The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century - Softcover

 
9780375713422: The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375713425 ISBN 13: 9780375713422
Verlag: Vintage, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

A brilliant ensemble of the world’s most visionary scientists provides twenty-five original never-before-published essays about the advances in science and technology that we may see within our lifetimes.

Theoretical physicist and bestselling author Paul Davies examines the likelihood that by the year 2050 we will be able to establish a continuing human presence on Mars. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi investigates the ramifications of engineering high-IQ, geneticially happy babies. Psychiatrist Nancy Etcoff explains current research into the creation of emotion-sensing jewelry that could gauge our moods and tell us when to take an anti-depressant pill. And evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explores the probability that we will soon be able to obtain a genome printout that predicts our natural end for the same cost as a chest x-ray. (Will we want to read it? And will insurance companies and governments have access to it?) This fascinating and unprecedented book explores not only the practical possibilities of the near future, but also the social and political ramifications of the developments of the strange new world to come.

Also includes original essays by:

Lee Smolin
Martin Rees
Ian Stewart
Brian Goodwin
Marc D. Hauser
Alison Gopnik
Paul Bloom
Geoffrey Miller
Robert M. Sapolsky
Steven Strogatz
Stuart Kauffman
John H. Holland
Rodney Brooks
Peter Atkins
Roger C. Schank
Jaron Lanier
David Gelernter
Joseph LeDoux
Judith Rich Harris
Samuel Barondes
Paul W. Ewald

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Brockman lives in New York City.

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A brilliant ensemble of the world's most visionary scientists provides twenty-five original never-before-published essays about the advances in science and technology that we may see within our lifetimes.
Theoretical physicist and bestselling author Paul Davies examines the likelihood that by the year 2050 we will be able to establish a continuing human presence on Mars. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi investigates the ramifications of engineering high-IQ, geneticially happy babies. Psychiatrist Nancy Etcoff explains current research into the creation of emotion-sensing jewelry that could gauge our moods and tell us when to take an anti-depressant pill. And evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explores the probability that we will soon be able to obtain a genome printout that predicts our natural end for the same cost as a chest x-ray. (Will we want to read it? And will insurance companies and governments have access to it?) This fascinating and unprecedented book explores not only the practical possibilities of the near future, but also the social and political ramifications of the developments of the strange new world to come.
Also includes original essays by:
Lee Smolin
Martin Rees
Ian Stewart
Brian Goodwin
Marc D. Hauser
Alison Gopnik
Paul Bloom
Geoffrey Miller
Robert M. Sapolsky
Steven Strogatz
Stuart Kauffman
John H. Holland
Rodney Brooks
Peter Atkins
Roger C. Schank
Jaron Lanier
David Gelernter
Joseph LeDoux
Judith Rich Harris
Samuel Barondes
Paul W. Ewald

Aus dem Klappentext

ensemble of the world s most visionary scientists provides twenty-five original never-before-published essays about the advances in science and technology that we may see within our lifetimes.

Theoretical physicist and bestselling author Paul Davies examines the likelihood that by the year 2050 we will be able to establish a continuing human presence on Mars. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi investigates the ramifications of engineering high-IQ, geneticially happy babies. Psychiatrist Nancy Etcoff explains current research into the creation of emotion-sensing jewelry that could gauge our moods and tell us when to take an anti-depressant pill. And evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explores the probability that we will soon be able to obtain a genome printout that predicts our natural end for the same cost as a chest x-ray. (Will we want to read it? And will insurance companies and governments have access to it?) This fascinating and unprecedented book explores not only th

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Part One

The Future,

In Theory

Lee Smolin

The Future of the Nature

of the Universe

We are asked to predict the state of our science fifty years from today. Fifty years is a long time, given the pace at which physics and cosmology have progressed over the last several hundred years. But perhaps it is not too long a time to make predictions that will not seem entirely stupid by then. If you look back over the history of science, you will see that often the important questions people were asking had been answered fifty years later. And yet the progress of science has usually been slow enough that people speak roughly the same language as their colleagues working in the same field fifty years earlier.

Let's look back fifty years, then, and note what the big questions were. My own list would include:

1)What is the nature of the strong force that holds atomic nuclei together?

2)What is the nature of the weak force responsible for radioactive decay?

3)Is the Steady State model of the universe right, or might there have been a Big Bang, as speculated by Gamow and other fringe figures?

4)Do protons and neutrons have any internal structure?

5)Why do the proton and neutron have slightly different masses, while the electron is much lighter than either? Why is the neutrino massless? What is the muon and who ordered it?

6)What is the relationship between general relativity and quantum theory?

7)What is the right way to understand the quantum theory?

