[I do not own rights to any of the images below. They are obtained by randomly 'Google' searching.]
One thousand years ago, a horse would
eat grass, reproduce and sleep, and would be used for pulling carriages or for
riding. Even today, a horse would eat grass, reproduce and sleep but probably
would not be used so much for pulling carriages or for riding except for
special occasions like horse races, etc. However, human beings a thousand years
ago and human beings today are unbelievably different in what we do and how we do.
It’s a simple conclusion: on this planet, only human beings have used intelligence
to progress and develop. Only human beings are the problem solving animals, and hence every other creature has
remained the same over thousands of years (except for some evolution-induced
physical changes). Only we, humans have been able to master all other animals
and harness many forces and energy of nature to our own use. All these are
ubiquitously known and it doesn’t make any sense to elaborate.
If a person who lived 200 years ago were
to rise from his grave today, he would simply find the world to be pure magic!
The ability to walk on the moon or to see as well speak to someone on the other
part of the world instantly is something he/she would probably have never
thought to be feasible. Concepts like radioactivity, X-ray, electromagnetic
waves, radio technology, space shuttles and electronics were absolutely
non-existent for a person living 200 years ago. It’s obvious that he/she would
have looked at the moon shining bright at night and asked himself/herself: If I were to send something out there to the
moon, how would I control that thing sitting here on the earth? How would I
give command so that whatever thing I send up there knows what to do and how to
do? Perhaps, it is after all not possible to send something to the moon!
Poor chap! It’s not
his/her fault after all. That something called ‘electromagnetic waves’ exist
which can be used to transmit messages to control advanced ‘machines’ which are
sent to space was not known to those folks. That the bones of a body can be
imaged using something called X-rays or that we could fly in winged vehicles
called airplanes were totally
unfeasible at those times. The human race has truly exhibited unthinkable
progress in terms of scientific intellect over the last 200 years in this
context. The question is: 200 years from now, that is in the year 2212
AD, if we – you, I & everybody living today – were to rise from our graves,
shall we be amazed at the world then and would call it a pure magic?
We do try to extrapolate present
progress and predict what we might have achieved in the next 200 years. Things
like stem cell research to cure cancer, inter-stellar space missions to travel
to nearby stars, new energy source or new ways to harness sun’s energy with
extremely high efficiency, ability to predict and control tsunamis/earthquakes,
etc. are something we dream or aspire to achieve probably in the next 200
years. But hey! There might as well be
completely new things or new phenomena in nature of which we have absolutely no
idea whatsoever right now just like folks in 18th century really had
no idea of something called X-rays! Totally unknown phenomena or forces of
nature might be discovered which might change our path of progress drastically,
just a thought. But we don’t know what
those unknown phenomena could be! As Richard Feynman once remarked: “We can’t
force nature to reveal herself the way we want her to. She will reveal herself
the way she wishes.” That’s fine, but what
is it that is preventing us – the humans – from expediting the discoveries,
from achieving crucial breakthroughs in fundamental science and in applied
technology in a pace that is much faster
than the present pace? Is the rate of
progress of human scientific intellect slowing down, or saturating? Is
there an upper limit to the speed or pace at which humans can discover new
stuffs or design new technological or engineering marvels? In hindsight, if we
retrospect the last 200 years of human civilization in terms of scientific and
technological rise, could it have been possible to squeeze the entire
achievements of humans in half the time, say 100 years? That means, attaining
the same status in early 1900s as we have today in 2012, i.e., things like
cell-phones, internet, computer, rover on Mars, etc. being achieved in 1912.
Would it have been possible? For that, the pace of our intellectual development
and scientific discoveries would needed to have been almost twice of what we
had actually achieved in reality!
Imagine if we had all our present technology and science in the year 1912!
Then, how much more we could have achieved till today in 2012 – we could have
probably been in a much more advanced state for sure! So what was it that
prevented us from achieving that speed of scientific discoveries and
technological marvels in the last 200 years? Or, what about the opposite case,
where the pace was only half and so today in 2012, we were having technology
and science of the 1900s? Say, today we are just beginning to understand what
the mass of an electron is, that X-rays exist, that radioactivity exists, etc.
What would have happened then?
What
defines or limits the pace of scientific/technological breakthroughs? And how
can we increase it?
