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| George Paget Thomson |
In a previous post in this blog I expressed distrust about the predictions
made by scientists and popular writers about the future of science and technology.
Most of them never take place. Sometimes they are overly optimistic, sometimes overly
pessimistic.
Sometimes,
however, they are true, if only in part.
In 1955, George Paget Thomson (Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of
electron diffraction) published a book about technological predictions (The Foreseeable Future, Cambridge University
Press). I will summarize here the conclusions of his first chapter about the
future of energy:
Until the population increase can
be stopped, which is not foreseeable until 2050, energy consumption will
continue to increase. Among the various sources, hydraulics will quickly reach
its practical limits; coal and oil will be depleted sooner or later; solar
energy is too dispersed and its use too expensive; wind and tidal power will
never be major sources. The only alternative is nuclear energy: for the time
being, fission energy, until fusion becomes possible.
This
paragraph written 62 years ago could have been written today. In this field, progress
has been very slow. In contrast, Thomson’s predictions about the evolution of
transportation have been less accurate and can be summarized as follows:
Increasing the maximum speed of
cars does not make sense. The maximum speed in railroads (100 miles per hour)
has hardly grown in the last century and is not expected to improve much. The only
option to increase the speed of shipping would be by building large submarines
powered by atomic energy, capable of moving at 60 or 70 knots. Major advances
can only be envisaged in commercial air navigation, which will soon reach 2.5
times the speed of sound: crossing the Atlantic will take one hour.
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| Concorde |
Thomson’s
predictions for commercial air navigation have not been met. The only step in
that direction, the Concorde, was a failure. The super-submarines have never
come into existence. By contrast, railroads have more
than doubled their top speed.
In biology,
he correctly predicted the rise of biotechnology, genetics and the industrial
use of microorganisms. In medicine, on the other hand, he expressed doubts about
increasing the average duration of human life beyond 70 years (by 1955 it was
63) unless it were possible to eliminate death completely and maintain youth
indefinitely. In his words:
This new state of affairs will
profoundly alter man’s attitude toward death, perhaps not for his good. It will
make him more cowardly, as he will have more to lose.
Thomson
fails dramatically in his predictions about the future of computing. He
believes that one can now say that computers do think
(while they were in the first generation!), But the only future applications
he envisages are the verification of scientific theories and performing economic and electoral predictions. As their publication can influence the
result of what they predict, he assumes that these predictions and polls will
be considered top secret by governments. In this way, according to Thomson, the
use of computers will lead, in the long run, to less information dissemination.
What has happened is exactly the opposite.
It is
interesting to mention his predictions about the importance of scientific popularization, which compensates for the growing specialization in science and technology:
[Popularization] is not easy to
do, and those who dedicate themselves to it deserve as high a place in
scientific estimation as the researchers. Generally, those who are not
specialists in a field are better able to explain to others.
The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Futurology: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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