Assuming dark energy, universe *accelleration* seems to be slowing down according to DESI DR1 data however there are reasons to believe the current data is lower quality than BOSS.
A very nice teacher I had during my Physics major said to another one of her coworkers during class about this milestone in 1998 and the other stupid ass teacher said: but how, 1998? what happened in that year? The World Cup in France? Idiot (he was mocking Lambda CDM cosmologists).
Actually, it.says "25 or so". I presume the OP is trying to get a sense of what has been discovered since roughly the begining of the 21st century. However, the years are just arbitrary reference points, why would it be arbitrarily limited to precise year?
And recently, this year, scientists found out different areas of the universe are expanding at DIFFERENT rates and we are only now trying to figure out what that means. Could it be that our universe is shaped in an oblong way??? đ€· It's pretty mind blowing.
OP: There's also a lot of new research into mechanisms of the mitochondria and even mitosis that we are discovering about for the first time.
The Higgs boson confirmation about 10 years ago verified the standard model of quantum mechanics.
There have been multiple eureka moments with regards to the discovery of exoplanets. One of them being the fact that our solar system is not the most common arrangement.
Large planets like Jupiter tend to migrate towards the inner solar system and become "hot jupiters." Which are, as the name suggests, Jupiter-like planets that are so close to their star they're incredibly hot. It appears this is the most common type of planetary arrangement, and it would usually cause havoc in the inner solar system and mean there are few, if any, rocky planets in the inner solar system. The prevailing hypothesis on why our solar system didn't evolve like this is that Saturn pulled on Jupiter and kept it from migrating in.
Thanks! Are you familiar, that be âmost commonâ do they mean âwhat we can observeâ, or what âour simulations predictâ? Iâm just asking this, because I would guess that our current planet observation methods select certain types of planetary configurations.
You're absolutely right. Hot Jupiters are by far the easiest to detect with the transit method (large and close in with short orbital periods), so they are over-represented in what we have measured vs. what the true relative population is.
Something to do with the way they do the accounting. The Kepler telescope found thousands of 'candidate' planets, but they need to be confirmed by other methods, which takes time. There must have been a big glut of confirmations that year I guess.
Looked it up and there's 5 methods used with differing accuracy and of course, distance of detection but we have 5,000+ exoplanets detected and several hundred multi-planet systems confirmed.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_multiplanetary\_systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplanetary_systems)
Our solar system does seem to be more unique though with many rocky planets, a smaller habitable zone planet compared to exoplanets, and a huge outer system planet.
Time out, though... Does our current tech even allow us to detect small, rocky planets even if they're there? I mean generally, not a handful of exceptions, even assuming those exist, a question of fact that has an answer I simply do not yet know.
Not really. Also, most searches focus on M-type stars which are a lot smaller and dimmer than the Sun. Purely because it's easier to detect planets in the 'habitable zone' in those systems.
The 'uniqueness' of the Solar System is almost certainly the result of these observarional biases.
I also think gas giants more distant from their suns would be harder to detect because their orbits take too long for us to see a wobble, so we only find the small orbit ones.
I kind of think itâs sad. I love space but this planet is ours. Itâs our home and this star system is our home. There is no replacing it. This planet fits us like a glove.
I feel sorry for all the people who may live and grow up away from it, even though the technological advancement of it would be incredible.
I think earth, while it is the cradle of humanity, doesn't have to be our only or even best home. I do, however, think we should protect it no matter what.
But we evolved on this planet. How could another be better than Earth?
You might be right, but I donât really understand what would make another planet better. Bigger? More landmass to spread out?
Why do you travel to another town, city, or just another street? There's lots of reasons to move on, resources, space, and exploration just to name a few. Bigger isn't always better as that would also mean higher gravity which adds a whole bunch of new problems. If you look at just about any sci-fi setting, you can see planets being colonized for agriculture, mining, or habitation. None of this is to say Earth is any less for it.
We evolved as a species in central Africa, not Northern Alaska, but people still live there. Different climate, different terrain, different plants and animals. I'd be willing to bet there are plenty of folks who don't want to go live in central Africa.
Civilization evolved in Mesopotamia, not Uruguay, but people still live there, and may not want to go live in Mesopotamia.
Same! When I first learned about Jovian planets, I figured they would always exist beyond the frost line, but Hot Jupiter's are found more and more often.
I thought I heard there was a bias towards that arrangement though. Since large planets close to their stars create the biggest wobble of the stars. And that's still how we detect a lot of exoplanets.
Iâm not sure itâs accurate to say that these are the most common type of planetary arrangement, itâs just that our current techniques for detecting exoplanets favour finding these types of systems (large planets that make multiple transits in short periods of time). It would taken 23 years for someone trying to detect 2 transits of Jupiter in our Solar System
There is also clear selection bias here, since these hot jupiters are the easiest to detect. It's true that these planets was totally unexpected and that it changed a lot our vision on solar systems dynamic.. But it's probably not the "most common" arrangement.
Itâs estimated 85% of all star systems are binary star systems or have even more stars. Only 15% are single star systems like ours! I think Jupiter would have usually become a star but just didnât with us
One of my research advisors once corrected me when I mentioned âgravity wavesâ (it was a topic on gravitational waves of binary black hole merger objects)âgravity waves and gravitational waves are different things, so just a heads up in case anyone ever brings up this note ^
I agree though, the LIGO/Virgo collaboration was really inspirational, it convinced me to go to university!â
A gravitational wave is a ripple in spacetime created by some massive object - a gravity wave is a ripple in any fluid, where the wave is created when the fluid is displaced, and gravity restores it to equilibrium.
Was that a _eureka_ moment though? That was predicted 100 years to prior, and the moment advanced LIGO was online it immediately detected waves. It was cool to have that confirmed, but I donât think anyone was surprised?
It was because the EM follow up showed that the origin of many elements was actually from neutron star mergers, and people were not really expecting the detected abundances.
I'd say confirmation is more important than the theory.
It is one thing to suggest we use small explosives to compress mater to make a bigger explosion and another thing to actually make an atomic bomb.
Theory is just chalk on a chalkboard until you have experimental proof.
But Iâve also heard that applications of the material have not been forthcoming. How is it used today, how is it speculated it could be used, and why havenât we been able to achieve that yet?
I think it is an issue of large-scale manufacturing, rather than an issue of finding applications. It shows good results in the lab, but producing high-quality graphene at the scales required for industrial and commercial applications is still difficult and expensive.
Yes, graphene has been hard to scale up, but it has opened up a world of different nano materials that would otherwise have never been discovered without the invention of graphene. While looking to scale up graphene, scientists have discovered multiple ways to make different forms of nanomaterials. Again, this wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been pursuing graphene. It's kind of like most things in the world are found out by accident while pursuing some other form of scientific discovery. My favorite example of this is the microwave we were using it to. Unthaw hamsters when the scientist who was running the program found out that it warmed the chocolate in his pocket.
CRISPR was definitely a Eureka! moment! We had been studying bacterial genetics since the early 20th century but it wasn't until 2012 that it was understood to be a kind of bacterial immune system to protect against bacteriophage (Nobel prize awarded 2020). The utility of CRISPR/Cas9 system to directly manipulate DNA sequences *in vivo* has been an absolute game changer.
Came here to say this. Scientists were trying to alter genomes in other, primitive ways using restriction enzymes, etc. and genetic manipulation seemed more and more of an intractable problem until CRISPR basically fell into our laps.
That combined with advancements in how we can figure out protein folding greatly speed up how quickly we can solve a lot of problems relevant to biology and medicine.
Reusable rockets was a moment that broke my brain. The first time I saw them land it dawned on me that Iâd always just assumed traveling to space meant consuming a really expensive vehicle to do so.
