Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 Read Free Page B

of forward-thinking individuals of his time. He was part of a small circle of people who were at the forefront of innovation. In addition, Leonardo was always experimenting, building, and sketching models, a key attribute of anyone who wants to translate thinking into reality.
    Given the enormous, prophetic insights of Verne and Leonardo da Vinci, we ask the question: Is it possible to predict the world of 2100? In the tradition of Verne and Leonardo, this book will closely examine the work of the leading scientists who are building prototypes of the technologies that will change our future. This book is not a work of fiction, a by-product of the overheated imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter, but rather is based on the solid science being conducted in major laboratories around the world today.
    The prototypes of all these technologies already exist. As William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer who coined the word cyberspace, once said, “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”
    Predicting the world of 2100 is a daunting task, since we are in an era of profound scientific upheaval, in which the pace of discovery is always accelerating. More scientific knowledge has been accumulated just in the last few decades than in all human history. And by 2100, this scientific knowledge will again have doubled many times over.
    But perhaps the best way to grasp the enormity of predicting 100 years into the future is to recall the world of 1900 and remember the lives our grandparents lived.
    Journalist Mark Sullivan asks us to imagine someone reading a newspaper in the year 1900:

In his newspapers of January 1, 1900, the American found no such word as radio, for that was yet twenty years in from coming; nor “movie,” for that too was still mainly of the future; nor chauffeur, for the automobile was only just emerging and had been called “horseless carriage ….” There was no such word as aviator …. Farmers had not heard of tractors, nor bankers of the Federal Reserve System. Merchants had not heard of chain-stores nor “self-service”; nor seamen of oil-burning engines …. Ox-teams could still be seen on country roads …. Horses or mules for trucks were practically universal …. The blacksmith beneath the spreading chestnut-tree was a reality.

    To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000. In 1893, as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, seventy-four well-known individuals were asked to predict what life would be like in the next 100 years. The one problem was that they consistently underestimated the rate of progress of science. For example, many correctly predicted that we would one day have commercial transatlantic airships, but they thought that they would be balloons. Senator John J. Ingalls said, “It will be as common for the citizen to call for his dirigible balloon as it now is for his buggy or his boots.” They also consistently missed the coming of the automobile. Postmaster General John Wanamaker stated that the U.S. mail would be delivered by stagecoach and horseback, even 100 years into the future.

    This underestimation of science and innovation even extended to the patent office. In 1899, Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents, said, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

    Sometimes experts in their own field underestimated what was happening right beneath their noses. In 1927, Harry M. Warner, one of the founders of Warner Brothers, remarked during the era of silent movies, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

    And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

    This underestimation of the power of scientific discovery even extended to the venerable New York Times. (In 1903, the Times declared that flying machines were a waste of