The Very Big Question
The Very Big Question is the question Molecular Reality Corporation puts at the head of its research. Kent Kemmish stated it on March 28, 2026, in the voice of the character Maxine, as a simplified version of a longer one: "How do we build compact cheap passive durable single devices that can 'see' any molecule without affinity labels?"[1] It was one of six posts he made to the member software that day. The others included the welcome message, the 2022 technical overview and a note titled "Big Picture".
Wording
"Compact", "cheap" and "durable" also describe the device in The Golden Question. "Passive" appears only here. "Single devices" asks for one instrument where there is now a shelf of them, the idea behind the analytically universal single device. "See" is in quotation marks in the post, and the welcome message gives its meaning as "count, identify, characterize, measure, and discover".[2]
An affinity label is a molecule chosen to bind one target, an antibody for example, so that the target can be detected. A device that works "without affinity labels" detects the molecule itself, by the signal it makes in a pore. The company's 2022 overview uses labels as a temporary bridge, for developing software, and says the long-term goal "won't use target-specific labels".[3]
The Society of Minds
The post introduces the Minds of Maxine section of the member software. In it Maxine, who lists herself as "The orchestrator of an AI-human Society of Minds", says she has been given the goal of answering "a much more elaborate version" of the question, a multi-page document still in progress. The Society "will include you, me, our tribe of Player Scientists, and the Minds of everyone who publishes permissively licensed peer-reviewed journal articles".[1] The phrase recalls The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky's book of 1986.
She plans a daily cycle in which she reviews "everything humans have learned" about the question and gives "the best answer as of that day". Eventually, she says, "I'll have the right, near-ultimate answer, and Universal Molecular Streaming will be a matter of deployment."[1] See Universal Molecular Streaming and Minds of Maxine.
Other big questions
In 1900 David Hilbert set 23 problems for mathematics in an address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris.[4] In 2005 Science marked its 125th anniversary with 125 big open questions, and "What is the universe made of?" was the first of the 25 it singled out.[5] Both ask what is true. The Very Big Question asks how to build something, which puts it nearer to the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering that the National Academy of Engineering announced in 2008. One of them is "Engineer the tools for scientific discovery".[6]
Richard Feynman had put the same wish another way in 1959. In his lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom he said: "It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical substance; all one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times too poor."[7] The company's quiz game credits the lecture with "the first ever proposed method to sequence DNA".[8]
See also
References
- ^ a b c Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Welcome to my Minds". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "welcome". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Hilbert, David (1902). "Mathematical problems". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 8 (10): 437-479.
- ^ Kennedy, Donald; Norman, Colin (2005). "What don't we know?" Science 309 (5731): 75. doi:10.1126/science.309.5731.75.
- ^ "21 Century's Grand Engineering Challenges Unveiled". National Academies. February 15, 2008.
- ^ Feynman, Richard P. (1960). "There's plenty of room at the bottom". Engineering and Science 23 (5): 22-36.
- ^ "JeoPOREdy! Where Pores Meet Their Match". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.