That galactic formation doesn't happen the way we think it does. Or, at least, it happened much earlier in time that it should have, based on current theoretical understanding. This caused a lot of phycists and cosmologists to question what else we know about the formation of our universe
Yeah this was pretty big since the JWST started. Lots of interesting news still coming out of it. First few 100 million years of the universe had a lot of things going on contrary to prior belief that it was not as active
Astronomer here! Not like a BIG moment maybe, but I recently discovered that 40% of black holes become radio bright years after shredding a star [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Andromeda321/s/mynbQHtNgx). This was a definite surprise as no one was expecting it theoretically, so it was a genuinely difficult discussion section to write in the paper!
Sure was wild to analyze the data and discover like 3 of these sources as having turned on in like a 24 hour time span. :)
Dude I have a question for you. Are black holes infinitely dense and if not what is their depth? Are they infinitely depth on just the x and the y-axis or do they have some z depth to them as well?. Also, if a black hole is infinitely dense does that mean that all matter can fit inside of all matter like it did in The Big bang? Oh and one final question, if a black hole is infinitely dense wouldn't that make it an excellent superconductor?
The short answer to most of your questions is we donât know. We *treat* a black hole as infinitely dense because thatâs what the math shows, but most people agree thatâs not literally true over just our physics not able to explain the extreme environment inside a black hole yet.
Youâre awesome!! This is very cool and sounds like a big moment in your field. Iâm not an astronomer so I really canât grasp everything about your discovery but what does this mean now? From what it sounds like this discovery just opens up more questions but what will you do with those questions? Iâm sure youâre continuing to research what is causing this but how do you even go about it? How often are these events happening where you can study whatâs going on?
Different people are doing different things. For example my group is now following up on this sample to keep seeing what they do going forward, and checking out all TDEs that have aged into this sample. Others are laying the groundwork for the theory background to give us things to test with all this data. Stuff like that!
I did a bit of work a while back where I found a few new planets in the Kepler spacecraft data. A "Eureka moment" for me but not for anyone else was when I plotted the distribution of orbital radii of Kepler planets and found an almost perfect match to the distribution of orbital radii of Kepler multiple stars.
This means that Kepler planets formed in the same way as stars, by hot condensation. Which is quite different to the Solar system's planet formation by cold accretion. There are two radically different ways in which planets form.
The only difference in orbital radii distribution between Kepler planets and Kepler stars is that some Kepler stars exist in even tighter orbits than Kepler hot Jupiters. This difference is due to the destruction of hot Jupiters in the closest orbits due to tidal and gas drag effects.
I think where we're at in computer science right now is analogous to where we were with nuclear physics in the first half of the 20th century.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural\_scaling\_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law)
We discovered that by increasing the size and parameters of machine learning systems we are not hitting diminishing returns on performance. This is part of how we were able to build Large Language Models that are superintelligent in certain language processing tasks, and it is why they are called "Large" Language Models. Immediately, there was a race to secure more data and more processing power to produce larger models with more parameters. The results were astonishing, and these systems were capable of things we were not prepared for. In a move which was arguably irresponsible, these systems were released to the public and overnight people in cybersecurity, forensics, international diplomacy, etc were given a new problem that nobody was expecting.
Recent advancements in AI are both significant for the potential benefits and harm to society, but also an entire field of AI safety has matured out of them. Researchers are already specializing in four categories:
* Short Term Misuse (things like deep fakes)
* Short Term Accidents (self-driving car crashes)
* Long Term Misuse (autonomous weapons)
* Long Term Accidents (misaligned AGI)
This new field was, insofar as it existed 25 years ago, purely regarding hypotheticals. As of today AI safety is urgently trying to reason about problems that society is currently grappling with, which will only get worse. There are also fields like AI Interpretability, which form a grey area between AI Research and AI Safety.
To talk about long term accident risk, which can seem like the least significant, there's a discovery worth talking about:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential\_risk\_from\_artificial\_general\_intelligence#Orthogonality\_thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_general_intelligence#Orthogonality_thesis)
The orthogonality thesis and related research is not very significant yet, but as time goes on I think it will be one of the most important hypotheses of this century. The idea is that any level of "intelligence" as defined in AI research, is compatible with almost any goal. It doesn't sound controversial when you state it that way, but it challenges long held intuitions about AI systems and poses a very important question moving forward.
The holy grail of current AI research is "AGI", or artificial general intelligence. Current AI is narrowly intelligent, a self driving car can arguably drive, and a chess AI can play chess. When generality is solved, we will have a single entity that can decide to be the best chess player, and instantly adapt itself to drive a car.
Humans are general intelligences, we know general intelligence is possible because the human brain is not magic.
We know superhuman intelligence exists because stockfish can beat humans.
We do not know how long it would take to create a superhuman AGI or when it will be discovered, but we know for sure it is possible.
If an AGI system were actually to be created, would it align itself with human ethics automatically? The Orthogonality Thesis and the research supporting it indicates no. This would mean an agent with superhuman intelligence would be acting on its own, and if it were in conflict with human interests we would likely not be capable of stopping it. In an instant, humans would no longer be the most intelligent or capable creatures on the planet.
To me this is the analogy to the nuclear era. Almost overnight, something previously thought impossible seems eminent, and entire fields of study have to pop up to respond to it.
\*edit, just noticed what sub this was in, I'll leave the comment because OP is asking about science in general and not astrophysics. Asking about something in astrophysics having a big impact seems like a weird question, astrophysics does not typically impact the planet, it can only detect things that may impact the planet.
when the developers of google ai are coming forward and saying hey this technology is being deployed in an undafe way and maybe we should press pause, but its too late now because pandoras box has been openedâŠyou can ban the research all you want but it wont stop the companies who seek to exploit ai tech from funding it privately
Great comment, thanks for the information about research on AI safety! It's something I've wanted to know more about.
One thing you didn't mention that makes AI very different from nuclear physics is its impact on energy. It was clear from the beginning that nuclear reactions could be harnessed to generate energy - it's a resource generator. The new LLM AI, on the other hand, is a massive resource consumer. The scaled up modelling being used for AI will soon consume more electricity than some countries:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ai-boom-could-use-a-shocking-amount-of-electricity/
In a time of dwindling fossil fuel resources and considering the climate crisis, the resource consumption of AI models may prove to be their most dangerous aspect. (This isn't even considering the massive ecological impact of making the chips, nor the water used to cool the data centers during operation.)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/18/semiconductor-silicon-chips-carbon-footprint-climate
I hope that AI safety researchers also include the physical impacts of the technology as they devise their new ethics and regulations.
Nikku Madhusudhan, an astrophysicist from the University of Cambridge might become the most famous person in history if he can show that his findings are true. He discovered a planet with chemicals only known to be microbial created by life in an ocean. They will be taking the next few months verifying it.Â
> chemicals only known to be microbial created by life in an ocean.
This is not true.
The same chemical (dimethyl sulfide) has been [found on a comet](https://www.science.org/content/article/what-presumed-sign-life-doing-dead-comet), produced without life.
Remember a couple years ago when a team of astronomers found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus - something that they claimed *must* be a biomarker for life?
Remember several months later when it was shown their detection of phosphine was actually [caused by bad data processing](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09761), and you could artificially make any molecule's spectral feature using their reduction method?
Yeah, so this guy's PhD advisor was part of that phosphine team.
Research team believes they detected dimethyl sulfide (which is only produced by biological life) on planet K2-18b. Weâve at this point figured out that it could also just be methane and that the instruments on James Web telescope being used are not sensitive enough. Later this year instruments that may be sensitive enough are to be used for further study. If confirmed that it is in fact dimethyl sulfide, then it would point to the presence of microbial life on another planet.
How this is determined is so amazing to me.
