New Scientist has asked over 70 of the world’s most brilliant and charismatic and modest scientists to forecast what might be the big breakthroughs in their fields over the next 50 years. Some of the many examples that might be of interest to CV readers:
- Alex Vilenkin thinks we might find cosmic strings.
- Gerard ‘t Hooft imagines a deterministic theory that would supercede quantum mechanics.
- Lisa Randall hopes that the LHC will tell us something about the fundamental nature of spacetime.
- Edward Witten thinks that string theory will be fertile, and is excited about extra-solar planets.
- Steven Weinberg would like to see a theory of everything.
- Max Tegmark will be printing T-shirts emblazoned with the aforementioned TOE.
- David Deutsch looks forward to working quantum computers.
- Rocky Kolb and Kip Thorne both predict that we’ll find gravitational waves from inflation.
- Martin Rees wants to know if there was one Big Bang, or many.
- Richard Gott imagines a colony on Mars.
- Lawrence Krauss prevaricates about dark energy.
- Frank Wilczek actually steps up to the plate, predicting superintelligent computers and abundant solar power.
- Steven Pinker thinks it’s all just a trick to make him look foolish.
Hey, wait a minute — even I’m in there! Who knew? Here’s my prognostication:
The most significant breakthrough in cosmology in the next 50 years will be that we finally understand the big bang.
In recent years, the big bang model – the idea that our universe has expanded and cooled over billions of years from an initially hot, dense state – has been confirmed and elaborated in spectacular detail. But the big bang itself, the moment of purportedly infinite temperature and density at the very beginning, remains a mystery. On the basis of observational data, we can say with confidence what the universe was doing 1 second later, but our best theories all break down at the actual moment of the bang.
There is good reason to hope that this will change. The inflationary universe scenario takes us back to a tiny fraction of a second after the bang. To go back further we need to understand quantum gravity, and ideas from string theory are giving us hope that this goal is obtainable. New ways of collecting data about dark matter, dark energy and primordial perturbations allow us to test models of the earliest times. The decades to come might very well be when the human race finally figures out where it all came from.
[Here you can imagine some suitably aw-shucks paragraph in which I appear to be vaguely embarassed at all this talk of “brilliance,” which might be appropriate in describing Weinberg and Witten and ‘t Hooft but certainly doesn’t apply to little old me, who would never have made the cut if it weren’t for my blogging hobby, although I’m not quite sure how Max got in there either, and hey, if anyone wants to protest that I certainly do belong, that’s what comment sections are for. Don’t have time to construct it just now, but you know how it would go.]
Anyone else want to predict what the biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be?
Congratulations, you are now up there with Borat’s cousin:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/science-forecasts/dn10476-simon-baroncohen-forecasts-the-future.html
I have to say, a lot of y’all seem awfuly sure of having today’s hypotheses remaining valid. Did anyone suggest things like:
-consigning string theory to the same dustbin as ether and phogistron
-proving the proton is stable.
-demonstrating that 5 of the 6 solar system bodies with a history of surface or subsurfce water are lifeless (I was tempted to say all 6 dead, but finging life on just enceladus or just Ceres would be way more interesting, scientifically, than either all or none).
What is the most widespread scientific hypothesis from the mid 50’s that is now discredited? From my perspective, I’d say that pre-plate theories on continental tectonics take top spot for “gosh, they were silly back then.” The granite moon runs a close second.
Here’s a few:
(i) Quarks and leptons will be found to be composite objects at the LHC and our assumptions about the basic building blocks of matter will be proved wrong.
(ii) There will be a breakthrough in accelerator technology allowing the construction of multi-TeV pp and e+e- colliders with a linear size below 1 km. (These will be need to study quark/lepton compositeness!)
iii) Dark Matter will be found to have multiple components.
That male-female physicist ration will be about 1:1 and we all can go have a drink and sing a song of happiness.
Particle experimentalists will be considered for inclusion on lists of the most brilliant and charismatic and modest scientists. (Well, we can dream.)
we’ll find life or evidence of life beyond Earth in the universe. Maybe microbes on encealadus or clear atmospheric signatures on an exoplanet. Oh, and cool stuff about dark energy and matter will get done too, of course.
