Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century

"There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century--the atom, the computer, and the gene."

--Harold Varmus, NIH Director

"Prediction is very hard, especially when it's about the future."

--Yogi Berra

Three centuries ago, Isaac Newton wrote: ". . . to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."  When Newton surveyed the vast ocean of truth which lay before him, the laws of nature were shrouded in an impenetrable veil of mystery, awe, and superstition.  Science as we know it did not exist.

Life in Newton's time was short, cruel, and brutish.  People were illiterate for the most part, never owned a book or entered a classroom, and rarely ventured beyond several miles of their birthplace.  During the day, they toiled at backbreaking work in the fields under a merciless sun.  At night, there was usually no entertainment or relief to comfort them except the empty sounds of the night.  Most people knew firsthand the gnawing pain of hunger and chronic, debilitating disease.  Most people would live not much longer than age thirty, and would see many of their ten or so children die in infancy.

But the few wondrous shells and pebbles picked up by Newton and other scientists on the seashore helped to trigger a marvelous chain of events.  A profound transformation occurred in human society.  With Newton's mechanics came powerful machines, and eventually the steam engine, the motive force which reshaped the world by overturning agrarian society, spawning factories and stimulating commerce, unleashing the industrial revolution, and opening up entire continents with the railroad.

By the nineteenth century, a period of intense scientific discovery was well underway.  Remarkable advances in science and medicine helped to lift people out of wretched poverty and ignorance, enrich their lives, empower them with knowledge, open their eyes to new worlds, and eventually unleash complex forces which would topple the feudal dynasties, fiefdoms, and empires of Europe.

By the end of the twentieth century, science had reached the end of an era, unlocking the secrets of the atom, unraveling the molecule of life, and creating the electronic computer.  With these three fundamental discoveries, triggered by the quantum revolution, the DNA revolution, and the computer revolution, the basic laws of matter, life, and computation were, in the main, finally solved.

That epic phase of science is now drawing to a close; one era is ending and another is only beginning.

This book is about this new dynamic era of science and technology which is now unfolding before our eyes.  It focuses on science in the next 100 years, and beyond.  The next era of science promises to be an even deeper, more thoroughgoing, more penetrating one than the last.

Clearly, we are on the threshold of yet another revolution.  Human knowledge is doubling every ten years.  In the past decade, more scientific knowledge has been created than in all of human history.  Computer power is doubling every eighteen months.  The Internet is doubling every year.  The number of DNA sequences we can analyze is doubling every two years.  Almost daily, the headlines herald new advances in computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, and space exploration.  In the wake of this technological upheaval, entire industries and lifestyles are being overturned, only to give rise to entirely new ones.  But these rapid, bewildering changes are not just quantitative.  They mark the birth pangs of a new era.

Today, we are again like children walking on the seashore.  But the ocean that Newton knew as a boy has largely disappeared.  Before us lies a new ocean, the ocean of endless scientific possibilities and applications, giving us the potential for the first time to manipulate and mold these forces of Nature to our wishes.

For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature.  But today, we are on the cusp of an epochmaking transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature.  It is this tenet that forms the central message of Visions.  The era now unfolding makes this one of the most exciting times to be alive, allowing us to reap the fruits of the last 2,000 years of science.  The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery.

Emerging Consensus Among Scientists

What will the future look like?  Science fiction writers have sometimes made preposterous predictions about the decades ahead, from vacationing on Mars to banishing all diseases.  And even in the popular press, all too often an eccentric social critic's individual prejudices are substituted for the consensus within the scientific community.  (ln 1996, for example, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to life in the next 100 years.  Journalists, sociologists, writers, fashion designers, artists, and philosophers all submitted their thoughts.  Remarkably, not a single scientist was consulted.)

The point here is that predictions about the future made by professional scientists tend to be based much more substantially on the realities of scientific knowledge than those made by social critics, or even those by scientists of the past whose predictions were made before the fundamental scientific laws were completely known.

It is, I think, an important distinction between Visions, which concerns an emerging consensus among the scientists themselves, and the predictions in the popular press made almost exclusively by writers, journalists, sociologists, science fiction writers, and others who are consumers of technology, rather than by those who have helped to shape and create it.  (One is reminded of the prediction made by Admiral William Leahy to President Truman in 1945: "That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. . . .  The [atomic] bomb will never go off, and I will speak as an expert in explosives."  The admiral, like many "futurists" today, was substituting his own prejudices for the consensus of physicists working on the bomb.)

As a research physicist, I believe that physicists have been particularly successful at predicting the broad outlines of the future.  Professionally, I work in one of the most fundamental areas of physics, the quest to complete Einstein's dream of a "theory of everything."  As a result, I am constantly reminded of the ways in which quantum physics touches many of the key discoveries that shaped the twentieth century.

In the past, the track record of physicists has been formidable: we have been intimately involved with introducing a host of pivotal inventions (TV, radio, radar, X-rays, the transistor, the computer, the laser, the atomic bomb), decoding the DNA molecule, opening new dimensions in probing the body with PET, MRI, and CAT scans, and even designing the Internet and the World Wide Web.  Physicists are by no means seers who can foretell the future (and we certainly haven't been spared our share of silly predictions!).  Nonetheless, it is true that some of the shrewd observations and penetrating insights of leading physicists in the...