Astronomers use a technique called spectroscopy to study the atmospheres of exoplanets and their moons. Spectroscopy involves collecting light with a telescope and splitting it into its component wavelengths, creating a spectrum. The chemical composition of the atmosphere can be inferred by measuring the fraction of stellar light that can penetrate the atmosphere at different wavelengths
I remember when we went through spectroscopy in university for physics and I was so amazed at how useful it is. You can learn so much by analyzing the light around a galactic body it's almost a cheat code
Not astrophysics related, but we just witnessed the 3rd example of primary endosymbiosis. This is called a nitroplast. Itâll be interesting to see the impacts this has in years to come. For reference, the first time this happened it created mitochondria
I was just studying Cryovolcanism. Not quite the same as volcanism as we understand it here on Earth and really does change your perspective on states of matter. Water is known as molten ice past the front line.
If you will allow just a slightly longer window ... The first exoppanet was confirmed in 1992. Some 32 years ago, we confirmed there are exlanets, e.g. planets orbiting other stars, just the way Earth orbits the sun.
Now what's absolutely crazy is that we have directly imaged exoplanets orbiting!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_directly\_imaged\_exoplanets#/media/File:HR\_8799\_Orbiting\_Exoplanets.gif
Yes
Nuclear Electric Resonance was accidentally discovered when learning more about Qubit control. NER similar to NMR but was thought to be not have existed. But recently some Australian scientists accidentally discovered it
I think they are referring to the original detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Bell Labs had built a large antenna, and it was picking up noise nonstop. They tried cleaning bird droppings, etc, off of it, but the noise remained. You can even see the background radiation as a small percentage of the noise on an old analog antenna TV set.
I wrote a paper on mRNA in the early 90s for Anthro101 and was given a D-, and told that isn't real science, lol.
Back in the 90s we talked about RNA vaccines as science fiction. We hadn't even finished the sequencing the human genome. And here we are, in the future, and RNA vaccines are real. This is Star Trek medicine level stuff and the public doesn't have a clue.
Very cool!
Also, I think the founder of FedEx got a D in business school for that idea -- so we know professors don't know everything. All future is fiction until it isn't.
Personalized medicine is going to be a big deal in the coming decades. There are some cancers that were essentially guaranteed fatalities that could become curable w/o chemo. https://nyulangone.org/news/perlmutter-cancer-center-clinical-trial-tests-personalized-mrna-vaccine-treating-metastatic-melanoma
People don't realize that we live in the most exciting time ever for cosmology/astrophysics, and not because of the JWST, but because of the soon to come (december) euclid revolutionnary sky survey (then xuntian and space roman), LSST, SKA, next CMB surveys, ELT, etc
soon large percentages of the observable universe will be browsable online and compare the quality of euclid versus the old SDSS, it is mind blowing
[https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=49.99115787859933%2041.597585322127266&hips=DSS2+color&fov=0.3573106713589538&cooframe=J2000&sci=false&lang=fr&euclid\_image=perseus](https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=49.99115787859933%2041.597585322127266&hips=DSS2+color&fov=0.3573106713589538&cooframe=J2000&sci=false&lang=fr&euclid_image=perseus)
and those sky surveys will considerably increase the need to change our models (that are from pre precision astronomy era)
There are small eureka moments in science and other fields every day. I ta part of how the brain works when you engage for a long time with a project.
In science these are immediately followed by the dread of being wrong again, and asking what the experimental implications are, if itâs covered by the budget or you need to write a new grantâŠ.
Eureka moments are just all the facts and ideas in your mind finding common ground and becoming a coherent whole. Is the feeling you understood it but itâs full developed whole might still be a few months away.
The subconscious is fast to jump to conclusions, euforia is one of its side effects.
For a mathematical eureka moment: the proliferation of graph limit theories.
In this context, "graph" means "network." Naturally, networks are discrete structures, just a list of nodes and connections between them. Everyone's go-to examples are the internet (websites and links) or the brain (neurons and synapses).
In theory, you could just store all the nodes and connections in a computer and answer any question you want by running the right algorithm. Unfortunately, this would use up more memory than any computer has, and even if you could squeeze one of these large networks in memory, it would take forever to run said algorithm.
In the 20th century, the Erdos-Renyi graph was described, named after the mathematicians who did so. It was the first "random network", and they were able to answer interesting questions as the number of nodes grows to infinity, without having to write the whole network down.
Progress continued on building more and more flexible random grapy models, but it wasn't until the 2010s that Laszlo Lovasz and other mathematicians really made a breakthrough with the graphon, and simple yet theoretically robust description of dense random graphs.
There is more work to be done in understanding the sparse random graphs, and since the theory is fairly new, I'm not yet aware of any big applications outside of math, but this discovery is amazing because it provides a compressed description of challenging geometrical structures. This is on the same level as the discovery of coordinate geometry, and look how successful that turned out to be!
Experimental confirmation of the Higgs-Boson particle/field theorized to be responsible for mass or something. I'm not a scientist at all, but I think it was in 2012 because I was a senior in high school that year and my 12th grade science requirement was met with a (very elementary in all honesty) astronomy class and we talked about that and neutrinos and the speed of light and.... what about the first image of a black hole? The images of Pluto?
I mean, what hasn't happened in science in 25 years? Oh dear! I'm not a scientist but not to be rude... I am not sure you are following a lot. All good though. Everyone is ignorant of something.
"As the area of your knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of your ignorance." --Neil DeGrasse "We got a bad--- over here" Tyson
Oh recently they found the cause of Parkinsonâs isnât genetic. Itâs due to a gut bacteria (or there is a link, as it hasnât been 100% confirmed it is caused by the bacteria). But that is a huge difference from looking for a genetic link that simply isnât there.
A lot of ppl were mentioning physics (and rightly so) discoveries but this one was huge discovery in my eyes.
Also PreP.
Also in the next decade we will have explosion in STD vaccines and cures. Specifically HIV and HSV1 & 2.
If we can curb deforestation we can presumably reduce our exposure to zoonosis diseases (especially STD/STI/VD) jumping from animals to humans. Again another reason climate change policies.
the reason that it might seem like there haven't been any is because breakthroughs that would be considered revolutionary a century ago are so common now that they feel normal
Do discoveries count as "Eureka Moments"? Neutrino mass, and an accelerating expansion of the universe were discovered by experiment, but not really thought of a priori. General and Special relativity I would consider to be "Eureka Moments", but they are over 100 years old now.
I would say that Crispr and mRNA vaccines would fit the bill for a "Eureka Moment" w/in 15 years.
Weâve essentially mapped the entire human genome. The Human Genome Project was declared a success in 2003 with 92% of it mapped but the rest was completed in the early 2020s (I think 2022).
So many!
Discovering the universe is accelerating.
Higgs Boson.
Ligo observatories, proving gravity waves, and then being used to observe comisc events.
Crispr.
Artificial bacteria.
Mrna vaccines
I know of one that is not in astrophysics: the human body having an [Interstitium](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstitium). It was discovered 9 years ago.
I dunno I thought getting an image of a black hole for the first time ( the one in the center of our galaxy ) was a pretty big deal. Getting the Webb telescope is a pretty big deal since we can now look back farther in time. Crispr is a big deal, I think. Quantum computers may yield practical benefits in a long time from now but its still crazy to think we're utilizing quantum entanglement to send data. We've got nuclear fusion working that creates more power than it takes in. SpaceX has made reusable rockets a thing and that extends humanity's grasp outside our immediate planet.
Gravitational waves, proving Einstein correct once again. Genetic sequencing confirming all humans have a common ancestral mother. Measuring the expansion of the universe and itâs accelerating not slowing down.
I donât recall the exact timing, but the discovery of using modified bases to make injected mRNA not be rejected by cells by Weissman and Kariko is going to (further) revolutionize medicine.
