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· Jun 28

1. greg egan in the '90s absolutely fucking hates religion, spirituality, all humanities subjects and the people who study them, with an intensity i find jarring. i guess this might've made more sense during the height of the atheism wars but it strikes me as ridiculous now

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(not to mention "in this timeline your wife is alive because science") it takes a stunning amount of arrogance to assert so forcefully that religion has no redeeming value the way greg does. you have to believe that almost every human being who ever lived was a fucking moron

it's also becoming clearer that a big part of why greg thinks science deserves the level of worship he offers it is that he sees it as where all the real miracles come from; the path to acquiring real godhood

for someone born in 1961, 16 years after the atom bomb, 8 years before the moon landing, i can see where he's coming from. but for me, born in 1990, the biggest technological story of my lifetime seems like the rise of smartphones + websites that drive their users insane

1:12 PM · Jul 7, 2022Twitter Web App

that's a much less positive development than the discovery of penicillin or whatever else people want to point to. there have also been no big developments in fundamental physics, no fusion, no big medical tech advances that i know of... science has been a poor god in my lifetime

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physics as a religion also suffers from having a deeply unsatisfying cosmology with tons of gaping holes. what caused the big bang? nobody knows. what caused cosmic inflation? "the inflaton field" ie nobody knows. what are dark matter and dark energy? nooooobody knoooows

there's just nothing in fundamental physics about how a person living in macroscopic reality dozens of orders of magnitude away from atoms let alone quarks ought to live their lives. it's very unsatisfying if you aren't constantly getting new technology out of it!

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greg egan's stories just do not contain an explanation of why taking physics as your religion does not inevitably collapse into nihilism *other than* the possibility of sustained rapid technological progress being a sufficiently exciting distraction

@joshuayn514

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science has done lots of cool stuff since the 90s! - wireless everything - computers so cheap/fast/small everyone owns one - search engines (!!), online maps - LED lightbulbs that basically never need to be replaced and use little energy - voice recognition that rivals star trek

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I was just imagining if you took somebody from the 90s and transported them to the present, would they be impressed? Most of our technological progress has been in consumer electronics and the internet. From a societal point of view a lot has gotten worse.

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There have been a lot of developments in fundamental physics since the 90s, even if you don't consider the observation of the higgs to be worthwhile. Condensed matter, quantum foundations, and quantum computing have seen huge progress, not to mention most other non HE-physics

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arguably that’s because we haven’t been worshipping the science god *enough*!

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The big medical advance of our lifetime is the ability to make a drug for a specific protein target. This was accomplished in two mostly-independent ways: * monoclonal antibodies * structural biology, basically computer-aided design (CAD) of drug-protein complexes

helicopterosaur

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