MISCELLANEOUS: Technological progress exponential ?

Technological progress is accelerating, this is the credo of futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil.















I have always been quite sceptical about this statement, for various reasons, some of them being:

• Resources are limited and any growth will settle once a system approaches these limits.
• Some things grow exponentially (e.g. computer power, number of sequenced nucleotides), others don't (e.g. number of proteins being structurally analyzed). So this growth behaviour were less a general law than a data selection effect.
• Technological growth rates might be correlated with the population growth rates which are also exponential and which can't hold forever (same reson as in 1).
• Growth is strongly due to availability of oil. After we have reached (world) "peak oil" things might change.
  

However the following video is quite impressive and lets me rethink the whole issue:
Innovation Everywhere—How the Acceleration of “GNR” (genetics, nanotechnology, robotics) Will Create a Flat and Equitable World

PHYSICS: Derivation of the standard model of particle physics

When I took a course in theoretical high energy physics at university, the professor wrote down the Lagrangian of the standard model, mentioning that that is the current world formula, as it
describes everything we know of in physics at the moment (back in 1993 at least), except for gravity. The formula is not quite enlighting, being a collection of many summands.

Now Alain Connes has derived this Lagrangian from geometric principles (noncommutative geometry, spectral triples), which I find extremely remarkable. Even better, it even contains gravity (in the form of the Einstein Hilbert term).

Here is a very impressive audio representation of his findings (although no transparencies are available, it is still worth listening to get the idea):
Noncommutative geometry and the standard model with neutrino mixing

And here is the result which is supposed to describe all known physics (plus the Higgs particle):

















More can be found in the following paper:
Noncommutative Geometry and the standard model with neutrino mixing
Or more explicitely here:
Gravity and the standard model with neutrino mixing