpful, very informative, very positive view of the future. On your end note. I work every day with “all human knowledge”, “8 billion humans”, “2 billion children learning for the first time between 4 and 24 years old”, “5 billion internet users”. When I check a topic like “Hubble tension” it has 64,100 entry points. If you trace out who is working on that, what is known, what models instruments data algorithms applications, you will find that for most ideas that surface that you can bring to mind, there are often 10,000 individuals and groups working on it. And the dynamics are closely the same for all groups. That old saw about “if ___ had not been born” is not true, but orders of magnitude larger. It is not just a few alternate Einsteins, but thousands of even millions, depending on the topic.
I bet that this year we could see proof the Universe is many orders of magnitude larger than our little “big bang region”. I think I will win that bet. But there were already tens of thousands saying that already in different ways. Rather than only finding and rewarding and promoting “stars” and “geniuses”, we as a species need to value all humans and make sure we have a solid foundation. Break up the LIGOs and have better, smaller sensors in all countries, and orbits or all bodies in the heliosphere. Break up the CERNs and have smaller desktop and continuously operating reference experiments to give open lossless shared data for all humans, not just a few who could afford to go to the right schools. Most of the knowledge now is not so much hoarded, but it is hidden by laziness and lack of effort to share. “We got ours, and to heck with everyone else”. Trace out a few thousand topic groups on the Internet, see who has all the resources and why. Check the countries where billions of humans are living and have the identical brain cells and often more creative, but they don’t happen to have lobbyists and powerful constituencies.
I like your sense that these technical things need local human meaning. July 2023 is the 25th anniversary of the Internet Foundation. And I work every day. I am more than a little disgusted that so much money gets spent to create hoopla and “ooh aah” and not enough to feed the hungry, manage cities well, run the planet well. Too many groups gain monopoly control of subjects, and raise the barriers to keep everyone else out. But the global internet and global knowledge accessible to everyone will raise the total potential for all many orders of magnitude. If electricity, radio, computers raised global standards of living for everyone, then human caring complete auditable open verifiable “true AI” algorithms for storing and sharing knowledge can give us a century of growth and fairness never seen before.
Your efforts to find and share are a good indication of a better future for all. But think carefully about who can see what you are doing. And think about the effort you invest. There are about 5 billion humans with some access to the Internet. But when people like your speaker post their “papers” she puts it out in PDF or literally on paper. The people who can read that English language are not the majority. The people who can look up those references, find those tools, check the meaning of the terms, find the raw data, find the tools — that is nearly impossible,. BUT, with an AI assistant capable of all human subjects, all human knowledge, USING the knowledge from an “astrophysics” paper does NOT have to be that hard. If the author and publishers and their stakeholders and investors are responsible and post the equations in global open symbolic mathematics form, post the algorithms in global open symbolic algorithm form, post the raw lossless data in global open formats, and make sure every person using the Internet (all humans) can actually use those things.
If that means that a researcher who has to use a supercomputer or exascale facility to do their work, to visualize has to make sure ALL their material and data and visualizations are open to all – that is the prices human society should pay to let everyone have the same chance.
When I was 8 I found a book on Chinese and taught myself, but no who spoke or used that language was near enough for me to work with. When I was 11 years old, I wanted to study spectroscopy, but there were no libraries near that even had a book on the subject. When I was 16, I was studying random neural networks and there was no one who was doing that kind of thing who would talk to a young person. But today, a young person of those ages can get on the Internet, find a certified AI with that subject expertise and talk to them in most any human language and begin to expand and learned. When I was 19 I took graduate courses in artificial intelligence. I was NOT unusual at all. The people around me were smarter than me. And in their areas of interest and passion, likely better than anyone in the world.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
