But without many thinking outside the box, we would not be where we are today.

I would tend to disagree. We are where we are today as a society because of the billions of lives that went before us that added their moments to a hope for a better future. No out of the box thinking. Just effort.

Of course there are moments where some surpass but even those never thought out of the box.

Einstein took a great deal of his thinking from Vedic traditions.

Mad people might think outside the box. Not sure we will always understand them.

Nazi's think outside the box but that's probably because they were outside the box to start with.

I do think as we become more industrial \ technological progress in certain areas will speed up.

The biggest drawback to science is the many who concentrate their thinking on what they have experienced & know. The concept of thinking outside the box is alien to them. A closed mind has many boundaries.

That sounds a bit like the less educated or less 'knowing' are a problem when it comes to understanding the boundless ex-box truths that we might know :(

I think the everyday people are the ones who create and maintain a world in which some of (if not all of us) can image a place outside the box.

Thing is there are many boxes and 99.99% have nothing to do with aliens.

The interesting thing is whilst we try to look outside the box we forget or are too scared to look at what is in the box.

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The interesting thing is whilst we try to look outside the box we forget or are too scared to look at what is in the box.

More than likely. But isn't it just as likely that many looked inside that box & realised that with what was available at the time, the solution (for whatever problem) may have to come from an unconventional concept?

Perfectly highlighted here:

I was quite good at maths in school but when it came to differentiation and Integration, I just switched off. I just couldn't see the point of any of it. Yeah OK, some of today's inventions probably make use of it, but not back in 1960 when I was struggling with it.

With me, it was logarithms & Anti-logarithms. We all have our limits. To insult others because of those limits makes one wonder if or when the day that E.T. arrives & meets up with us, are we going to marvel or look for their limits so that we can insult them?

I had to study group theory and Lie algebras to write my thesis. Now I can barely understand what I wrote but I was young and climbed mountains. Now I can barely walk.
Tullio

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I feel like cryonics is also missing the mark as I don't think consciousness can be dethawed like frozen orange juice.

Cryogenics started out as a SciFi method of getting people to remote places on long space journeys, these days it is fact. Women routinely freeze their eggs and embryos for future use, and if you can afford it you can be frozen after death hoping medical science can cure you in the future. Also if you think about it, when we go to sleep, the body's metabolism slows down to ensure a peaceful state. But we still wake up in the morning with all our faculties. Cryogenics is just the next step forward in that direction.

In terms of a persons character or soul, is that encoded into your DNA or not? If not where? Transporter technology would have to replicate that as well as the physical body composed of atoms and particles.

Suspended animation for hibernating turtles is one thing, and still not close to being viable for human space travel, but successfully freezing someone after death for a hopeful reanimation at some point in the future is technology that is much further out of our grasp. It is questionable whether a dead person's molecular structure can ever be resuscitated. I also used the frozen orange juice analogy in order to illustrate the fact our bodies are a lot more complicated than reconstituting a beverage. And, indeed, it's the mysterious etherealness of our thought processes and what makes us individuals that I feel is not "solid" enough to be put on hold in a stasis sort of way, especially after death, or even be teleported. Where does the consciousness go? What is consciousness? Can you touch it? Can you break it down into subatomic particles like the rest of the body?

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

Can you touch it? Can you break it down into subatomic particles like the rest of the body?

And if you could teleport conciousness, that is the information of it like teleporting particles, wouldn't that create a copy of "you" with the same conciousness.
And then you could also create many of "you" with the same conciousness...
Spooky...
Some more on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6BDtaoW9m8

Or failing that a scribe in Egypt during the Pyramid building.

