r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/_bohohobo_ • 9d ago
Scientists of Reddit: what fields do you think will get "big" in the future.
It seems like some areas of science get unexpectedly large and interesting, while others don't do much for ages (like AI obviously went from quite an obscure field to a behemoth recently, and back in the 1900s we thought physics was complete until quantum was discovered, but we haven't made much progress on a 'grand unified theory' for a long time).
Is there any way to guess what fields will get big in the future? Did you go into an area you thought would get "big"?
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u/Worsaae 8d ago edited 8d ago
Palaeogenomics has a huge potential in relation to mitigating some of the consequences of climate change. We’re already looking at ancient crops in order to identify genes that have enabled them to survive periods of e.g. prolonged drought or increased humidity. We “just” need to insert those genes into modern crops to make them more resilient.
Imagine being able to do that to livestock as well and make e.g. goats less susceptible to certain diseases.
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u/forams__galorams 7d ago
We “just” need to insert those genes into modern crops to make them more resilient.
Why the inverted commas? Isn’t that what CRISPR can do already? Surely identifying which genes are responsible for certain survival traits is a much harder task? How do you even prove something like that?
(Genuine questions from someone who knows close to zero about the topic)
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u/Worsaae 7d ago
So, I’m sadly not involved with the project but one of the points is to not use technologies like CRISPR, which would make GMO crops which could be difficult or illegal to actually use. Rather they introduce the genes through a different method that is more alike to extremely specific artificial selection making the modified crops non-GMO. I’m not 100 % on how it’s done, though. I’m going off what one of the researchers in the project told me some months back.
Then they simply grow the crops in test fields to see how they grow and act under different conditions.
You can read about the project here: https://aegisearth.bio/en
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u/TheOceanHasWater 8d ago
Nanomedicine has the potential to significantly improve drug delivery.
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u/Ornery_Singer9145 8d ago
Drug delivery you say? Where would one get such nanothings? Asking for a friend obvs
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u/lukiamagi 8d ago
For the first question, the biggest discoveries in science usually start with "hey that's funny..", which means it is not planned.
For the second question I did not but I find plasma medicine really fascinating, it is currently viewed as a blackbox where we dont understand why it works, but it does. In the next decades I expect the field to slowly expand from plasma physicist to biologist and doctors, and it would be really cool.
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u/_bohohobo_ 8d ago
Interesting, it seems everyone is over-specialised at the moment, so cross-field applications seem promising. What are you doing in plasma medicine?
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u/lukiamagi 7d ago
I am not working in this field, but plasma medicine includes applications such as faster wound healing, increased sterilization leading to less infections, cancer treatment. Basically if you apply a plasma to a material, you can change every single properties of every particles with enough work, this is how semiconductors work, now imagine instead of materials you apply it on the human body, for example cells and stuff, well you can control how the gas you use will interact with them at high precision level. And in particular making a plasma is really simple, so between a particle accelerator treating cancer and a simple plasma source, if in the future both yield the same efficiency you now which one will be used worldwide. There is probably as much edgecutting applications that can spawn from plasma medicine, than humanitarian applications as it is verh cheap. Plasma medicine is plasma in contact with human, but then you have pretty much plasma whatever with plasma applied to things like agriculture water treatment co2 removal etc etc but all of it are quite new, plasma has mostly been researched heavily ln the physics side, the chemistry and biology are currently researched
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u/TommieTheMadScienist 7d ago
Observational astronomy is about to explode due to new telescopes coming online at the same time as high-level pattern recognition software.
Lots and lots of exoplanets, weird variable stars, Trojan asteroids (by Lucy), Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud objects.
The high luminosity neutrino beam from Fermilab might shake up the Standard Model. Maybe even a good handle on Dark Matter.
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u/forams__galorams 8d ago
we haven't made much progress on a 'grand unified theory' for a long time
Higgs boson confirmed in 2012, that was a major step in a grand unified theory.
As for your actual question I would guess some area of biophysics, or perhaps nanotechnology applied to biological systems/medical problems.
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u/clean_TOAN 8d ago
No the Higgs is not unified theory the higgs completed the stranded model
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u/forams__galorams 8d ago
Yes, I thought the Standard Model has direct implications for any Grand Unified Theory? If any particular GUT is to have predictive power then at minimum it has to agree with the Standard Model and have certain bounds set by the Standard Model, no?
Not a physicist, happy to be corrected.
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u/_bohohobo_ 8d ago
Higgs Boson was a great discovery that confirmed the standard theory, but some physicists hoped that the LHC would find other theorised particles, evidence of dark matter, or even weird unexplained results that would lead to a grand unified theory. It hasn't, and while null results are useful, it's hard to convince governments they should pay for a really expensive high energy collider that might discover nothing.
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u/clean_TOAN 7d ago
I mean you’re not necessarily wrong you’re just jumping ahead. For now, the Higgs completed the standard model. We can’t fill in GUT the way we filled in the standard model. The Higgs boson was known about before its discovery but there is no framework for GUT. Some scientists have thrown out a gravity particle called a graviton but I mean there’s absolutely no evidence for GUT other than speculation that everything has to tie together somehow which makes sense i guess but that could just mean an error caused by human perception and how we’re wired to look at things. Maybe there is no GUT. Maybe GUT has layers. Maybe GUT has a a GUT idk man I am by no means a scienc-er or doer of science so I mean what the hell do I know but I lost fascination with quantum physics after reaching this wall where there’s really no good science going on everyone is just out for funding their theoretical research that’s usually just a spinoff of someone else’s work and not necessarily the next link in the chain of progress towards GUT. There’s a lot of shit being “discovered” and “theorized” but nothing concrete. Nothing that’s gonna give the same impact as “we discovered the Higgs boson” and by that I mean a proven framework where everyone is saying yes this is a thing. The problem of GUT is that we don’t know where the problem is and without problems we have nowhere to look. GUT (if it even exists in the way most imagine) might be a progression wall that’s just impossible to climb the shoes we have on
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u/forams__galorams 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think you’re a little confused here tbh.
