New Scientist has decided to commemorate their 50th anniversary by asking a large number of scientists to predict what will happen in the next 50 years. As you might have predicted, the list of responses includes a large number of short essays of the form:
Exciting new developments in my own field of research will completely transform our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Nevertheless, they make for some interesting reading. Of course, they’re not sorted by topic, and it can get a little daunting trying to figure out who you should read, so it’s good that Sean Carroll (who made the list) provides an index for the physics contributions and Phillip at BioCurious (who didn’t make the list) offers some highlights of the biological contributions.
Well, the question they asked was “What do you think (or hope) will be the most significant breakthrough in your field between now and 2056, and why?” So, it was indeed quite predictable that people would predict breakthroughs in their own fields.
And I didn’t make any effort to list all of the physics answers — just an unrepresentative subset.
I don’t know what happened, I’m sure I was simply over-looked.
In 2056, I think they should do an article looking back at the predictions. That would be very interesting. Anyone know if they have done something similar for soe of the predictions from the past 50 years?
It would also be interesting because I wonder how much we know about stuff, such that an expert in a field could really say with high certainty that in 50 years time we will know a specific something. We all know that scientists have been wildly wrong beforehand, but my point is, do we know enough to reduce the margin or error?
Of all the predictions in physics, I found the one about deterministic QM most interesting. The rest is just variations on HEP stuff.