I think we can confidently assert that now we know the answers to the first four questions. We are still working on the last three. But the first have not been forgotten; indeed, the methods by which those questions were answered form the basis of the training of a theoretical physicist today.

If we look back a hundred years, however, we find that we no longer care about many of the questions people were asking then. I'm not enough of a historian to write a list of questions asked by physicists at the turn of the last century, but they would likely have been more concerned with the properties of the ether than with the properties of atoms. There was no evidence for the existence of physical atoms until a few years later--and, indeed, in 1900 many physicists did not believe that atoms existed. Others, like Ernst Mach, thought the question was not a part of physics because atoms would never be observed. As for astronomy, there was no evidence in 1900 for the existence of galaxies apart from our own Milky Way, nor did anyone have any idea what made the stars shine. So while physicists of the early 1950s would probably have understood the questions that physicists are asking now, no one at the beginning of the twentieth century could have understood even the words that physicists were using in 1950 to talk to each other.

Sometimes science changes so little over fifty years that it makes sense to try to predict what we will know after that span. But there are periods when progress is faster and this is no longer the case. It seems that there is a horizon, somewhere between fifty and a hundred years into the future, beyond which it may be useless to speculate in any detail about the progress of science.

Let's take a moment to consider why this is so. It's probably partly because fifty years is about the length of a scientific career, from the beginning of studies until retirement. This, then, is the span of time over which the conservative tendencies built into the structure of scientific careers act to retard the progress of science. Science is hard, and we scientists prefer to have as good an understanding of what we're doing as possible; thus, unless forced to do otherwise, we prefer to work with techniques and ideas we already understand well. Another factor is that the careers of young scientists are often controlled by senior people nearing retirement, who are in many cases no longer active and therefore unfamiliar with new techniques. Career-savvy graduate students, no matter how imaginative, hesitate to work on something not understood by the powerful old men and women of their field. Thus, in order to think about what my science will be like in fifty years, I imagine what the brightest of my graduate students will be talking about at their retirement parties. My guess is that unless they are forced by data they cannot otherwise explain to make a revolution comparable to that of the early twentieth century, they will be using the language we've taught them. If that's the case, the present exercise may be useful--though the romantics among us would rather anticipate a revolution than confirmation of our own beliefs.

One can also speculate on what was different about the sociology of science in the first half of the twentieth century to enable such enormous progress. Two credible answers come to mind: One is that it was possible for outsiders, such as Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest, to publish in spite of not having university positions; another is that the generation that preceded the inventors of quantum theory was mostly wiped out in World War I, leaving the field open for Heisenberg, Dirac, and their friends.

This said, what will we know about fundamental physics and cosmology in fifty years? Rather than guessing, I propose a method that has a chance of reaching conclusions that won't look silly in the 2050s. I will list the most fundamental questions that are currently unanswered. Then I will ask what developments we may expect in experimental and observational science which will enable answers to them to be checked. I won't worry about theoretical developments, since there are already proposed answers to all of my questions and I assume that over a time span of fifty years we theorists will be able to adjust our theories, or invent new ones, in response to the data.

Here, then, is my list of the seven most important open questions in fundamental physics and cosmology:

1)Is quantum theory true as presently formulated, or will it need to be modified, either to have a sensible physical interpretation or to unify it with relativity and cosmology?

2)What is the quantum theory of gravity? What is the structure of space and time on the Planck scale (10-33 cm, or twenty orders of magnitude smaller than an atomic nucleus)?

3)What explains the exact values of the parameters that determine the properties of the elementary particles, including their masses and the strengths of the forces by which they interact?

4)What explains the large ratios of scales we observe? Why is the gravitational force between two protons forty powers of ten smaller than their electrical repulsion? Why is the universe so big? Why is it at least sixty powers of ten bigger than the fundamental Planck scale? Why is the cosmological constant smaller than any other parameter in physics by roughly the same ratio?

5)What was the Big Bang? What determined the properties of the universe that emerged from it? Was the Big Bang the origin of the universe? If not, what happened before it?

6)What constitutes the dark matter and dark energy that make up between 80 and 95 percent of the density of the universe?

7)How did the galaxies form? What do the patterns we observe in the distribution of the galaxies tell us about the early evolution of the universe?

The first four of these questions continue, and deepen, unanswered questions from fifty years ago. The other three are new. Let us then ask whether the observations and experiments we'll be able to make in 2050 will be sufficient to test answers that theorists may propose to these questions. Of course, anything could be invented in fifty years. If my method is to be believable, we have to be conservative about the development of technology. I will thus consider only technology already existing or under...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375713425
ISBN 13 
9780375713422
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Herausgeber
Brockman John
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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