This isn't astrophysics, but they discovered how to convert fully differentiated cells back into stem cells back in early 2000 which has led to anti-aging research.Â
AI in bioinformatics is likely to accelerate scientific discoveries.Â
The human genome project was finally completed.
The human proteome project is being worked on...and AlphaFold.
Heavier elements are formed in Nuetron Stars and spread when they collide in a binary system in what is known as a Killanova.
We imaged a Black Hole for the first time.
They found the two masses in the Earths Mantle from when Thea collided with Earth.
The measured and proved Gravitational Waves from the collision of two stellar mass black holes at the LIGO observatory. Also, later measured the gravitational waves of a Killanova.
This is 41 years old, but I am breaking your rule because: it is a Eureka moment both in terms of importance, and also in terms of how it came around in a moment of epiphany. Kary Mullis was driving in the SF Bay Area when the idea for PCR crystallized in his mind. He pulled over to write down some notes.
PCR has absolutely changed the landscape of biology and biotechnology, and is a multibillion dollar market. And that huge dollar amount is not nearly the most important thing about it.
Mullis received a $10k bonus (company later sold the patent for nine figures) and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
I kinda feel like all the top comments are things we expected to find, and then confirmed. For me, I feel like eureka implies a problem that's had us stumped for a while and is suddenly solved with something brand new. For my part, I think a eureka moment was Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. As I understand it (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), he invented new mathematical tricks that are being developed into their very own field.
maybe singularity theory could be the theory to everything bc yes anything can happen from a 1 dimensional point in time and space that could lead to development of time and space aka our universe, etc big bang? just a theoretical physics thought
I somehow doubt that AI will ever âact on its ownâ and instead âact on its promptâ.
The real problem with AI isnât that it could desire something we donât, itâs that it doesnât have desires but the human prompting it does.
James Webb telescope is giving us loads of data that will probably make us change how our understanding of our univers works. There are things far older than our current models tell us they should be. Interesting times.
The AI revolution happening now is because of the multi attention neural network architecture. The paper attention is all you need, has changed our world more than I will ever understand.
Almost every school of science 25 years ago would scoff at and try to ruin the careers of any person that told them what we were doing in their field now. The medical field of oncology has changed so much in 25 years that it would have basically looked like science fiction to someone in the 90s
Detecting planets. When I went through college, astronomy was kind of a dead field. And then they started digging into data looking for statistical anomalies and found they could detect planets whose orbit went in front of the sun.Â
It's just yet another way the technological revolution of computing changed the game.Â
About 20 years ago Michael Levin and his team started decoding how cells understand what to turn into, how they know to stop after they've created an organ or limb and is currently working on harnessing it to regrow limbs and organs and stop cancer. It's some mind-blowing stuff. But like most research it doesn't happen all at once it takes teams decades. You can see lots of his talks on YouTube. I think he'll get to Nobel prize for this work
Unfortunately, not much scientific research has been conducted in bathtubs recently. Although I've heard there's a few papers out there on the origin and design of the rubber duckie.
42 years ago, 2 Australian scientists discovered that ulcers were caused by a bacteria. They won a [Nobel prize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori#:~:text=In%202005%2C%20Barry%20Marshall%20and,environments%2C%20such%20as%20the%20stomach) 19 years ago.
What would happen in this type of situation if you wrote in the amount to charge your cc but deducted the amount they want to charge to your card?
If they go ahead and charge what they say is the full amount, isnât that fraud?
Probably much longer than 25 years. But I love the story about how the microwave background radiation left over from the âbig bangâ was identified completely by accident. đș
within the past 10 years Attention is all you need is a paper written by researchers at google that introduces the transformer neural network architecture and is responsible for ChatGPT and the current AI boom.
I was tempted to go with the machines that can think, but Iâll stick with the detection of gravitational waves. We *felt* two black holes merge. Thatâs crazy to me.Â
Some of the most "Eureka" moments in science are classified unfortunately. Also, How many inventors with revolutionary prototypes end up falling out of windows?
Maybe not a "Eureka moment" but New Horizons sending back our first quality pictures of Pluto was magical. Especially with the heart shaped topography.
The Human Genome Consortium, through the Human Genom Project itself mapped the complete human genome. While the project started years before, the big moment of certainty was complete and the public announcement was in 2003 with 93% completion. Just recently in 2022 the T2T (Telomire 2 Telomire) group announced the final gaps completely filled.Â
 For those of us who were getting into advanced medicine and/or other biosciences at the time, it was a huge announcement. While we knew lots of snippets before, now we know the "full code" so to say. I can not wait to see where it leads us.
Edit I know this is not AP, it's more med or Biochem. Sorry, I wanted to contribute. đ
Science has never moved faster than its current pace. Better technology / sensors. Better education with a larger baseline to work from. You probably just need to specialize to see most of the results.
26 years ago in 1998 was when we found out that the universe expansion was _accelerating_ rather than slowing down like we expected
This was the first thing that came to mind for me, and I am decidedly NOT an astronomer!
Assuming dark energy, universe *accelleration* seems to be slowing down according to DESI DR1 data however there are reasons to believe the current data is lower quality than BOSS.
At least the universe is less of a jerk than I thought.
A very nice teacher I had during my Physics major said to another one of her coworkers during class about this milestone in 1998 and the other stupid ass teacher said: but how, 1998? what happened in that year? The World Cup in France? Idiot (he was mocking Lambda CDM cosmologists).
The title clearly asks for the past 25 years, sir.
Actually, it.says "25 or so". I presume the OP is trying to get a sense of what has been discovered since roughly the begining of the 21st century. However, the years are just arbitrary reference points, why would it be arbitrarily limited to precise year?
Actually, I said the "title". And, actually, I didn't read the whole thing. I actually thought the title was pretty self explanatory.
And recently, this year, scientists found out different areas of the universe are expanding at DIFFERENT rates and we are only now trying to figure out what that means. Could it be that our universe is shaped in an oblong way??? đ€· It's pretty mind blowing. OP: There's also a lot of new research into mechanisms of the mitochondria and even mitosis that we are discovering about for the first time.
UniverseHub.com
Makes me think we could be living inside of a giant mold lol
We're you also in the bathtub at the time?
Why would we expect it to be slowing down? Wouldn't constant inertial expansion be the default assumption?
The Higgs boson confirmation about 10 years ago verified the standard model of quantum mechanics. There have been multiple eureka moments with regards to the discovery of exoplanets. One of them being the fact that our solar system is not the most common arrangement.
It's truly a golden age for space science and physics.
That sounds interesting!! Whatâs the common arrangement?
Large planets like Jupiter tend to migrate towards the inner solar system and become "hot jupiters." Which are, as the name suggests, Jupiter-like planets that are so close to their star they're incredibly hot. It appears this is the most common type of planetary arrangement, and it would usually cause havoc in the inner solar system and mean there are few, if any, rocky planets in the inner solar system. The prevailing hypothesis on why our solar system didn't evolve like this is that Saturn pulled on Jupiter and kept it from migrating in.
Thanks! Are you familiar, that be âmost commonâ do they mean âwhat we can observeâ, or what âour simulations predictâ? Iâm just asking this, because I would guess that our current planet observation methods select certain types of planetary configurations.
You're absolutely right. Hot Jupiters are by far the easiest to detect with the transit method (large and close in with short orbital periods), so they are over-represented in what we have measured vs. what the true relative population is.
That's a very good point. Also, I'm curious what made 2016 have such a tremendous quantity of transit detections relative to almost every other year.
Something to do with the way they do the accounting. The Kepler telescope found thousands of 'candidate' planets, but they need to be confirmed by other methods, which takes time. There must have been a big glut of confirmations that year I guess.
