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1. What sort of physics are we to do between now and the end of the century? I will try to look at the next 30 years of physics not avoiding speculation but mainly concentrating on practical questions to face us today. My remarks are sure to have a personal and Princeton flavour, but principles should apply to anyone, anywhere. I will begin with an example from the past, which proves a forecast for 30 years to be sometimes possible and fruitful.
2. When I came as a graduate student to the English Cambridge 24 years ago, I found most of my physicist friends cursing the name of Sir Lawrence Bragg, who had become director in 1938, the year after the death of Rutherford. By that time the younger men thought to be brilliant physicists and known to be establishing schools of their own had left the place. The leadership in high-energy physics had passed to Berkeley. But Bragg made no effort to rebuild. He did not appear to be interested in plans for a new accelerator to be developed. He said: have taught the world very successfully how to do nuclear physics. Now let us teach them how to do something else."
3. The people whom Bragg was interested in supporting were thought to be a strange bunch, doing things which the high energy people would hardly consider to be physics. There was Martin Ryle, who was known to be looking for radio sources in the sky. There was Max Perutz, who was said to have spent 10 years on X-ray analysis of the structure of the hemoglobin molecule and to remark very cheerfully that in another 15 years he would have it. There was a crazy character called Francis Crick, who seemed to have lost interest in, and given up, physics altogether. The place which Bragg was to leave in 7 years had become a centre of first-class international standing in two fields of research that nowadays appear as important as high energy physics: radio astronomy and molecular biology.
4. This history of the last 30 years in Cambridge may seem to be little oversimplified. Nevertheless we can appreciate it if we think of the important lessons which it can give us today. What are the lessons? What enabled Bragg to do so well with what looked in 1938 like disastrous situation? Broadly speaking, he may be said to have followed three rules. The rules are:
1. Don't try to revive past glories.
2. Don't do things just because they are fashionable.
3. Don't be afraid of the scorn of the theoreticians.
5. The last 30 years have shown us, Princeton people, to be doing not so well as Bragg did. As for the 1st rule I can say with confidence that we score high on it. We have not since 1946 had a professor working in the field of general relativity. It seemed unreasonable to expect to find anybody in this particular field as good as Einstein. On the second rule we score middling. We have always had room for some unfashionable people, but a very high percentage of our output of papers turns out to be in the fashionable part of particle physics and seems to be quite indistinguishable from the papers produced by 20 other institutes of theoretical physics. On the third rule we score extremely bad. The most original, unfashionable and worthwhile thing done by the Institute after Einstein was the design and construction of Von Neumann's prototype electronic computer, the Maniac. In the ten years after World War II the group around Von Neumann was to lead the world in ideas concerning the development and use of computers. Bui the snobs at our Institute could not tolerate electrical engineers walking around with their dirty hands and spoiling the purity of our scholarly atmosphere.
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Von Neumann was strong enough to override the opposition. But when he tragically died, they took advantage of the opportunity, and the project was given up.
6.I always thought the failure of our computer group to be a disaster not only for Princeton but for science as a whole. It meant that at that time no academic centre existed for computer people of all kinds to get together at the highest intellectual level. The field that was abandoned was to be taken over by IBM. Although it is a fine organization in many ways it cannot be expected to provide the atmosphere of intellectual fertility which Von Neumann managed to create here, at Princeton. We had the opportunity to do it, and we threw the opportunity away.
7.So much for the past. What about the future? Because our computer project appeared unique and ahead of its time, I was sorry at the news of its abandonment. But I am not equally sorry at the news that our accelerators to be abandoned next year. I believe the loss of the accelerator is likely to put Princeton into a position similar, in some respects, to that of Cambridge in 1938. We shall have an opportunity to do something different.
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Text F. Molecular Biology in the Year 2000
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1. I want to consider the future of molecular biology and, to a lesser extent, of cell biology. Applied biology, or the social implications of biological research, or frontiers coming into being are out of the scope of my paper as I want to keep the discussion within reasonable limits. Long-range forecasts are hard to make indeed, but those for a period of about 25 years have often proved to be successful. This enables me (in any case) to take arbitrarily a period of 30 years which brings me nicely to the year 2000.
2. I shall argue that there are certain general factors which make a big increase in biological knowledge during this period virtually certain. In the first place, there is a very considerable amount of manpower available, not only at present, but also on an even greater scale in the future. It is fair to say that an increasingly greater number of people in one way or another appear to be showing an interest in biology and the scope of research is steadily expanding far and wide in advanced countries. In fact, the amount of effort seems to be strongly correlated with the standard of living. Because there are many countries in the world with a standard of living which is likely to rise, we can expect more countries to start contributing to biological research. Now more and more people in all countries are found to go into biology. Moreover, we can safely state that the tendency is not only for biologists themselves to increase in number, but also for quite a lot of people to move into biology from other disciplines.
3. An interesting distinction to be made here is between problems and techniques. For problems, scientists seem to move upwards in the scale of complexity. That is to say, they go from physics and chemistry into molecular biology and from molecular biology to cell biology and so on. For techniques, it appears to be quite a different matter, and one may find people borrowing techniques in any direction. Broadly speaking, modern biologists are quite at home using recently developed techniques emerging in physical sciences. In spite of this it is rare for biologists to leave biology and to take up problems in chemistry and physics proper.
4. Another extremely important factor to be taken into consideration has been tremendous power of modern experimental techniques. One has only to think of such examples as chromatography, radioactive tracers, or the electron microscope (to mention only a few) to see how powerful and varied they are. A molecular biologist who would tackle any problem with the technique available before, say, 1935, is sure to give up the effort. Moreover, there is little sign of exhaustion of any one technique and still there are signs of new ones coming along for example the use of nuclear magnetic resonance, on the one hand, and of computers, on the other. For these reasons, we can expect a massive research effort in biology.
