On Nietzsche's dreams, I guess ibuprofen comes to mind (discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams and John Nicholson). How many of his headaches would have been easily relieved with just a pill. Chemistry was the fundamentally transformative science of the first part of the 20th century, Better Living Through Chemistry [1] and all that.
And Nietzsche knew that chemistry was the future, it was in the air. "In a letter of January 1869 to his close friend Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche, reflecting wryly on the vicissitudes of fate, breaks the news that has just intervened to dash their common 'dreams of a Parisian future': 'just last week I was going to write to you and suggest that we study chemistry together, that we throw philology where it belongs, among the household effects of our forefathers'" [2] However, he doesn't pursue chemistry, "In commenting on this same episode of 1869, Mittasch muses: what if Nietzsche had carried out his plan and begun studying chemistry, for instance with O.L. Erdmann and H. Kolbe in Leipzig: would we be counting him nowadays among our great German chemists?" [2], as we know, he falls back into philology and publishes The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Incidentally, in 1869, apparently in one day, February 17, Dmitri Mendeleev conceived the first periodic table of the elements [3]. No one could have guessed the power that lies in those scribbles, and that's the point: if Nietzsche could have dreamed all the polymers and drugs of today he would have forgotten Greek and Latin.
Yes, in physics, plenty of "low hanging fruits" such as general relativity or black-body radiation have been picked early. The incompleteness theorems have crushed the mathematical optimism for only 5 years, from 1931 to 1936, when Turing showed that even without an algorithm to solve the halting problem, you can still build an computer, as we are well aware.
Hopefully not even 150 years to cure all illnesses, I'm hoping for 50 because, you know, the clock is ticking. The source for this hope is the work that is being done in regenerative medicine and in programmatic tissue control [4].
And Nietzsche knew that chemistry was the future, it was in the air. "In a letter of January 1869 to his close friend Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche, reflecting wryly on the vicissitudes of fate, breaks the news that has just intervened to dash their common 'dreams of a Parisian future': 'just last week I was going to write to you and suggest that we study chemistry together, that we throw philology where it belongs, among the household effects of our forefathers'" [2] However, he doesn't pursue chemistry, "In commenting on this same episode of 1869, Mittasch muses: what if Nietzsche had carried out his plan and begun studying chemistry, for instance with O.L. Erdmann and H. Kolbe in Leipzig: would we be counting him nowadays among our great German chemists?" [2], as we know, he falls back into philology and publishes The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Incidentally, in 1869, apparently in one day, February 17, Dmitri Mendeleev conceived the first periodic table of the elements [3]. No one could have guessed the power that lies in those scribbles, and that's the point: if Nietzsche could have dreamed all the polymers and drugs of today he would have forgotten Greek and Latin.
Yes, in physics, plenty of "low hanging fruits" such as general relativity or black-body radiation have been picked early. The incompleteness theorems have crushed the mathematical optimism for only 5 years, from 1931 to 1936, when Turing showed that even without an algorithm to solve the halting problem, you can still build an computer, as we are well aware.
Hopefully not even 150 years to cure all illnesses, I'm hoping for 50 because, you know, the clock is ticking. The source for this hope is the work that is being done in regenerative medicine and in programmatic tissue control [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistr...
[2] Nietzsche’s Conceptual Chemistry, by Duncan Large in Nietzsche and Science, p. 190, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97813152479...
[3] https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-...
[4] Regeneration, Intelligence in Life & Memory - Dr Michael Levin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w