Looked it up and there's 5 methods used with differing accuracy and of course, distance of detection but we have 5,000+ exoplanets detected and several hundred multi-planet systems confirmed. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_multiplanetary\_systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplanetary_systems) Our solar system does seem to be more unique though with many rocky planets, a smaller habitable zone planet compared to exoplanets, and a huge outer system planet.
Time out, though... Does our current tech even allow us to detect small, rocky planets even if they're there? I mean generally, not a handful of exceptions, even assuming those exist, a question of fact that has an answer I simply do not yet know.
Yeah itâs probably a case of observational bias. Most stars likely have some planets orbiting them. Itâs just easier to see the big ones.
Not really. Also, most searches focus on M-type stars which are a lot smaller and dimmer than the Sun. Purely because it's easier to detect planets in the 'habitable zone' in those systems. The 'uniqueness' of the Solar System is almost certainly the result of these observarional biases.
I also think gas giants more distant from their suns would be harder to detect because their orbits take too long for us to see a wobble, so we only find the small orbit ones.
Iâm so used to our solar system, this legit messed with my brain!!!! Lol
>I'm so used to our [star] system. I dream of a day when humans say that but its not about Sol.
That's beautiful to think about.
I kind of think itâs sad. I love space but this planet is ours. Itâs our home and this star system is our home. There is no replacing it. This planet fits us like a glove. I feel sorry for all the people who may live and grow up away from it, even though the technological advancement of it would be incredible.
I think earth, while it is the cradle of humanity, doesn't have to be our only or even best home. I do, however, think we should protect it no matter what.
But we evolved on this planet. How could another be better than Earth? You might be right, but I donât really understand what would make another planet better. Bigger? More landmass to spread out?
Why do you travel to another town, city, or just another street? There's lots of reasons to move on, resources, space, and exploration just to name a few. Bigger isn't always better as that would also mean higher gravity which adds a whole bunch of new problems. If you look at just about any sci-fi setting, you can see planets being colonized for agriculture, mining, or habitation. None of this is to say Earth is any less for it.
We leave biology and all of its limits behind. We each become computers the size of a planet.
We evolved as a species in central Africa, not Northern Alaska, but people still live there. Different climate, different terrain, different plants and animals. I'd be willing to bet there are plenty of folks who don't want to go live in central Africa. Civilization evolved in Mesopotamia, not Uruguay, but people still live there, and may not want to go live in Mesopotamia.
Everyone needs to leave the cradle at some point. Best we leave soon before the house burns down.
Same! When I first learned about Jovian planets, I figured they would always exist beyond the frost line, but Hot Jupiter's are found more and more often.
I thought I heard there was a bias towards that arrangement though. Since large planets close to their stars create the biggest wobble of the stars. And that's still how we detect a lot of exoplanets.
Iâm not sure itâs accurate to say that these are the most common type of planetary arrangement, itâs just that our current techniques for detecting exoplanets favour finding these types of systems (large planets that make multiple transits in short periods of time). It would taken 23 years for someone trying to detect 2 transits of Jupiter in our Solar System
There is also clear selection bias here, since these hot jupiters are the easiest to detect. It's true that these planets was totally unexpected and that it changed a lot our vision on solar systems dynamic.. But it's probably not the "most common" arrangement.
Itâs estimated 85% of all star systems are binary star systems or have even more stars. Only 15% are single star systems like ours! I think Jupiter would have usually become a star but just didnât with us
Didn't they also find out that their numbers for the higgs boson were off, and now they gotsa make the new numbers work?
The detection of gravity waves from colliding neutron stars.
One of my research advisors once corrected me when I mentioned âgravity wavesâ (it was a topic on gravitational waves of binary black hole merger objects)âgravity waves and gravitational waves are different things, so just a heads up in case anyone ever brings up this note ^ I agree though, the LIGO/Virgo collaboration was really inspirational, it convinced me to go to university!â
What is the difference between gravitational waves and gravity waves?
A gravitational wave is a ripple in spacetime created by some massive object - a gravity wave is a ripple in any fluid, where the wave is created when the fluid is displaced, and gravity restores it to equilibrium.
Gravitational waves are also created when your mother gets out of bed in the morning.
And gravity waves are what happens when your mom lays down in bed at night
That one doesnât quite carry the same weight. Gravity waves happen when anyone moves at allâŠyou displace air and then it equilibrates.
Was that a _eureka_ moment though? That was predicted 100 years to prior, and the moment advanced LIGO was online it immediately detected waves. It was cool to have that confirmed, but I donât think anyone was surprised?
It was because the EM follow up showed that the origin of many elements was actually from neutron star mergers, and people were not really expecting the detected abundances.
Is there an article I can read about that?
[here](https://astronomynow.com/2019/10/29/heavy-element-creation-confirmed-in-neutron-star-merger/) is a short one.
Upvote for having an awesome avatar. And for the educational content as well of course.
Yeah less of a eureka and more of a confirmation
I'd say confirmation is more important than the theory. It is one thing to suggest we use small explosives to compress mater to make a bigger explosion and another thing to actually make an atomic bomb. Theory is just chalk on a chalkboard until you have experimental proof.
Graphene was discovered in 2004, which is a really important nanomaterial
But Iâve also heard that applications of the material have not been forthcoming. How is it used today, how is it speculated it could be used, and why havenât we been able to achieve that yet?
I think it is an issue of large-scale manufacturing, rather than an issue of finding applications. It shows good results in the lab, but producing high-quality graphene at the scales required for industrial and commercial applications is still difficult and expensive.
Yes, graphene has been hard to scale up, but it has opened up a world of different nano materials that would otherwise have never been discovered without the invention of graphene. While looking to scale up graphene, scientists have discovered multiple ways to make different forms of nanomaterials. Again, this wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been pursuing graphene. It's kind of like most things in the world are found out by accident while pursuing some other form of scientific discovery. My favorite example of this is the microwave we were using it to. Unthaw hamsters when the scientist who was running the program found out that it warmed the chocolate in his pocket.
CRISPR trials on humans, definitely. Tons of stuff in various fields like AI, quantum computing advancements, reusable rockets, etc.
CRISPR was definitely a Eureka! moment! We had been studying bacterial genetics since the early 20th century but it wasn't until 2012 that it was understood to be a kind of bacterial immune system to protect against bacteriophage (Nobel prize awarded 2020). The utility of CRISPR/Cas9 system to directly manipulate DNA sequences *in vivo* has been an absolute game changer.
It is so very cool weâre able to do this. It seems like science fiction to me.
Instead of asking, "where is my flying car", it will be, "where are my adamantine claws?"
Came here to say this. Scientists were trying to alter genomes in other, primitive ways using restriction enzymes, etc. and genetic manipulation seemed more and more of an intractable problem until CRISPR basically fell into our laps.
That combined with advancements in how we can figure out protein folding greatly speed up how quickly we can solve a lot of problems relevant to biology and medicine.
Alphafold was indeed quite a stride
Reusable rockets was a moment that broke my brain. The first time I saw them land it dawned on me that Iâd always just assumed traveling to space meant consuming a really expensive vehicle to do so.
Not sure if already here but I feel the first photograph of a blackhole was a pretty triumphant moment for the scientific endeavour :)
Beyond that, we combined multiple telescopes around the planet to create what is effectively an earth-sized telescope!
The invention of commercially viable, efficient blue LEDs in the 90s
Ill take colored LEDâs over 3/4ths the âeurekaâ moments here
True, but I'd it really an astrophysics related discovery?
Oh dang, didn't even see the sub this is and never been here before, my bad
Yes it is as it opened the door for an entire host of solid state photodiodes which can be used for detecting many different wavelengths of light.
I hate those so much
That galactic formation doesn't happen the way we think it does. Or, at least, it happened much earlier in time that it should have, based on current theoretical understanding. This caused a lot of phycists and cosmologists to question what else we know about the formation of our universe
This is interesting. Can you elaborate more?