5. If we are to accept that most of the problems that we are concerned with today are likely to be solved by the year 2000, it is worth while considering what problems can be expected to remain unsolved. It seems to me there are subjects of a rather general nature which appear to fall into this class. I certainly expect some progress to take place in the intervening years, but I rather doubt whether we shall be in a position to see the answers in broad outline, let alone in great detail. Examples of such topics are: the origin of life on Earth; the existence of life on other worlds, and communication with other creatures in the galaxy, if we assume them to exist.
6. Finally, one must consider the problems that are not to face immediately, or are of such a long-term nature that we cannot expect them to be solved by the year 2000. These are by far the hardest to guess, because such problems depend partly on questions which have not learned to ask yet. Anyway, new and unexpected developments are certain to make the whole field even more fascinating in the year 2000 than it is today.
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Text G. Physics in the Next 30 Years
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1. I begin my prognostications of the future by taking a look at what might be expected to happen in high-energy physics in the next 30 years.
There are two main ways of doing research in this field. The rich man's way is to build accelerators, which give high, accurately controlled energy. The poor man's way is to use cosmic rays, which are known to come down upon poor and rich alike like the rain, but have very low intensity and completely uncontrolled energy. I think there is a better-than-even chance that the major discoveries of the next 30 years in high-energy physics may be expected to be made with cosmic rays. That is why I venture to say that it may be good for us, scientifically speaking, to be poor. I may easily happen to be wrong about the promise of cosmic rays physics. Going into any field of research is always a gamble. Only in this case I believe this gamble to be a reasonable one. I have heard some accelerator enthusiasts talk as if they seriously expect, by building one more machine and measuring a few more cross sections, to solve all the outstanding riddles of nature. Our experience in high-energy physics so far has taught us that there are new problems and new complexities to be disentangled every time that we extend the range of our observations. I would be disappointed if no surprises were found to remain in the vast range of energies beyond the reach of the accelerators. I hope and believe that the universe of high energies will prove to be as inexhaustible as the universe of astronomy and the universe of pure mathematics.
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2. Apart from studying cosmic rays, what else is there for physicists to do?
An individual physicist working in close collaboration with engineers and chemists and biologists is likely to be able to make some important contributions. However, he is not to expect things which he does to be mainly physics. If he is any good, he will use his physics only as a cultural background to think about problems primarily chemical, biological or economical in nature. Accordingly, I think it would be mistake for a physics department of a university to become heavily involved in a fashionable environmental problem, for instance, as it is violation of the 2nd of Bragg's rules. I take it as self-evident that physics will not flourish in isolation from the rest of science. In particular, it is essential for physics to keep in close touch with biology, as biology rather than physics is likely to be the central ground of scientific advance during the remainder of our century. Bragg understood this in 1946 when he put his money on Perutz and the X-ray analysis of hemoglobin in preference to a new accelerator.
3. I think there exists a tremendous opportunity for major advances in molecular biology to be made by means of physical techniques. But will it be good physics? I have every reason to expect you to object to this style of research saying that it may be good biology, but it is not physics. That is what many of us were saying about Bragg and Perutz in 1946. I believe we were profoundly mistaken. The idea of physics having to be pure in order to be good, was wrong in 1946 and is sill wrong today. William Spohns recent article called "Can Mathematics Be Saved" turned out to be a kind of sensation in the mathematical world. Spohn's thesis is that the purists who dominate the mathematical establishment have alienated mathematics from the rest of human culture to bring it to the danger of becoming sterile. Much of what he says is equally true if you change the title of his article to "Can Physics Be Saved?" and substitute "high-energy physics" for his "modern mathematics". In my opinion the surest way to save physics is to keep young physicists working on the frontiers where physics overlaps other sciences, such as astronomy and biology. It is easy to give examples. One possibility known to have been much discussed by molecular biologists is the development of electron-microscope technology to the point at which the structure of individual molecules becomes directly visible. It might be possible in this way to achieve a non-destructive and rapid analysis of large molecules...
4. It would be pointless for me to try to make a complete list of the important things which physicists will find interesting to do in the coming decades. Inevitably the most exciting things are certain to be those that 1 haven't thought of. I myself find that the most exciting part of physics at the present moment lies on the astronomical frontier, where we have had an unparalleled piece of luck in discovering the pulsars. Pulsars turn out to be laboratories in which the properties of matter and radiation can be studied under conditions millions of time more extreme than we had previously had available to us. We do not yet understand how pulsars work, but there are good reasons to believe that they are accelerators in which Nature makes cosmic rays. Besides providing cosmic rays for the particle physicists to be able to do "cheap" physics, the pulsars are sure to provide crucial tests of theory in many parts of physics ranging from superfluidity to general relativity...
5. I have tried to give here an honest evaluation of those tendencies in physics that I find to be good and bad. I am not gloomy about the future of physics. To my mind there are only two things that can be considered to be disastrous for the future of physics. One is to solve all the major unsolved problems. That would indeed be a disaster, but I do not expect it to happen in the foreseeable future. The other disastrous thing would be if we became too pure and isolated from the practical problems of life for any of the brightest and most dedicated students to want to study physics at all. This second danger seems to me to be a real one. It will not happen if we stay diversified, if we emphasize work that has important applications outside physics, and above all, if we follow Bragg's third rule: "Do not be afraid of the scorn of theoreticians".
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