←back to thread

34 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.338s | source
Show context
fasteddie31003 ◴[] No.43737296[source]
Am I wrong to assume that science that is harder to prove will have less impact on human wellbeing? Electricity is easy to run experiments on and prove, meaning humans can manipulate it for our benefits easy. However, the Higgs Boson was extremely difficult to prove and I see no way that it could ever benefit humanity's wellbeing. Now how could humans improve our wellbeing by manipulating dark matter?
replies(7): >>43737380 #>>43737451 #>>43737456 #>>43737774 #>>43738508 #>>43738823 #>>43739266 #
1. Groxx ◴[] No.43737451[source]
Everything is hard until it's not. Invisible electromagnetic waves are invisible (hard) and frequently deadly (hard!), but now we have WiFi, cell phones, GPS, xrays, etc.

Superconductivity is absurd magic and took impossibly low temperatures until they weren't impossible, and now it's driving MRIs, massively improving medical research, and the realm of usability is constantly expanding. Absolute zero was known reasonably accurately for over 100 years before liquid helium was achieved, and superconductivity came only three years after.

It's the kind of thing you can frequently only judge accurately in retrospect.