Chris Mann
VISIONS: HOW SCIENCE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE 21ST CENTURY AND BEYOND by Michio Kaku (Oxford University Press)
Science has exploded in this century. The Templeton Foundation estimates that a billion dollars a day is now spent on scientific research. Is science worth it? Different thinkers from Aristotle onwards have held different positions about its merits.
Poet William Blake witnessed the poverty that accompanied the scientific and industrial revolution in Britain. He made Isaac Newton a symbol of cold rationality and despaired at “the mind-forged manacles of man”.
TH Huxley and Arthur Koestler, influenced by Charles Darwin, were pessimistic about science’s net benefit in the hands of a species with a long history of both caring and murderous behaviour. The elimination of smallpox and the invention of the machine-gun and atom bomb are examples of this duality.
Contemporary views also vary. Reductionists such as Richard Dawkins advocate the primacy of evolutionary biology. Holistic thinkers such as Paul Davies and Fritjof Capra link the evidence of design and purpose in physics to the perennial concerns of spirituality.
Michio Kaku, author of this book, is a distinguished physicist at the City University of New York and an optimist. His predictions are based on interviews with over 150 scientists. He believes that the “quantum revolution” at the start of this century spawned the present bio- molecular and computer revolutions. The quantum theory “reduced the mystery of matter to a few postulates”. These include the discoveries that energy is not continuous but occurs in discrete quanta and that subatomic particles have both particle and wave-like functions.
He believes that science “has finally decoded” many of the fundamental “rules” of nature. The era of specialisation is over and the next century will see increasing synergy between the three revolutions. Scientists will not be able to work without reference to them. The exponential increase in the power of computing, for example, made the mapping of the human genome possible.
The shift of wealth away from economies based on natural resources and fixed capital will continue. Brain-power and imagination, invention and the organisation of new technologies are the key ingredients in the creation of new wealth. >From now to 2020 there will be a further explosion of scientific activity powered by continued advances in computing.
Computer power has increased by a factor of 10-billion since 1950. This growth will continue into the next century in terms of Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles every 18 months. The new phase, influenced by the increasing power of sensors, will lead to “tabs, pads and boards”. Tabs will be tiny, clip-on badges with the power of today’s PC. Pads will resemble extremely thin computer monitors and will be equivalent to work-stations scattered around the office or home. Boards will be huge computerised screens hung on walls that function as interactive screens for video, TV and the Internet. This hybrid of TV and computer technology will be spurred on by the mandatory replacement of analog by digital TV signals in the United States by 2006.
Advances in the field of molecular biology will also be spectacular. The complete human genome will be decoded by 2005 and the DNA sequencing of other organisms will continue until completed by “roughly 2020”. This will produce a comprehensive “Encyclopaedia of Life”. We may well have our own DNA on a CD to complement our bar-coded ID books. This hoard of genetic information will enable medicine to tackle many genetic and infectious diseases and a large number of cancers. Entire organs such as livers and kidneys will be grown in the laboratory.
>From 2020 to 2050, the emphasis in bio-molecular medicine will shift to an attack on the enormous complexity of diseases whose origins are polygenetic. These include heart disease, arthritis and schizophrenia. It may also lead to isolating and improving the genes that control human ageing. It could also result in the cloning of humans.
Physics in this period is likely to develop holographic TV, nuclear fusion and room- temperature superconductors. Nanotechnology will begin to make molecule-sized machines. Computer processors may well be bionic and linked to human neurons.
Kaku goes as far as to predict developments from 2050 to 2100. Robots with increasing intelligence and self-awareness will control more and more activities. Improvements to energy creation will make interplanetary travel and colonies in space possible in the era that follows. Bio-geneticists will be able to design and create life-forms ranging from new plants and organs to the mental characteristics of our children.
He states that “by the close of the 21st century, the sheer power of the three scientific revolutions will force the nations of the earth to co-operate on a scale never seen before in history”. We will, he believes, change from being “passive observers of nature to being active choreographers of nature” and will become a single planetary civilisation, run by a global middle-class which speaks English.
These broad socio-economic predictions, delivered with scant reference to the costs, make up the most controversial sections of the book. There is little about the impact of science on the environment and less about its effect on people in countries with different belief-structures and undeveloped science.
Kaku leaves serious gaps. There is no analysis of the funding of science, at present or in the future. There is nothing about the future of weapons technology and its effect on the armaments industry. Nor is there any analysis of the financial dependence of much of science on the military-industrial complexes of the superpowers.
These omissions emphasise the benevolent image of science presented by the book. This is much like the prevailing public image: science and technology are seen as benign, logical and objective, more useful than economics and more valuable than the humanities.
If its history is anything to go by, the future of science will be more messy and complex, and the costs in financial, ecological and human terms more extensive and traumatic than Kaku depicts. Science is made and funded by people. What is researched and how it is applied relates directly (but not absolutely) to human cultural values and political economies.
Kaku does examine some of the dangers and “trade-offs”, but his triumphalist view of science tends to justify the unpleasant means in terms of a glorious end.
Science is an immense array of measured but incomplete models of understanding. It is a powerful tide of theories, based on research and experiment, constantly being developed and superseded by others. As geneticist Steve Jones puts it, “there is no limit to its enquiries, and no explanation is ever complete”.
Phrases such as “the laws of nature” are misleading abstractions. Neither Newton nor Albert Einstein’s great edifices have withstood the tide of change; nor has Kaku’s own theory of super-strings. Set against the findings of paleontologists and evolutionary time, science has only just begun.
And what of science in underdeveloped countries? They may well resent the insensitivity of global predictions that depict the unscienced of the earth as a Western middle-class in waiting. As the present government White Paper sets out, we need more innovative science in our country.
The pre-eminence Kaku ascribes to quantum physics, microbiology and information science may well be challenged by evolutionary biologists, agronomists and chemists. As an organising principle for his material, however, it generates megabytes of superbly organised and startling information. This is presented with such relaxed clarity that lay-readers of this stimulating book may well think that science has become easier since they were at school.
Chris Mann is a research associate of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa. His latest book is The Horn of Plenty