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?
