This, but I will caveat that weaker goals relating to this, for example getting data on whether gravity is classical or quantum at all (ignoring the specific theory) might become possible by 2040.
I agree this particular part is unrealistic, given the other capabilities implied.
I will admit I’m not an expert here. The intuition behind this is that if you grant extreme performance at mathsy things very soon, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that the AIs will make some radical breakthrough in the hard sciences surprisingly soon, while still being bad at many other things. In the scenario, note that it’s a “mathematical framework” (implicitly a sufficiently big advance in what we currently have such that it wins a Nobel) but not the final theory of everything, and it’s explicitly mentioned empirical data bottlenecks it.
When general readers see “empirical data bottlenecks” they expect something like a couple times better resolution or several times higher energy. But when physicists mention “wildly beyond limitations” they mean orders of magnitude more!
I looked up the actual numbers:
in this particular case we need to approach the Planck energy, which is 1.2×1028 eV, Wolfram Alpha readily suggests it’s ~540 kWh, 0.6 of energy use of a standard clothes dryer or 1.3 of energy in a typical lightning bolt; I also calculated it’s about 1.2 of the muzzle energy of the heaviest artillery piece in history, the 800-mm Schwerer Gustav;
LHC works in the 1013 eV range; 14 TeV, according to WA, can be compared to about an order of magnitude above the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito;
the highest energy observed in cosmic rays is 3×1020 eV or 50 J; for comparison, air and paintball guns muzzle energy is around 10 J while nail guns start from around 90 J.
So in this case we are looking at the difference between an unsafely powerful paintball marker and the most powerful artillery weapon humanity ever made (TBH I didn’t expect this last week, which is why I wrote “near-future”)
This, but I will caveat that weaker goals relating to this, for example getting data on whether gravity is classical or quantum at all (ignoring the specific theory) might become possible by 2040.
I agree this particular part is unrealistic, given the other capabilities implied.
I will admit I’m not an expert here. The intuition behind this is that if you grant extreme performance at mathsy things very soon, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that the AIs will make some radical breakthrough in the hard sciences surprisingly soon, while still being bad at many other things. In the scenario, note that it’s a “mathematical framework” (implicitly a sufficiently big advance in what we currently have such that it wins a Nobel) but not the final theory of everything, and it’s explicitly mentioned empirical data bottlenecks it.
When general readers see “empirical data bottlenecks” they expect something like a couple times better resolution or several times higher energy. But when physicists mention “wildly beyond limitations” they mean orders of magnitude more!
I looked up the actual numbers:
in this particular case we need to approach the Planck energy, which is 1.2×1028 eV, Wolfram Alpha readily suggests it’s ~540 kWh, 0.6 of energy use of a standard clothes dryer or 1.3 of energy in a typical lightning bolt; I also calculated it’s about 1.2 of the muzzle energy of the heaviest artillery piece in history, the 800-mm Schwerer Gustav;
LHC works in the 1013 eV range; 14 TeV, according to WA, can be compared to about an order of magnitude above the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito;
the highest energy observed in cosmic rays is 3×1020 eV or 50 J; for comparison, air and paintball guns muzzle energy is around 10 J while nail guns start from around 90 J.
So in this case we are looking at the difference between an unsafely powerful paintball marker and the most powerful artillery weapon humanity ever made (TBH I didn’t expect this last week, which is why I wrote “near-future”)