Science's 125 open questions

For its 125^th anniversary, Science magazine offers us what it considers to be the 125 most important open questions facing science:

Age-Old Questions Continue to Entice Scientists (News report)

125 Questions (Full report at Science)

If I may brag a little, I've already come up with a very similar list of open questions.

Unfortunately, since I don't have the budget to work with that Science does, a lot of the details on my list aren't fleshed out very well. Worth a little partial credit, perhaps?

A new technological dark age?

The general asumption most people have is that technological innovation is not only progressing steadily, but that it's actually accelerating. However, one expert's careful study suggests that may not be so:

Entering a dark age of innovation

[Jonathan] Huebner is confident of his facts. He has long been struck by the fact that promised advances were not appearing as quickly as predicted. "I wondered if there was a reason for this," he says. "Perhaps there is a limit to what technology can achieve."

In an effort to find out, he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him.

This outlook it quite possibly too pessimistic. But an awful lot depends on future developments whose arrival is very difficult to predict, and which may not even occur any time soon. Among things that probably must happen in order to sustain technological advance are

• Finding cheap, abundant sources of renewable energy to replace ever more expensive fossil fuels.
• Inventing entirely new computing technologies such as "quantum computers" to take over when semiconductor-based iterative procedural computers reach their apparent limits in 10 or 15 years.
• Averting looming and potentially quite disruptive environmental problems such as global warming and dwindling fresh water supplies.
• Discovering a biotech means to prevent a global pandemic of an infectious disease such as avian flu or SARS, which could easily lead to a long-lasting economic depression.
  

That is all without even considering obvious global political problems, such as religious and cultural clashes, the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and conflicts arising from the vast disparity in wealth between the least and most affluent countries. It's hard to imagine any technological fix for problems like these.

And technology may not bail us out in areas where it can potentially be effective, if indeed innovation is about to slow significantly because most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.

It may well be that other goals such as sending humans back to the Moon and to Mars will have little useful value in dealing with any of these problems. Certainly we're not going to be able to move large numbers of Earth's population off the planet before technologies we can't even really imagine at present are developed. Space travel is probably not anywhere near our top priority right now. (Has the still unfinished space station been, or will it ever be, good for much of anything at all?)

What we're really going to need most to develop is more like a vast, renewable source of good sense and good luck.

Creationism

It's not just a wacky fringe theological idea any more. In the U. S. (and many other culturally conservative countries), its main purpose is political rather than theological, and it's attacking not just evolution, but science in general.

That is because politics and religion are increasingly inseparable in many places, since powerful economic and political forces have discovered (once again) how useful religion is to misdirect people's attention and to attract votes. Creationism (or its more sophisticated city cousin, "intelligent design") is being used as a wedge issue to mislead and manipulate people into supporting candidates and policies whose real but concealed agendas are contrary to most people's actual economic interest.

Here's a good overview of what's going on now:

Creationism special: A battle for science's soul

This time the creationists' proposals are "far more radical and much more dangerous", says Keith Miller of Kansas State University, a leading pro-evolution campaigner. "They redefine science itself to include non-natural or supernatural explanations for natural phenomena." The Kansas standards now state that science finds "natural" explanations for things. But conservatives on the board want that changed to "adequate". They also want to define evolution as being based on an atheistic religious viewpoint. "Then they can argue that intelligent design must be included as 'balance'," Miller says.

Controlled nuclear fusion

When will we ever have thermonuclear ("fusion") electric power? For something like 50 years the answer has been "in about 30 years". A large part of the problem is political. Here's one assessment of the situation:

Nuclear fusion: power to the people?

But what's changed since JET was built to make it any more likely that fusion won't remain forever 30 years in the future? The materials, says Carpenter, and the computers. From helium-cooled superconducting magnets to tungsten chamber walls to supercomputers that can calculate how the plasma will behave far more accurately and quickly than ever before, the pieces are all there, waiting for the politicians to sign off the cheques and shake hands.

Biocomputation

This panel discussion at Edge, among J. Craig Venter, Ray Kurzweil, and Rodney Brooks, is a must-read.

It's too long to summarize concisely. But the gist is that computing and biotechnology are the leading technologies of the past decade, and almost certainly of the next several decades. While they are not exactly merging (yet -- that's another decade or two away), they are starting to overlap significantly at the cutting edge.

Venter leads off with a discussion of how rapid progress in genomics will affect developments in cancer, antibiotics and antivirals, and synthetic biology (synthesizing living organisms). Kurzweil speculates about how radical advances in treatments for infectious and systemic diseases may occur sooner than most expect. Brooks explains why he thinks we need to understand much more about biology before we can make further progress in such fields as robotics and artificial life.

After the introductory remarks, Kurzweil and Brooks debate how rapidly dramatic progress in the science and technology of biocomputation should be expected to occur. The disagreements revolve around questions about how long it will take to really understand extremely complex systems such as individual cells and the human brain.

The discussion as a whole is a good introduction to the science of the 21^st century.

The U. S. is losing in science and technology

Not to be alarmist or anything, but...

Quoting Ray Kurzweil from this discussion at Edge:

You'll be pleased to know that things are not slowed down in China and India. I've got some graphs showing engineers' levels are declining in the United States; they're soaring in China. China's graduating 300,000 engineers a year compared to 50,000 in the United States.

From another article:

According to a survey in Physical Review, reported in May 2004, the number of scientific papers published by West European authors had overtaken those by U.S. authors in 2003, whereas in 1983 there were three American authors for every West European. The percentage of patents granted to American scientists has been falling since 1980, from 60.2 percent of the world total to 51.8 percent. In 1989, America trained the same number of science and engineering PhDs as Britain, Germany and France put together; now the United States is 5 percent behind. The number of citations in science journals, hitherto led by American scientists, is now led by Europeans.

It wouldn't be any surprise in 10 or 15 years to see a similar report regarding U. S./Europe combined vs. China/India/elsewhere in Asia...

Already Korea seems to be leading the world in stem cell work... Venter, in the Edge article referred to above, notes that "There are an awful lot of people who don't go into stem cell research right now, a lot has been shut down, a lot of scientists have had to leave the country to try and continue their research, a lot of money that could have gone to it has been diverted."

One could also observe that the world's largest high-energy physics facility for at least the next 15 years, CERN, is located on the French/Swiss border, and the next-generation experimental fusion reactor, ITER, will be in France. (Japan was the alternative; the U. S. wasn't even in the running.)

Folks, it could well be that the game's over, and the U. S. has already lost, though it hasn't realized that yet.

What the bleep...

If you don't know what this refers to, or if you know it's a movie but you haven't seen it, don't worry. You haven't missed anything.

If you have seen it and you think some of it just might be plausible, then you need to read on. In fact, read this: What the Bleep are they On About?!

Example:

"We only see what we believe is possible -Native American Indians on Caribbean Islands couldn't see Columbus's ships [sitting on the horizon] because they were beyond their knowledge" Dr. Candace Pert (former scientist, current new-age guru) in What the Bleep Do We Know?

It's hard to say where Candace Pert got the low-down on what the Native American Indians did or didn't see when Columbus and the gang hit the horizon. Columbus certainly didn't speak the language, and the locals didn't keep written records. Only the Shaman knows, and we're about 500 years too late to ask him.