Chris, you might be interested in checking on the Rhind Papyrus which is an algebra book found in an un-looted tomb in Egypt. It was a scroll about 16 feet long by 13 inches wide and was copied by the scribe "Ahmose". 0r "Ahmes" It dates to 1550 BC

From Wikipedia in the words of the scribe:
"This book was copied in regnal year 33, month 4 of Akhet, under the majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Awserre, given life, from an ancient copy made in the time of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Nimaatre. The scribe Ahmose writes this copy.[2]"

A Babylonian clay table of approximately the same age (1600-1900 B.C.E.) has a value of Pi, expressed as the fraction 25/8, or 3.125. This is slightly closer to the true figure , than that given in the Egyptian Rhind papyrus.

You have to assume that the Babylonians and Egyptians independently came up with these slightly different approximations to Pi by experimentation: measuring how much grain was contained in a variety of different-sized cylindrical granaries and then working through different values of "Pi" to find one that fitted the data.

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355/113 is even better. That's 3.1415929... compared to π that is 3.1415926...
There are of course many more and better approximations of π using fractions of natural numbers.
Next best is 52518/16717. But the ancient egyptians wheren't familary with factorising.

Translation from RMP how 256/81 comes about.
Example of finding the area of a round field with a diameter of 9 khet. What is its area?
Take away 1/9 of its diameter, namely 1. The remainder is 8.
Multiply 8 times, making 64. Therefore the area is 64 setjat.
Explanation with modern notation https://numberwarrior.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/on-the-egyptian-value-for-pi/

Where does the consciousness go? What is consciousness? Can you touch it? Can you break it down into subatomic particles like the rest of the body?

Science doesn't have an answer to that at present. One answer you will get is from religion, where Christians believe that when you die your soul, the essence of you, goes up (note the "up")* to Heaven, where everything you have done in your life is written down in a big book and you will be judged as good or bad, and either allowed in or sent down to hell.

The other answer that you could get is from people that believe in reincarnation. That is where the moment you die The essence of your being is instantly transferred to a new born baby, but without the memories of your life. The flaw there of course is what happens when the birth rate exceeds the death rate in a year? Is there a reserve cache of lost souls?

Well, if there's any type of after-life at all, the notion that we would come back to Earth is kind of depressing to me. I'd rather go to another star system.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

And then you could also create many of "you" with the same conciousness...

Star Trek Transporter technology works upon the basis that it disassembles you into your component particles, keeping a record or blueprint of how you were made. The particles are then transported elsewhere, and using that memory reconstituted in reverse into you again. The original you is not left behind. Yes the transporter system has a copy or blueprint of how you were put together, but it doesn't have a copy of the stream of particles that it transported.

I think there's a lot more subtleties to our individual experiences of life than 1 + 1 = 2. Our brain gives us fractional irrational answers all the time. I think we try too hard to make something black and white when it's really many shades of gray. Teleporting atomic particles makes sense to me, but I just have a feeling it's more complicated when it comes to all the nuances that make us who we are. There's an awful lot of idiosyncrasies about the human condition. I don't think there can be exact duplicate consciousnesses.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

None of this quantum stuff makes any sense to me. I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand it all technically, but there's this nagging feeling that it just all doesn't add up somehow. Almost like someone playing a huge joke on mankind and enjoying seeing us all running around in circles for their amusement.

I listened to a radio interview on Italian Swiss TV, Channel 2, with a Zurich Polytechnic University professor who said that using a quantum theory called Density Functional, developed in 1964 and whose creator received the Nobel Prize in 1998, he and his group were able to analyze the properties of 2000 new materials, so far totally unknown, and to give indications to experimental physicists how to assemble the most valuable. The research was done using computers such as the Piz Daint in Lugano, sixth in the top500 list of supercomputers and cooled by the water of Lugano lake. I listened to some lectures on Density Functional Theory while at Trieste Research Area from 1991 to 1994.
Tullio

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Some applications that use quantum effects.

Quantum tunnelling applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling#Applications
Quantum tunnelling or tunneling is the quantum mechanical phenomenon where a particle passes through a potential barrier that it classically cannot surmount.