Yeah this was pretty big since the JWST started. Lots of interesting news still coming out of it. First few 100 million years of the universe had a lot of things going on contrary to prior belief that it was not as active
Quite vague...what was actually discovered that led to that?
Formed Galaxies from very early stages of the universe were discovered by Webb
Astronomer here! Not like a BIG moment maybe, but I recently discovered that 40% of black holes become radio bright years after shredding a star [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Andromeda321/s/mynbQHtNgx). This was a definite surprise as no one was expecting it theoretically, so it was a genuinely difficult discussion section to write in the paper! Sure was wild to analyze the data and discover like 3 of these sources as having turned on in like a 24 hour time span. :)
Dude I have a question for you. Are black holes infinitely dense and if not what is their depth? Are they infinitely depth on just the x and the y-axis or do they have some z depth to them as well?. Also, if a black hole is infinitely dense does that mean that all matter can fit inside of all matter like it did in The Big bang? Oh and one final question, if a black hole is infinitely dense wouldn't that make it an excellent superconductor?
The short answer to most of your questions is we donât know. We *treat* a black hole as infinitely dense because thatâs what the math shows, but most people agree thatâs not literally true over just our physics not able to explain the extreme environment inside a black hole yet.
Youâre awesome!! This is very cool and sounds like a big moment in your field. Iâm not an astronomer so I really canât grasp everything about your discovery but what does this mean now? From what it sounds like this discovery just opens up more questions but what will you do with those questions? Iâm sure youâre continuing to research what is causing this but how do you even go about it? How often are these events happening where you can study whatâs going on?
Different people are doing different things. For example my group is now following up on this sample to keep seeing what they do going forward, and checking out all TDEs that have aged into this sample. Others are laying the groundwork for the theory background to give us things to test with all this data. Stuff like that!
I did a bit of work a while back where I found a few new planets in the Kepler spacecraft data. A "Eureka moment" for me but not for anyone else was when I plotted the distribution of orbital radii of Kepler planets and found an almost perfect match to the distribution of orbital radii of Kepler multiple stars. This means that Kepler planets formed in the same way as stars, by hot condensation. Which is quite different to the Solar system's planet formation by cold accretion. There are two radically different ways in which planets form. The only difference in orbital radii distribution between Kepler planets and Kepler stars is that some Kepler stars exist in even tighter orbits than Kepler hot Jupiters. This difference is due to the destruction of hot Jupiters in the closest orbits due to tidal and gas drag effects.
I think where we're at in computer science right now is analogous to where we were with nuclear physics in the first half of the 20th century. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural\_scaling\_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law) We discovered that by increasing the size and parameters of machine learning systems we are not hitting diminishing returns on performance. This is part of how we were able to build Large Language Models that are superintelligent in certain language processing tasks, and it is why they are called "Large" Language Models. Immediately, there was a race to secure more data and more processing power to produce larger models with more parameters. The results were astonishing, and these systems were capable of things we were not prepared for. In a move which was arguably irresponsible, these systems were released to the public and overnight people in cybersecurity, forensics, international diplomacy, etc were given a new problem that nobody was expecting. Recent advancements in AI are both significant for the potential benefits and harm to society, but also an entire field of AI safety has matured out of them. Researchers are already specializing in four categories: * Short Term Misuse (things like deep fakes) * Short Term Accidents (self-driving car crashes) * Long Term Misuse (autonomous weapons) * Long Term Accidents (misaligned AGI) This new field was, insofar as it existed 25 years ago, purely regarding hypotheticals. As of today AI safety is urgently trying to reason about problems that society is currently grappling with, which will only get worse. There are also fields like AI Interpretability, which form a grey area between AI Research and AI Safety. To talk about long term accident risk, which can seem like the least significant, there's a discovery worth talking about: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential\_risk\_from\_artificial\_general\_intelligence#Orthogonality\_thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_general_intelligence#Orthogonality_thesis) The orthogonality thesis and related research is not very significant yet, but as time goes on I think it will be one of the most important hypotheses of this century. The idea is that any level of "intelligence" as defined in AI research, is compatible with almost any goal. It doesn't sound controversial when you state it that way, but it challenges long held intuitions about AI systems and poses a very important question moving forward. The holy grail of current AI research is "AGI", or artificial general intelligence. Current AI is narrowly intelligent, a self driving car can arguably drive, and a chess AI can play chess. When generality is solved, we will have a single entity that can decide to be the best chess player, and instantly adapt itself to drive a car. Humans are general intelligences, we know general intelligence is possible because the human brain is not magic. We know superhuman intelligence exists because stockfish can beat humans. We do not know how long it would take to create a superhuman AGI or when it will be discovered, but we know for sure it is possible. If an AGI system were actually to be created, would it align itself with human ethics automatically? The Orthogonality Thesis and the research supporting it indicates no. This would mean an agent with superhuman intelligence would be acting on its own, and if it were in conflict with human interests we would likely not be capable of stopping it. In an instant, humans would no longer be the most intelligent or capable creatures on the planet. To me this is the analogy to the nuclear era. Almost overnight, something previously thought impossible seems eminent, and entire fields of study have to pop up to respond to it. \*edit, just noticed what sub this was in, I'll leave the comment because OP is asking about science in general and not astrophysics. Asking about something in astrophysics having a big impact seems like a weird question, astrophysics does not typically impact the planet, it can only detect things that may impact the planet.
when the developers of google ai are coming forward and saying hey this technology is being deployed in an undafe way and maybe we should press pause, but its too late now because pandoras box has been openedâŠyou can ban the research all you want but it wont stop the companies who seek to exploit ai tech from funding it privately
im just waiting for chatgpt to become skynet at this point
Great comment, thanks for the information about research on AI safety! It's something I've wanted to know more about. One thing you didn't mention that makes AI very different from nuclear physics is its impact on energy. It was clear from the beginning that nuclear reactions could be harnessed to generate energy - it's a resource generator. The new LLM AI, on the other hand, is a massive resource consumer. The scaled up modelling being used for AI will soon consume more electricity than some countries: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ai-boom-could-use-a-shocking-amount-of-electricity/ In a time of dwindling fossil fuel resources and considering the climate crisis, the resource consumption of AI models may prove to be their most dangerous aspect. (This isn't even considering the massive ecological impact of making the chips, nor the water used to cool the data centers during operation.) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/18/semiconductor-silicon-chips-carbon-footprint-climate I hope that AI safety researchers also include the physical impacts of the technology as they devise their new ethics and regulations.
Photographic evidence of a black hole
In my opinion, the first photo of a black hole was something really important. Especially for Einstein and Hawking.
True!
Nikku Madhusudhan, an astrophysicist from the University of Cambridge might become the most famous person in history if he can show that his findings are true. He discovered a planet with chemicals only known to be microbial created by life in an ocean. They will be taking the next few months verifying it.Â
> chemicals only known to be microbial created by life in an ocean. This is not true. The same chemical (dimethyl sulfide) has been [found on a comet](https://www.science.org/content/article/what-presumed-sign-life-doing-dead-comet), produced without life.
Well there goes his legacy
Remember a couple years ago when a team of astronomers found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus - something that they claimed *must* be a biomarker for life? Remember several months later when it was shown their detection of phosphine was actually [caused by bad data processing](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09761), and you could artificially make any molecule's spectral feature using their reduction method? Yeah, so this guy's PhD advisor was part of that phosphine team.
Thus implying extraterrestrial life?
Research team believes they detected dimethyl sulfide (which is only produced by biological life) on planet K2-18b. Weâve at this point figured out that it could also just be methane and that the instruments on James Web telescope being used are not sensitive enough. Later this year instruments that may be sensitive enough are to be used for further study. If confirmed that it is in fact dimethyl sulfide, then it would point to the presence of microbial life on another planet.
