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Sunday, August 04, 2002
BOOK REVIEW: THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS: SCIENCE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY * * (2 stars, out of 4).
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It's hard to judge a book of essays as a whole. There are some four star essays and some no star essays in this book. But taken as a whole, there is very little flow to the book. Rather, it is both extremely repetitive and contradictory. Practically every writer has to mention Moore's Law, and define it again and again for you (it is the empirical prediction that computing power will double every eighteen months). Practically every writer has to rehash the same ramifications of the Human Genome Project. And practically every writer makes the same prediction: that the particular unproven hypotheses that they are currently working on trying to prove, will, in fact, be proven in the next 50 years.
One interesting theme of the book is that we know a lot about what's going to happen in the next 50 years, because it takes at least a generation for new ideas to be accepted in the scientific community, because what has to happen first, is that all the old people who've made and staked their careers on the old ideas, all have to retire or die. This makes a lot of sense when you think about psychology, or child-rearing, or even medicine, but the various experts claim it to be true of physics and mathematics as well. Only computer science and astronomy, it would seem, are genuinely open minded to receive totally new ideas. One researcher, for example, says that the evidence is already great that cancer and some heart disease are primarily caused by contagious infections, which could be treated. He says, the only reason that idea isn't already accepted is that too many doctors have too much invested in the old models. Amusingly, he points out that the refusal of the medical establishment to accept the idea of cancer and heart disease as being caused by contagious infections will hasten the day when new doctors more open to the idea will be at the helm of the medical establishment. This is because, ironically, their stubbornness will cause them to die of heart disease and cancer, which could be better treated with a new paradigm.
All in all, the book is too long and too often obscure. Cut the book in half (keeping the best half, and not a random half), and you might have a very good book.
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2002/08/book-review-next-fifty-years-science.html
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