Anon writes:
Did you miss Art McDonald, who is on the list?
If we’re talking public excitement then I’d have to say that if SETI turns something up (as Jeff said), there will be a fundamental shift in the way we see the universe.
For physicicsts, if we find proton decay at KEK or another gauge group at LHC we will all be very giddy. Or, the condensed matter guys could finally figure out low temperature superconducting.
Finally, we’re about due for another superstring revolution, so perhaps some intelligent grad student (or Witten) will find a vacuum selection mechanism and silence the string critics once and for all.
‘t Hooft’s proposal is the most interesting
Curently we don’t understand quantum mechanics in all it’s aspects. We only understand it as an effective theory where observers are classical. That’s clearly not the most general case. I find it hard to believe that we could have a theory of everything and still not understand quantum mechanics fully.
1. We will come to understand that QM and gravity are intertwined by an radically new approach that utilizes information theory for its characterization.
2. Dark energy will emerge as a natural consequence some form/interpretation of the holographic principle.
Elliot
Composite quarks and leptons at the LHC? That would be kind of difficult, given the multi-TeV LEP bounds on four-fermion operators….
Practical fusion power.
It is notable that ‘t Hooft, a father of the holographic principle, is so concerned about locality, i.e. anti-holography, that he is willing to look for an underlying deterministic theory. It is even more remarkable in view of the social stigma associated with hidden variables (10 crackpoints for item number 9).
Personally, I strongly feel that giving up QM on the fundamental level is misguided, but the quest for locality is not. There are a few quantum gravities where we can do everything explicitly and all the way, and most of them are local rather than holographic.
I am of course thinking about the free bosonic string in D dimensions, which may be regarded as a bona fide theory of 2D gravity coupled to D scalar fields. When D=26, this theory is consistent and holographic. However, when D < 26, the theory is still consistent (according to the no-ghost theorem, the Hilbert space has a positive-definite inner product, cf GSW chapter 2), but now correlators depend on separation, i.e. locality.
onymous: THe LHC discovery reach for composite fermions is about 10 times greater than LEP..only the ILC can compete.
@anonymous too:
Indeed I had missed him. Interesting choice.
A sensitive space telescope, perhaps of a multiocular interferometer design, will make spectrographic readings of the atmosphere of an Earth-like exoplanet or exomoon, and determine from the abundance of chemicals therein, that the planet probably harbors life.
Surely it has to be a revolutionary way to solve global warming or the energy crisis? Atleast I hope that’s what it might be.
This is all so physics, or have I missed something, what about stem cells, AIDS, malaria and cancer?
Here are several:
Dark matter and dark energy will be understood an manifestations of the same phenomenon.
Extra dimensions will be constrained to be smaller than Planck size.
The absolute masses of neutrinos will be measured precisely.
CPT will be observed to be violated.
All this can be done only if we solve the water problems.
Interesting that a few of the 6 particle theorists mention the LHC, while the one particle experimenter mentions non-LHC detection of dark matter.
Another interesting point about theorists and the LHC: for much of the past 15 or so years, very basic predictions for the LHC, like for the inclusive missing energy spectrum, were poorly computed, and off by an order of magintude or so. So while most of the theory community has been having a bloody good time inventing all sorts of fun stuff, the basic tools needed to evaluate/confirm/deny an LHC discovery sat underdeveloped.
Or course it may be that new signals at the LHC will be so obvious that careful work on background estimation will not be required. But that is unlikely, and what is sometimes considered obvious turns out to be less obvious in retrospect… after all, supersymmetry was already discovered in the 1980’s at the SppS, but whoops, turned out it was just background.
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Didn’t some participant at the SLAC summer institute mention a breakdown of unitarity instead of a higgs particle a few months back? That would be interesting.
You are all too conservative. How about…
The world’s best known physicist will be an AI.
That’s what we like to see! I suspect that something like that will happen down the road — but not in fifty years.
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I am surprised on how narrowly focused the Science News 50 list predictions are. Each maven sees a little further but only in their field.
For better predictions see Kurzweil. He sees the rate of progress accelerating sharply.The 21st century is equal to 1000 times more progress than the 20th. The singularity is in 2045.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=195200017&pgno=2