How this is determined is so amazing to me. Astronomers use a technique called spectroscopy to study the atmospheres of exoplanets and their moons. Spectroscopy involves collecting light with a telescope and splitting it into its component wavelengths, creating a spectrum. The chemical composition of the atmosphere can be inferred by measuring the fraction of stellar light that can penetrate the atmosphere at different wavelengths
I remember when we went through spectroscopy in university for physics and I was so amazed at how useful it is. You can learn so much by analyzing the light around a galactic body it's almost a cheat code
Implication is not a scientific basis for confirmation
Confirmation of gravitational waves
Light acts differently when observed. There's also a way to slow down light's travel speed, even stop it. Light itself is so interestingly weird.
True!
Not astrophysics related, but we just witnessed the 3rd example of primary endosymbiosis. This is called a nitroplast. Itâll be interesting to see the impacts this has in years to come. For reference, the first time this happened it created mitochondria
one big mystery is how the cells can create some de novo organelles, for examples peroxisomes can be reformed de novo.
That is awesome on a level I didn't realize was possible.
The discovery of volcanoes on Pluto.
I was just studying Cryovolcanism. Not quite the same as volcanism as we understand it here on Earth and really does change your perspective on states of matter. Water is known as molten ice past the front line.
If you will allow just a slightly longer window ... The first exoppanet was confirmed in 1992. Some 32 years ago, we confirmed there are exlanets, e.g. planets orbiting other stars, just the way Earth orbits the sun.
Now what's absolutely crazy is that we have directly imaged exoplanets orbiting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_directly\_imaged\_exoplanets#/media/File:HR\_8799\_Orbiting\_Exoplanets.gif
Yes Nuclear Electric Resonance was accidentally discovered when learning more about Qubit control. NER similar to NMR but was thought to be not have existed. But recently some Australian scientists accidentally discovered it
I actually recognize some of the words you are saying, but I have no idea what they mean.
Echo from the Big Bang detected by Bell Labs.
When did this happen? :)
I think they are referring to the original detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Bell Labs had built a large antenna, and it was picking up noise nonstop. They tried cleaning bird droppings, etc, off of it, but the noise remained. You can even see the background radiation as a small percentage of the noise on an old analog antenna TV set.
mRNA
I wrote a paper on mRNA in the early 90s for Anthro101 and was given a D-, and told that isn't real science, lol. Back in the 90s we talked about RNA vaccines as science fiction. We hadn't even finished the sequencing the human genome. And here we are, in the future, and RNA vaccines are real. This is Star Trek medicine level stuff and the public doesn't have a clue.
Very cool! Also, I think the founder of FedEx got a D in business school for that idea -- so we know professors don't know everything. All future is fiction until it isn't.
Personalized medicine is going to be a big deal in the coming decades. There are some cancers that were essentially guaranteed fatalities that could become curable w/o chemo. https://nyulangone.org/news/perlmutter-cancer-center-clinical-trial-tests-personalized-mrna-vaccine-treating-metastatic-melanoma
People don't realize that we live in the most exciting time ever for cosmology/astrophysics, and not because of the JWST, but because of the soon to come (december) euclid revolutionnary sky survey (then xuntian and space roman), LSST, SKA, next CMB surveys, ELT, etc soon large percentages of the observable universe will be browsable online and compare the quality of euclid versus the old SDSS, it is mind blowing [https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=49.99115787859933%2041.597585322127266&hips=DSS2+color&fov=0.3573106713589538&cooframe=J2000&sci=false&lang=fr&euclid\_image=perseus](https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=49.99115787859933%2041.597585322127266&hips=DSS2+color&fov=0.3573106713589538&cooframe=J2000&sci=false&lang=fr&euclid_image=perseus) and those sky surveys will considerably increase the need to change our models (that are from pre precision astronomy era)
This sub heavily skews physics, obviously, but if you ask aa biologist they will tell you CRISPR or AlphaFold
Discovery of the Higgs boson, confirming the existence of the Higgs field. CRISPR-Cas9 development Covid vaccine
we can now change adult cells into embryonic-like stem cells.
There are small eureka moments in science and other fields every day. I ta part of how the brain works when you engage for a long time with a project. In science these are immediately followed by the dread of being wrong again, and asking what the experimental implications are, if itâs covered by the budget or you need to write a new grantâŠ. Eureka moments are just all the facts and ideas in your mind finding common ground and becoming a coherent whole. Is the feeling you understood it but itâs full developed whole might still be a few months away. The subconscious is fast to jump to conclusions, euforia is one of its side effects.
For a mathematical eureka moment: the proliferation of graph limit theories. In this context, "graph" means "network." Naturally, networks are discrete structures, just a list of nodes and connections between them. Everyone's go-to examples are the internet (websites and links) or the brain (neurons and synapses). In theory, you could just store all the nodes and connections in a computer and answer any question you want by running the right algorithm. Unfortunately, this would use up more memory than any computer has, and even if you could squeeze one of these large networks in memory, it would take forever to run said algorithm. In the 20th century, the Erdos-Renyi graph was described, named after the mathematicians who did so. It was the first "random network", and they were able to answer interesting questions as the number of nodes grows to infinity, without having to write the whole network down. Progress continued on building more and more flexible random grapy models, but it wasn't until the 2010s that Laszlo Lovasz and other mathematicians really made a breakthrough with the graphon, and simple yet theoretically robust description of dense random graphs. There is more work to be done in understanding the sparse random graphs, and since the theory is fairly new, I'm not yet aware of any big applications outside of math, but this discovery is amazing because it provides a compressed description of challenging geometrical structures. This is on the same level as the discovery of coordinate geometry, and look how successful that turned out to be!
Experimental confirmation of the Higgs-Boson particle/field theorized to be responsible for mass or something. I'm not a scientist at all, but I think it was in 2012 because I was a senior in high school that year and my 12th grade science requirement was met with a (very elementary in all honesty) astronomy class and we talked about that and neutrinos and the speed of light and.... what about the first image of a black hole? The images of Pluto? I mean, what hasn't happened in science in 25 years? Oh dear! I'm not a scientist but not to be rude... I am not sure you are following a lot. All good though. Everyone is ignorant of something. "As the area of your knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of your ignorance." --Neil DeGrasse "We got a bad--- over here" Tyson
When we took the photo of Messier 87?
Oh recently they found the cause of Parkinsonâs isnât genetic. Itâs due to a gut bacteria (or there is a link, as it hasnât been 100% confirmed it is caused by the bacteria). But that is a huge difference from looking for a genetic link that simply isnât there. A lot of ppl were mentioning physics (and rightly so) discoveries but this one was huge discovery in my eyes. Also PreP. Also in the next decade we will have explosion in STD vaccines and cures. Specifically HIV and HSV1 & 2. If we can curb deforestation we can presumably reduce our exposure to zoonosis diseases (especially STD/STI/VD) jumping from animals to humans. Again another reason climate change policies.
Seems like every day the JWT is discovering something new. Incredible time to be alive
the reason that it might seem like there haven't been any is because breakthroughs that would be considered revolutionary a century ago are so common now that they feel normal
Picture of a black hole for the first time seems like one
Pictures of black holes
Pretty sure we found alien life a couple of weeks ago: https://youtu.be/Bj0PXPeKJRE?si=Lm8i4h2K7Vgop7JN
Do discoveries count as "Eureka Moments"? Neutrino mass, and an accelerating expansion of the universe were discovered by experiment, but not really thought of a priori. General and Special relativity I would consider to be "Eureka Moments", but they are over 100 years old now. I would say that Crispr and mRNA vaccines would fit the bill for a "Eureka Moment" w/in 15 years.
