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Posts from 2024

When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen? A Multimillennium Tale of Computation

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See also:
“Computing the Eclipse: Astronomy in the Wolfram Language” »

When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen? A Multimillennium Tale of Computation

Updated and expanded from a post for the eclipse of August 21, 2017.

When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen? A Multimillennium Tale of Computation

Preparing for April 8, 2024

On April 8, 2024, there’s going to be a total eclipse of the Sun visible on a line across the US. But when exactly will the eclipse occur at a given location? Being able to predict astronomical events has historically been one of the great triumphs of exact science. But how well can it actually be done now?

The answer is well enough that even though the edge of totality moves at just over 1000 miles per hour, it’s possible to predict when it will arrive at a given location to within perhaps a second. And as a demonstration of this, for the total eclipse back in 2017 we created a website to let anyone enter their geo location (or address) and then immediately compute when the eclipse would reach them—as well as generate many pages of other information. Continue reading

Computing the Eclipse: Astronomy in the Wolfram Language

3 comments
See also:
“When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen? A Multimillennium Tale of Computation” »

When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen? A Multimillennium Tale of Computation

Computing the Eclipse: Astronomy in the Wolfram Language

Basic Eclipse Computation

It’s taken millennia to get to the point where it’s possible to accurately compute eclipses. But now—as a tiny part of making “everything in the world” computable—computation about eclipses is just a built-in feature of the Wolfram Language.

The core function is SolarEclipse. By default, SolarEclipse tells us the time of the next solar eclipse from now:

Continue reading

Can AI Solve Science?

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Note: Click any diagram to get Wolfram Language code to reproduce it. Wolfram Language code for training the neural nets used here is also available (requires GPU).

Can AI Solve Science?

Won’t AI Eventually Be Able to Do Everything?

Particularly given its recent surprise successes, there’s a somewhat widespread belief that eventually AI will be able to “do everything”, or at least everything we currently do. So what about science? Over the centuries we humans have made incremental progress, gradually building up what’s now essentially the single largest intellectual edifice of our civilization. But despite all our efforts, there are still all sorts of scientific questions that remain. So can AI now come in and just solve all of them?

To this ultimate question we’re going to see that the answer is inevitably and firmly no. But that certainly doesn’t mean AI can’t importantly help the progress of science. At a very practical level, for example, LLMs provide a new kind of linguistic interface to the computational capabilities that we’ve spent so long building in the Wolfram Language. And through their knowledge of “conventional scientific wisdom” LLMs can often provide what amounts to very high-level “autocomplete” for filling in “conventional answers” or “conventional next steps” in scientific work. Continue reading