Due
to my limited knowledge of biology, I will exclude biological breakthroughs,
but it seems and it’s true that we have had very, very few technological breakthroughs
in the last 60 years, or for that matter, even fewer scientific discoveries
which favor technological breakthroughs given the present know-how. The present
day gadgets like iPhone, Xbox, fancy cell phones, etc. are NOT fundamental breakthroughs, nor is Facebook a fundamental
breakthrough in human progress. No doubt these things are improving
connectivity across the globe but from an engineering or scientific
perspective, they are just mere improvements or polishing of existing
technological devices. There is nothing fundamentally new in any of today’s
gadgets or devices which can change the world as radically as the transistor or
a laser changed it. Proof of combining weak force to electromagnetic force or
discovery of Higgs’ Boson or proof/disproof of dark energy in the universe are
all cool and exciting physics but as of now, we do not have any means of using
these knowledge for progress of human civilization from a technological
perspective. With our existing know-how, we cannot use Higgs’ Boson or dark
energy to invent new stuffs which can provide technological breakthroughs to
make human lives better. But, 150 years back, proof of existence & demonstration
of electromagnetic waves was just physics, and then, lo & behold!
Electromagnetic waves were put to use and now, they surround us all the time!
Who knows, Higgs’ Boson may be put to radically new applications to change our
lives in ways we can only imagine now! Just as today we have harnessed
electrons and photons to design and implement electronic and photonic devices
respectively which constitute the bulk of our technological prowess now,
similarly in the next 200 years we may have Bosonic or Neutrino-based technology
or a technology that harnesses gravitational waves to make cool devices for us
to use!
Then,
why are we not able to achieve those, right now? In the past 50 years, why are
we not able to come up with anything fundamentally as new as quantum mechanics
was in 1920s or anything as radical as a transistor technology? Is the pace of
our scientific progress pre-determined by someone/something, or is it just that
we all are becoming dumber every day?
The
number of PhDs has increased dramatically over the last 20-30 years, the number
of research institutes, the amount of funding – everything has been increasing,
almost everywhere in the world, and yet we are not achieving any breakthrough.
There were much fewer PhDs and research institutes way back in 1920s or 1950s,
but things like nuclear fission, laser, and quantum mechanics were discovered.
And today? Is the number of truly smart people decreasing now, or is the
average intelligence dwindling? Everything is so monotonically incremental in
nature, be it increasing the speed of our computers from 2 GHz to 4 GHz
following Moore’s Law (?) or be it providing more features in the next iPhone
or be it increasing the power of a laser diode from 100 mW to 150 mW.
Everything is just incremental, and nothing is abrupt or far-reaching. The
phrase ‘thinking out of the box’ exists in inspirational speeches and in
commencement addresses but it does not seem to exist in the research world. Does
research really need to be incremental? And it’s such an irony that the younger
generation is more fascinated by concepts like ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘MBA’ or ‘start-up’
where you flourish your business and make money, claiming to either ‘change
lives’ or to ‘bring technology’ closer to more people, which all sound great
and are necessary, but hey, we need smarter people in research too, we need to
fasten our pace of technology and we need to achieve breakthroughs!
Lastly,
is the speed at which we communicate, limiting our progress? We use words,
sentences to speak to and communicate. So, if I say that “An electron has a
mass of 9.1x10-31 kg and so its gravitational pull on another
electron is too insignificant to be accounted for. Thus gravity does not play a
role in the behavior of electrons in your laptop or cell-phone.”, I take
something like 15 to 20 seconds to say or convey this information. However, your brain (assuming you know what an ‘electron’
is and what ‘gravity’ is) requires a fraction of a second to process this
information and understand it. So the rate at which we disseminate knowledge or
thought or information is not limited by the speed at which our brain functions
but by the speed at which we convey. Imagine a technique in which I could
convey the above sentence about electrons to you in a few milli seconds of even
micro seconds. It need not be ‘telepathy’ which is pseudoscience, it can be
something which we haven’t found out yet. Certain things, especially new and
complicated things, might however, require more time even for the brain to
process and understand, for example if I say “Density of states in quantum well
is stair-case like”, if you are not aware of ‘density of states’ or ‘quantum
well’, then your brain can not understand it. What I am trying to argue is
that, for exchanging information, if we can replace words and sentences which
consume seconds to minutes of time, with some technique which requires milli-seconds
to be conveyed, then the pace of our progress, our thoughts, our achievements would
be so faster! A 30-minute conference talk can be conveyed as well as understood in a matter of few seconds!
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