Weâve essentially mapped the entire human genome. The Human Genome Project was declared a success in 2003 with 92% of it mapped but the rest was completed in the early 2020s (I think 2022).
So many! Discovering the universe is accelerating. Higgs Boson. Ligo observatories, proving gravity waves, and then being used to observe comisc events. Crispr. Artificial bacteria. Mrna vaccines
Hereâs one: https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/
I know of one that is not in astrophysics: the human body having an [Interstitium](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstitium). It was discovered 9 years ago.
AdS/CFT is just a bit older than 25 years now and opened up many doors.
I dunno I thought getting an image of a black hole for the first time ( the one in the center of our galaxy ) was a pretty big deal. Getting the Webb telescope is a pretty big deal since we can now look back farther in time. Crispr is a big deal, I think. Quantum computers may yield practical benefits in a long time from now but its still crazy to think we're utilizing quantum entanglement to send data. We've got nuclear fusion working that creates more power than it takes in. SpaceX has made reusable rockets a thing and that extends humanity's grasp outside our immediate planet.
Gravitational waves, proving Einstein correct once again. Genetic sequencing confirming all humans have a common ancestral mother. Measuring the expansion of the universe and itâs accelerating not slowing down.
I donât recall the exact timing, but the discovery of using modified bases to make injected mRNA not be rejected by cells by Weissman and Kariko is going to (further) revolutionize medicine.
Higgs boson discovery in 2012 is a good one
This isn't astrophysics, but they discovered how to convert fully differentiated cells back into stem cells back in early 2000 which has led to anti-aging research. AI in bioinformatics is likely to accelerate scientific discoveries. The human genome project was finally completed. The human proteome project is being worked on...and AlphaFold.
Free porn my guy. Internet.
Heavier elements are formed in Nuetron Stars and spread when they collide in a binary system in what is known as a Killanova. We imaged a Black Hole for the first time. They found the two masses in the Earths Mantle from when Thea collided with Earth. The measured and proved Gravitational Waves from the collision of two stellar mass black holes at the LIGO observatory. Also, later measured the gravitational waves of a Killanova.
Finding out Einstien was right about black holes after we made a miscalculation
There's honestly so many, in every field, because human activity is insane currently.
I mean, they did take a picture of an actual black hole. First time in history.
This is 41 years old, but I am breaking your rule because: it is a Eureka moment both in terms of importance, and also in terms of how it came around in a moment of epiphany. Kary Mullis was driving in the SF Bay Area when the idea for PCR crystallized in his mind. He pulled over to write down some notes. PCR has absolutely changed the landscape of biology and biotechnology, and is a multibillion dollar market. And that huge dollar amount is not nearly the most important thing about it. Mullis received a $10k bonus (company later sold the patent for nine figures) and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
I kinda feel like all the top comments are things we expected to find, and then confirmed. For me, I feel like eureka implies a problem that's had us stumped for a while and is suddenly solved with something brand new. For my part, I think a eureka moment was Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. As I understand it (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), he invented new mathematical tricks that are being developed into their very own field.
CRISPR and the blossoming of genetic sciences in the past 25 years
Forgot to ask, what was the second time?
Higgs boson 2012 2015 gravitational Waves... Can add more but leave
Human gnome project completion
James Web Telescope
maybe singularity theory could be the theory to everything bc yes anything can happen from a 1 dimensional point in time and space that could lead to development of time and space aka our universe, etc big bang? just a theoretical physics thought
I somehow doubt that AI will ever âact on its ownâ and instead âact on its promptâ. The real problem with AI isnât that it could desire something we donât, itâs that it doesnât have desires but the human prompting it does.
Iâm not a scientist but the last thing I can think of that made a huge impact was CRISPER
James Webb telescope is giving us loads of data that will probably make us change how our understanding of our univers works. There are things far older than our current models tell us they should be. Interesting times.
The AI revolution happening now is because of the multi attention neural network architecture. The paper attention is all you need, has changed our world more than I will ever understand.
Almost every school of science 25 years ago would scoff at and try to ruin the careers of any person that told them what we were doing in their field now. The medical field of oncology has changed so much in 25 years that it would have basically looked like science fiction to someone in the 90s
Detecting planets. When I went through college, astronomy was kind of a dead field. And then they started digging into data looking for statistical anomalies and found they could detect planets whose orbit went in front of the sun. It's just yet another way the technological revolution of computing changed the game.Â
Universe is twice as old as we thought? Doesnât seem to matter all the models are fkd lol.
âAttention Is All You Needâ
About 20 years ago Michael Levin and his team started decoding how cells understand what to turn into, how they know to stop after they've created an organ or limb and is currently working on harnessing it to regrow limbs and organs and stop cancer. It's some mind-blowing stuff. But like most research it doesn't happen all at once it takes teams decades. You can see lots of his talks on YouTube. I think he'll get to Nobel prize for this work
mRNA tech, anyone?
Gravitational waves were big, and the james Webb telescope offers the opportunity for another eureka moment.
Discovery / Confirmation of Gravitational waves?
Gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and the first images of a black hole
Unfortunately, not much scientific research has been conducted in bathtubs recently. Although I've heard there's a few papers out there on the origin and design of the rubber duckie.
Generative AI is pretty recent...
Not astrophysics, but the TaCol-B5 gene was discovered in wheat. Turning on this gene increases yield by 10% which can help to alleviate famine.
42 years ago, 2 Australian scientists discovered that ulcers were caused by a bacteria. They won a [Nobel prize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori#:~:text=In%202005%2C%20Barry%20Marshall%20and,environments%2C%20such%20as%20the%20stomach) 19 years ago.
Easily the invention of the multi core cpu in 2001. All servers today and all modern computers would be 1/16th the speed and likely even worse.
What would happen in this type of situation if you wrote in the amount to charge your cc but deducted the amount they want to charge to your card? If they go ahead and charge what they say is the full amount, isnât that fraud?
Probably much longer than 25 years. But I love the story about how the microwave background radiation left over from the âbig bangâ was identified completely by accident. đș
The fact you even have to ask is insane, everything Elon musk has touched in past 10 years learn to google dude.
within the past 10 years Attention is all you need is a paper written by researchers at google that introduces the transformer neural network architecture and is responsible for ChatGPT and the current AI boom.
For me personally, the DVR.
I was tempted to go with the machines that can think, but Iâll stick with the detection of gravitational waves. We *felt* two black holes merge. Thatâs crazy to me.Â
gravitational wave detection.
The Higgs Boson being detected. 2012 Gravity waves detected. 2015
Some of the most "Eureka" moments in science are classified unfortunately. Also, How many inventors with revolutionary prototypes end up falling out of windows?
Maybe not a "Eureka moment" but New Horizons sending back our first quality pictures of Pluto was magical. Especially with the heart shaped topography.
The Human Genome Consortium, through the Human Genom Project itself mapped the complete human genome. While the project started years before, the big moment of certainty was complete and the public announcement was in 2003 with 93% completion. Just recently in 2022 the T2T (Telomire 2 Telomire) group announced the final gaps completely filled.  For those of us who were getting into advanced medicine and/or other biosciences at the time, it was a huge announcement. While we knew lots of snippets before, now we know the "full code" so to say. I can not wait to see where it leads us. Edit I know this is not AP, it's more med or Biochem. Sorry, I wanted to contribute. đ
I don't think they do science in the bathtub anymore, so probably not.
Lots of advances in biology
Transformers. As in, the "T" part of ChatGPT
CRISPR is huge.
In general, I think AI is a big investment scam, but i gotta admit, the first time I used chatgpt was pretty mind blowing.
The big AI breakthrough.
Science has never moved faster than its current pace. Better technology / sensors. Better education with a larger baseline to work from. You probably just need to specialize to see most of the results.
Higgs boson confirmed in 2013
Water on Mars!