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Victerius | 3 years ago

Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?

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chasd00|3 years ago

> Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?

they're working on getting you to click on an ad

phtrivier|3 years ago

They can't exist any more for structural reason.

This generation was classically educated, without TV or social media in their childhood. They spent the time we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty of occasions to tinker.

I claim the brains of those generation was structurally different from ours, and we're talking about the best minds of this generation.

It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the "best minds".

adventured|3 years ago

> they're working on getting you to click on an ad

They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives.

No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al.

They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map.

They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink.

They're working on fusion.

And so on and so forth.

Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.

rllearneratwork|3 years ago

yeah. But some are apparently working at Livermore Nat. Lab still. Also, I feel like there is a bunch at SpaceX, Tesla, NASA, DeepMind and OpenAI

euix|3 years ago

Hear hear!

bioemerl|3 years ago

Hiding behind the names of institutions that got smart enough to not give the peons fame or recognition.

rllearneratwork|3 years ago

off-topic, but related. Ulam's "Adventures of a Mathematician" is an excellent and very inspiring book.

StevenNunez|3 years ago

Elon Musk ::ducks::

vzcx|3 years ago

lmao, brilliant scientist Elon Musk is NOT. A closer comparison would be general Groves, someone who can get the team and resources in place so the work can get done.