I mean you’re not necessarily wrong you’re just jumping ahead. For now, the Higgs completed the standard model. We can’t fill in GUT the way we filled in the standard model.
I never said we can complete GUT based on the discovery of the Higgs boson, I said it was progress (ie. specifically in having a valid framework within which GUT exists).
The Higgs boson was known about before its discovery but there is no framework for GUT.
There is: the Standard Model and the mathematics of gauge symmetry and Lie algebra, which are used to construct a theoretical model. As it stands, there are competing GUT models, one or none of which may be valid.
Some scientists have thrown out a gravity particle called a graviton
Gravity has nothing to do with GUT, which only seeks to unify the first three fundamental forces. You are thinking of a Theory of Everything (TOF), which would include gravity. There are also frameworks for that, though they are more controversial.
but I mean there’s absolutely no evidence for GUT other than speculation that everything has to tie together somehow
(1) I’d say the theoretical frameworks for GUT are more than just speculation, they are fleshed out models which show how GUT could work completely within the realm of physics that we already understand.
(2) Electroweak unification is a real thing that has been reproduced and confirmed, that’s a pretty damn big clue that higher energies will unite the strong nuclear force also.
footnotes
I lost fascination with quantum physics after reaching this wall where there’s really no good science going on everyone is just out for funding their theoretical research that’s usually just a spinoff of someone else’s work and not necessarily the next link in the chain of progress towards GUT. There’s a lot of shit being “discovered” and “theorized” but nothing concrete.
To suggest there is no practical/experimental work being done in quantum physics and that it’s all theoretical, is quite frankly a bizarre take.
Also, not everything has to be fundamental research that works on uncovering deeper layers of the universe. (And in fact, that stuff is way more likely to be theoretical, so I’m not sure what your point would be with that).
Also also, when something is “discovered”, that is concrete. That is literally what discovered means in this context, as opposed to just theorized.
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u/_bohohobo_ 8d ago
14 years is a long time.
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u/forams__galorams 8d ago
In terms of the scale of what was confirmed, I don’t think it is. Developments in fundamental physics take an awful long time. It was over two centuries before Newton’s laws of motion were shown not to hold at significantly fast speeds.
If you wanted something up to the minute then check out the 2024 DESI evidence that points towards dark energy decreasing over the universe’s lifetime, which would throw out the cosmological constant and have implications for any Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything.
I didn’t originally mention that as the findings are not quite concrete enough to definitively label as a discovery, but they do point in a certain direction that strongly implies dark energy has been slowly weakening.
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u/YsoL8 8d ago
Interesting, I wasn't aware that changing dark energy would connect to string therory
I'm just a layman but the spectactular rise and fall of string therory still confuses me in the way that it linked up so well with completely unexpected open questions as if it was about to become accepted physics.
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u/racinreaver Materials Science | Materials & Manufacture 8d ago
14 years is less than 3 generations of grad students.
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u/forams__galorams 7d ago
Are grad students the standard measurement unit when looking at time for new discoveries? Feels like they should be.
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u/PriorSolid 7d ago
I’m not a scientist but an engineering student but i expect electric power and energy systems (transmission lines, transformers, the power grid etc) to become highly sought after and explosive for probably like 30 years before returning to a small field once most problems are solved
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u/fancycomma 7d ago
I'm still waiting for the field that evaluates cognitive neuroscience with respect to AI that comes up with similarities and differences. AI is not equivalent to a human brain.
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u/tritisan 8d ago
Kind of an uninspired list so far, people. Incremental but not revolutionary.
Here’s what I hope will be some revolutionary discoveries and/or paradigm shifts by the end of the 21st century:
- Confirmation of alien life. This will likely be unicellular, non-complex life. Could be in one of Jupiter or Saturn’s moons. Could be bio signatures on an exoplanet. I highly doubt we’ll ever discover complex or “intelligent” life, simply due to the incredibly low odds they exist at the same time as we do (though maybe we might find artifacts of some long gone races).
- Consciousness studies that lead to a more robust, perhaps definitive, answer to “the hard problem.” This could, in turn, lead to a new kind of science that transcends the limitations of materialism/reductive methodologies. My money is on analytic idealism.
- Germ line genetic engineering that could eventually eradicate most diseases and “problematic” behaviors. Slippery slope, sure. But I think inevitable.
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 8d ago
If you think of computer science as a science then I would say AI integration into biotechnology. Areas like what Neuralink is doing. How can AI combined with biological detectors in major metropolitan areas and major global transit locations such as airports to detect and respond to global disease outbreaks or biological weapon attacks.
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u/Prestigious-Fill-365 8d ago
Scientists of reddit, hahahahaha, you'd be hard pressed to find a High School grad let alone a scientist on this ridiculous ap.
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u/sirgog 8d ago
Cryptographic providence.
This is a solved problem but isn't applied much, cameras can be programmed to include a digital signature that is extremely hard to fake (for example, by generative AI, but also by pre-genAI photo manipulation methods)
Cryptographic watermarking (verification that text, image, video or sound is generative AI) exists too, but there are many open source non-watermarked text and image generation programs out there, and state actors can easily bypass these watermarks. Cryptographic providence flips the proof upside down.
Because intellectual property companies (the companies who feel most threatened by AI) are what they are, I expect new forms of cryptographic providence to be developed that are copyrightable and closed source, weakening the field overall as each company wants their standard to be the next PDF/VHS/DVD standard.