Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

science. For example, many correctly predicted that we would one day have commercial transatlantic airships, but they thought that they would be balloons. Senator John J. Ingalls said, “ It will be as common for the citizen to call for his dirigible balloon as it now is for his buggy or his boots.” They also consistently missed the coming of the automobile. Postmaster General John Wanamaker stated that the U.S. mail would be delivered by stagecoach and horseback, even 100 years into the future.
    This underestimation of science and innovation even extended to the patent office. In 1899, Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents, said, “ Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
    Sometimes experts in their own field underestimated what was happening right beneath their noses. In 1927, Harry M. Warner, one of the founders of Warner Brothers, remarked during the era of silent movies, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
    And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, “ I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
    This underestimation of the power of scientific discovery even extended to the venerable
New York Times.
(In 1903, the
Times
declared that flying machines were a waste of time, just a week before the Wright brothers successfully flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1920, the
Times
criticized rocket scientist Robert Goddard, declaring his work nonsense because rockets cannot move in a vacuum. Forty-nine years later, when
Apollo 11
astronauts landed on the moon, the
Times,
to its credit, ran the retraction: “ It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum. The
Times
regrets the error.”)
    The lesson here is that it is very dangerous to bet against the future.
    Predictions for the future, with a few exceptions, have always underestimatedthe pace of technological progress. History, we are told over and over again, is written by the optimists, not the pessimists. As President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Pessimism never won a war.”
    We can even see how science fiction writers underestimated the pace of scientific discovery. When watching reruns of the old 1960s TV series
Star Trek,
you notice that much of this “twenty-third-century technology” is already here. Back then, TV audiences were startled to see mobile phones, portable computers, machines that could talk, and typewriters that could take dictation. Yet all these technologies exist today. Soon, we will also have versions of the universal translator, which can rapidly translate between languages as you speak, and also “tricorders,” which can diagnose disease from a distance. (Excepting warp drive engines and transporters, much of this twenty-third-century science is already here.)
    Given the glaring mistakes people have made in underestimating the future, how can we begin to provide a firmer scientific basis to our predictions?
    UNDERSTANDING THE LAWS OF NATURE
    Today, we are no longer living in the dark ages of science, when lightning bolts and plagues were thought to be the work of the gods. We have a great advantage that Verne and Leonardo da Vinci did not have: a solid understanding of the laws of nature.
    Predictions will always be flawed, but one way to make them as authoritative as possible is to grasp the four fundamental forces in nature that drive the entire universe. Each time one of them was understood and described, it changed human history.
    The first force to be explained was the force of gravity. Isaac Newton gave us a mechanics that could explain that objects moved via forces, rather than mystical spirits and metaphysics. This helped to pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of steam power, especially the locomotive.
    The second force to be understood was the electromagnetic force, which lights up our cities and powers our appliances. When Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and others helped to explain electricity and magnetism, this unleashed the electronic revolution that has created a bounty of scientific wonders. We see this every time there is apower blackout, when society is suddenly wrenched back 100 years into the past.
    The third and fourth forces to be understood were the two nuclear forces: the weak and strong forces. When Einstein wrote down
E
=
mc
2 and when the atom was split in the 1930s, scientists for the first time began to understand the forces that light up