2023: Most Important Year Ever?

Seen from a scientist’s perspective, the last year was one of the most important years since the Big Bang.

During that year science made at least three major advancements that will change – are changing, have changed – our lives faster and more drastically than at any time in history.  In addition, astronomers came up with a mind-bending headscratcher that could change everything we think we know about the universe.

The three major advancements are quantum computing, which has been called the most important discovery since fire; artificial intelligence, which already had been declared the most important discovery since flight; and nuclear fusion, which has been a holy grail for scientists around the world since its possibility was first suggested in 1920.

The headscratcher is the recent discovery of six massive galaxies in deep space that well-established science says simply cannot exist.

Put all those together and we appear to be in for some tumultuous days, which, if we handle it right, can be a good thing.  An exciting thrill ride, but a good thing.

There may not be much if anything in this post that you do not know already, but it’s good to leave wars and politics behind for a few moments and ponder where we are in other important worlds.

Let’s begin with the headscratcher.  Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope was peering deeper into space than it ever had when it spied the six well-developed galaxies.  All of them contained billions of stars, and at least one of them contained more than 100 billion stars, about the same as our  Milky Way.  The galaxies were more than 13 billion light years away from Earth, which means scientists were looking at the galaxies as they existed 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang.

And that’s the problem.  It took our Milky Way the entire life of the universe to develop to where it is.  For those six deep-space galaxies to develop from the Big Bang as rapidly as they did,  they would have had to have developed 20 times faster than the Milky Way did, and science says that simply could not happen.

Ivo Labbe, one of the scientists involved in the project, was quoted in the journal Nature as summing it up in just  two words: “It’s nuts.”

Webb’s discoveries still need to be confirmed by other methods, but most astronomers and astrophysicists seem to agree the sightings are real and the effort to confirm them by other means is mostly routine science.  They agree on that, but they disagree vehemently about how it could have happened.

If the sightings are confirmed and they can’t be explained by established science, does that mean we have to rethink the Big Bang theory?

Labbe: “If even one of them turns out to be true, then it means we have to change our theories.”

I don’t need to say much about artificial intelligence because the news media pounds us with it every day – as it should, really, because it is an incredible invention that is rapidly changing our everyday lives.  But just as a reminder:

Businesses use AI to provide customer support and answer frequently asked questions.   Law enforcement agencies and others can use it to identify objects and people in images and videos.  AI algorithms are used to recommend products, movies and music based on user preferences. It is used to enable self-driving cars. It can write, it can compose, it can research, it can converse with people, it can, well, you know.

In other words, AI has the potential to  revolutionize many industries and improve our lives in countless ways.  But it also raises ethical questions about privacy, security and the impact on jobs, and especially its power.  We’ll just have to hope it never decides to eliminate the source of air and water pollution and has the power to do it.

Nuclear Fusion’s remarkable breakthrough (by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility) is that for the first time ever we have a process that produces more energy than is needed to produce it.  Scientists say that when mixed with tritium, one metric ton of deuterium can produce the same amount of energy as approximately 29 billion tons of coal.

And it’s clean.  Nuclear fusion, the process that fuels the sun, produces no greenhouse gases, and fusion reactors would produce significantly less radioactive waste than fission ones  do.

But although nuclear fusion is a remarkable scientific breakthrough, we’re only at a Kitty Hawk moment.  There are tremendous obstacles to overcome before nuclear fusion can enter the world in any commercial way.

But the important thing, the good thing, is that the science is done.  Now all that’s left is for the, in effect, the engineers to take over and begin overcoming those obstacles.  They say they know what needs to be done and they can do it, so it’s no longer a matter of whether it can be done.  It can be.  Now it’s a question of when it can be done, of when nuclear fusion can become commercial.

The answer to that depends on money.  Great gobs of money.  Scientists say only money is holding them back but give us the money and you’ll have your safe, clean and inexpensive energy in just a few years.  Otherwise, not for a long time.

Finally, although quantum computing has been called  “the most important scientific discovery since fire,” it is the least-discussed advancement of them all. It’s also the weirdest of them all.  It’s based on quantum mechanics, a subatomic world where waves have properties of particles, particles behave like waves, and particles can exist in multiple places at the same time until they are observed, at such time they can only exist in that one place.

I’ll let Wikipedia explain the importance of that.  It says that quantum computers “are expected to perform certain computational tasks exponentially faster than classical computers. Instead of using classical bits, quantum computers use qubits (basic units of quantum information), which can be in superpositions of states.  Quantum  programmers are able to manipulate the superposition of qubits in order to solve problems  that classical computing cannot do effectively, such as searching unsorted databases or integer factorization.”

IBM says it much more simply.  Quantum computing makes monumental and rapid progress possible in the fields of medicine, logistics, financial services, cloud security, and, yes, even artificial intelligence itself.

Whether we use all these incredible advances to their highest or lowest purposes is yet to be seen.  But either way, tomorrow’s world will differ from today’s in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

And it won’t be long before we arrive there.  We’re already well on the way.

Correction:  Because of a typographical error, last week’s posting said our forebears wrote the Constitution in the 1800s.  The Constitution was written in the 1700s.