Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses
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Today, I'm speaking with Michael Nielsen. You have done many things. You're one of 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 Ola and Greg Brockman credit them with getting them into the field. More recently, you're a research fellow at the Astero Institute and writing a book about religion, science, and technology. I'm going ask you about none of those things. The conversation I want to have today is, how do we recognize scientific progress? And it's especially relevant for AI because people
Okay. Yeah. So Michael Simoulli is one of the sort of the famous results often presented as this experiment that was done in the 1880s and that helped Einstein come up with the special theory of relativity a little bit later. So sort of changing the way we think about space and time and our fundamental conception of those things. And there's kind of 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, h
Okay, so 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?
Abraham Pike.
Abraham Pike. Yes. So does the Lord. And then also from Imre Lacatos, the methodologies of scientific research programs. The way it's told is that Michaelson Morley proved that the ether did not exist. Yeah. Therefore, it created a crisis in physics Yeah. That Einstein saw saw the special relativity. Yeah. And Richard pointing out is actually was trying to distinguish between many different theories of You know, if you're in space or if you're on Earth, it's the same direction of ether. Or maybe the wind is being carried around by the Earth, so you can't really experience it on Earth. But if y
For longer than that, he conducted them. I think the first one was in 1881, but he continued to believe until, I mean, he died. He died, I think it was like 1929 or so, it was like the late 20s. He was still doing experiments in the 1920s sort of about whether or not the ether existed. So continued to believe in the ether to the end of his life. I think the last public statement he made is like a year or two before he died and he still believed, basically believed at that point.
In fact, there was another physicist, Miller, who kept doing these experiments in the 1920s. He thought that he went to a high enough altitude. It was in Mount Wilson in California, where, oh, I'm high enough that I can actually the ether winds are not being dragged with it by the Earth. I and I've measured, the effect of the And Einstein hears about this and he says this is where you get the famous quote, subtle is the lord, but malicious he is not. Anyways, I think the reason the story is interesting for for many different reasons, but one is one of the different ways in which the real histo
Yeah. I mean, it certainly doesn't show that ideas about falsification are wrong, are falsified. But it does show the most naive ideas, things are often much more complicated than you think. Michaelson did this experiment in 1881, he was a very young man, and then other people, I think Rayleigh was one of them, pointed out that there were some problems with the way he did it so they had to redo it in 1887. And at that point, like a lot of the leading physicists of the day, leading scientists of the day, basically accepted this result that there was no et
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