FEATURE ARTICLE
Science in 2006, Revisited
From grid computing to genomics, the science fiction of 1986 is fast becoming science fact. There remains equal reward in the signal and in the noise
Lewis Branscomb
Cloudy Crystal Balls
It's not quite 2006 yet, so I have three years for some of my
predictions to come true. But how well did I do? The short answer is
that almost all my specific predictions have already turned out to
be simply wrong. I predicted the successful construction of the
Superconducting Supercollider and predicted its successor would be
under design by 2006—a tunnel around Antarctica. In honor of
the International Cosmological Year, the new machine would have the
acronym ICY. I predicted that T. Boone Pickens would endow the Santa
Fe Institute with enough money to become the department-less
graduate school for interdisciplinary science (the Pickens Institute
for Science, or PIS) that Murray Gell-Mann had dreamed of in the 1970s.
One of my more regrettably bad predictions was the idea that the
importance of complexity, irreversibility and nonlinearity in
science would bring about a resurgence of mathematics. In the United
States, that has not happened. Although the mathematicians and the
theoretical physicists are working together again, the U.S.
government has certainly continued to starve mathematics and has
done little to encourage a new generation of American
mathematicians. In this critical field we not only import our
students; we must import faculty as well.
Another disappointment is in education. One could foresee in 1986 a
massive shift from focus on teaching to focus on learning,
especially as the cognitive sciences made such good progress. But
alas, between parents who don't care, schools that can't function,
and politicians who sell clichés but are unwilling to address
the basic issues, again in the U.S. education at the pre-college
level still struggles in a swamp of neglect and ideological determinism.
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