Since I assume you would be interested to know, this quote seems almost certainly misattributed to Einstein and seems to have been made up by Ram Dass [1]. Though I would be happy to be proved wrong if you have a source
I’m glad this kind of work is getting highlighted on HN, but this is an extremely misleading title, to the point of being outright false.
As often happens, this appears to be due to PR titles being controlled by non-specialists, not the study authors.
While the work the authors do is important, in no sense does the tool they produced actually run a simulation.
A simulation implies a physical model and usually partial differential equations that are often solved on supercomputers, but here the neural network is rather interpolating some fixed simulation output in a purely data-driven way.
The simulations have not gotten faster due to neural networks, cosmologists have just gotten better at using them. Which is great!
Edit: see the sub-comment in the thread by crazygringo for the lead author’s take
Thanks for this earlier article. From there it seems that the most staff losses are at Goddard, which is largely focused on science, not launch capabilities. So this unfortunately seems to fit into the larger “anti-science” push of the administration (e.g. the almost entirely senseless cuts at the NSF, NIH) more than it has to do with launch activities.
Another dark day for US physics research…
Does anyone have access to a copy of the NASA statement on this that was shared with the media? It makes a big difference where in NASA these people were employed - this is the difference between slimming down an engineering division or cancelling one launch project and the total destruction of a smaller program for physics, which may have a much longer-term impact on US science.