Mayonnaise aka Casimir effect:) https://phys.org/news/2018-01-mayonnaise-effect-breakdown-viscosity-equation.html
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-casimir-effect-2699353
G. Casimir and Dirk Polder, suggested the effect while working on fluid properties, such as why mayonnaise flows so slowly ... which just goes to show that you never know where a major insight will come from.
One potential application would be to apply the dynamic Casimir effect as a means of creating a propulsion engine for a spacecraft, which would theoretically propel the ship by using the energy from the vacuum.

Hospital PET scans which are probably the most common application of antimatter.

There are more like bird navigation...

GPUGRID is using DFT in its Quantum Chemistry tasks, running only on Linux. The results are being fed to a neural network, which should greatly speed the calculations. Their materials are mostly biological. One outstanding example of a DFT calculation result is graphene, which should take the role of silicon in microelectronics.
Tullio

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None of this quantum stuff makes any sense to me. I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand it all technically, but there's this nagging feeling that it just all doesn't add up somehow. Almost like someone playing a huge joke on mankind and enjoying seeing us all running around in circles for their amusement.

So after much research and money, we now think we know why mayonnaise flows so slowly. Well, whoopie doo for us, that must rank as the scientific breakthrough of the century. The world can now sleep safe in their beds tonight :-)

(Sarcasm mode on)
A G Bell
S Morse
H Hertz
R Watson-Watt
R Oppenheimer

These are just a few examples of many who either invented or perfected techniques that are widely taken for granted today. Somewhere along the line, all originated as an original concept. I dare say that along the way, many were mocked by those with little or no understanding of the concepts.
(Sarcasm mode off)

PET scan. During a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, a small amount of radioactive tracer is injected into one of your veins. This give off a type of radiation that the PET scanner can pick up as the tracer moves through your body. This provides information about how your organs and tissues are functioning.

So what has that to do with anti-matter?

Birds navigate by tapping into the Earths magnetosphere. Again, what has that to do with anti-matter?

A positron (antielectron) is the antiparticle of the electron. It has the same mass and has an equal size but opposite charge as the electron. Positron charge is +1 and has a spin of 1/2. When a positron and an electron collide, both annihilates and results in two gamma photons.
Paul Dirac was the first to predict that anti-matter should exist.


Jim Al-Khalili and the Quantum Robin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jepgOQEvWT0

Most of modern structural chemistry consists in searching solutions of Schroedinger's static equation. It is well known that even in classical mechanics only the three bodies problem has an exact solution, the rest are approximations. Looking at atoms and molecules with many atoms and many electrons, the problem was even worse. Some first attempts were made using computers. One of the computer chemistry pioneers was Enrico Clementi, who was an IBM Fellow in San Jose in California. I met him in Milano while working at Mondadori. He returned to his native Sardinia but I doubt that he found there the facilities he had in IBM.
Tullio

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Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car
They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"
"No, but I know exactly where I am" Heisenberg replies.
The cop says "You were doing 55 in a 35." Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts "Great! Now I'm lost!"
The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says "Do you know you have a dead cat back here?"
"We do now!" shouts Schrödinger.
The cop moves to arrest them. Ohm resists,because he doesn`t know how to conduct himself.

Speaking of graphene, I read this article a few years ago. It's quite interesting: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/material-question

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

I would say that there is a tenuous link between PET scanning and antimatter. The only link there is the fact that the radioactive substance gives off positrons. This is due to radioactive decay before the substance gets anywhere near the body.

Hmm...
Without anti-matter like positrons PET doesn't work
The radioactive FDG solution that would work as a tracer is injected into the bloodstream and the positron/electron annihilation later scanned.

Positron-emission tomography (PET)[1] is a nuclear medicine functional imaging technique that is used to observe metabolic processes in the body as an aid to the diagnosis of disease. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide, most commonly fluorine-18. which is introduced into the body on a biologically active molecule called a radioactive tracer.

Anyway.
Here is some more how life utilise quantum mechanics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology
Photosynthesis, vision, enzymatic activity, magnetoreception, DNA mutation, smell...