WILL IT BE THE BEST OF TIMES--when genetic engineering and "miracle" drugs and neural implants eradicate cancer, HIV, blindness, quadriplegia, and world hunger? Or will it be the worst of times--when irresponsible combustion of fossil fuels and smart bombs and neuroweapons lead to irreversible global climate change and new scourges of war, devastation, disease, and famine?
What the future brings depends in large part on two factors: available technology and societal concern.
Technology provides the "how." Societal concern guides the "whether" and the "what" and the "why" and the "when" and the "who" and the "where" and the "how much."
A stereotype common in the popular culture and some literature would have it that scientists and engineers are (at worst) mad or evil or (at best) unaware or unfeeling about the import of the inventions they "unleash" upon the world. The reality is far different. Many technology experts are not only highly sensitive to the world's greatest ills and challenges, but are driven by a passionate urgency to right things for humanity as best they can.
They don't have all the answers.
Sometimes they have no answers--yet.
But they have identified many of the central, inescapable questions they feel will face human beings individually and collectively in the 21st century.
Here, you will meet five of the intellects whose contributions have helped sculpt the shape of technology and society in the last third of the 20th century. Vinton G. Cerf co-invented the Internet. Wilson Greatbatch invented the first totally implantable self-powered biomedical device--the cardiac pacemaker. Jack S, Kilby invented the integrated circuit--the essential technology for the computer chip. Arno A. Penzias co-discovered the 3-K cosmological background radiation--the first observational evidence in favor of the theory of the creation of the universe known as the Big Bang. And Charles H. Townes co-invented the laser.
Each reflects on the technical and social role of his achievement and offers his personal perspective on its promises and challenges for the future.
You may agree or disagree with the formulation of their questions or the opinions they express. But whichever is the case, do something about it. Act in the world according to your convictions and conscience.
That is the underlying message from all 50 luminaries interviewed for the IEEE's millennium book Engineering Tomorrow: Today's Technology Experts Envision the Next Century. Many have themselves dedicated a significant share of their lives to trying to better humanity's collective lot, whether through their technological developments, through broader social or political action, or through both.
For they take to heart the warning of the British orator and statesman, Edmund Burke, more than two centuries ago: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
"Did I envision the revolution that would be brought about by the invention of the integrated circuit?" asked Jack S, Kilby, who invented it in 1958 soon after starting work at Texas Instruments Inc. He snorted. "I certainly did not. And I don't think anyone else could either. Who could have ever predicted that it would set off a decrease in the cost of electronic functions of fully 10 million to one? I don't think anyone had any basis for extrapolating such change. The magnitude of that change is as if full-sized cars now cost US $100 apiece."
Essentially every "microchip" in today's high-tech devices is a monolithic integrated circuit. In concept, it is elegantly simple and powerful. Instead of using discrete components (resistors, capacitors, transistors, inductors) that are wired or soldered together, the circuit is built up in layers by lithographic techniques inspired by the multilayered art of color silk-screen printing.
The starting point is a single substrate or wafer of silicon. Then some areas are masked and implanted with impurity atoms to give them desired electronic properties. Unwanted areas are etched away, and more silicon is grown on the wafer, so that eventually structures are produced that behave more or less like discrete components.
It was Kilby's thought, moreover, that the processes by which transistors were made could be used for fabricating other types of electronic components. Then if that proved possible, it would be a relatively simple matter to fabricate and interconnect them on the same piece of material. The smaller the transistors and conductor lines could be made, the faster and denser the chip could be, limited primarily by lithographic and manufacturing techniques.
And the rest is four decades of exponential growth in speed and capacity and exponential decline in cost.
What now particularly amazes Kilby is that "people feel the IC has a productive future for at least another 15 years, as is projected by the semiconductor industry road map," he said. "The basic concept of the IC is now more than 40 years old. Forty years is as long as the vacuum tube lasted--and in the fast-moving world of high technology, that's a long time!"
He wonders now if there are inherent limits to the concept of the integrated circuit. The goal is to make it denser and faster. "Much progress has been made using finer and finer geometries," he said, referring to the widths of conductor lines lithographed onto the chips. "Today we're down to 0.25 micrometer, and people have made experimental chips with line widths as narrow as 0.1 µm.
"After that, it's not too clear what may happen, as existing transistor structures don't work very well when they're so small," he explained. Among other things, different circuit structures acquire their electronic properties from being doped with impurity atoms, and the distribution of those atoms is not completely uniform. Really small devices are sensitive to the slight lack of uniformity, so they don't work as expected.
"But people have projected an end to current IC design off and on for quite a while. And so far, whenever we've gotten close to a supposed limit, we've worked around it," Kilby observed.
"Before long, though, I suspect that something completely new will appear on the horizon." When asked if he had any idea what, he firmly replied: "Not the slightest!"
"Dramatic changes come when multiple technologies merge to meet human needs," said Arno A. Penzias, former vice president of research at AT&T Bell Laboratories. After several decades of encouraging research at Bell Labs and successor Lucent Technologies in one managerial position or another, he came to realize that combining existing technologies to meet new needs will be "the big driver of the next century."
The World Wide Web, for example, "happened because for the first time personal computers had enough memory and processing power that people could put bit-mapped displays in place so users could look at images instead of text. At the same time, communications networking was also good enough to support the needed data rates." Also, of course, the cost of all the technology was cheap enough to become widespread throughout the populace.
"Some of it looks obvious in retrospect, and also looks simple in prospect," Penzias said. "But picking the right combination takes intuition. It has to be a combination that meets a market need. That's the hard part: seeing what it is that people still need that they don't have.
"Now, to many engineers, combining existing technologies doesn't look 'techie' enough. They undervalue marketing--the ability to pick the right combination--because they confuse it with sales. But engineers have to remember that a big part of all technological advance is understanding market needs, because otherwise they'll put the wrong things together," he said, and perhaps end up with a market flop. What is trickiest about marketing, he has found, is that "customers themselves often don't know what they want."
But engineers can gain a sense of potential markets by listening to people and observing them closely, Penzias advised--and even watching and observing themselves. "What are the things that annoy you?" he asked. "What are the things that make you say, 'I wish they would...'? Then think about becoming the 'they'."
"Laser technology is still fairly new--in its adolescence," observed Charles H. Townes, co-winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for the technology underlying the invention of the laser. "Lasers marry the masterly techniques of electronic control with the all-pervasive field of optics," he said, to create "technical possibilities in a wide variety of fields that we couldn't imagine before."
In Townes's opinion, lasers promise to be great scientific tools in the early 21st century for the exploration of both chemistry and biology.
"Most interactions in physics are with surfaces," he explained. "But surfaces are not well understood, compared to what we know about bulk materials, gases, and liquids." Surfaces are fundamentally different from bulk materials because their atoms and molecules are anchored on only one side instead of on all sides. That sometimes makes them unusually reactive.
"As a simple example, water on an iron surface readily oxidizes the metal to form rust. Molecules that attach to surfaces are vital in manufacturing and to catalysis. "The catalytic converter in automobiles cleans up the car exhaust through surface interactions," Townes said. "People know about surfaces empirically and use their reactive effects, but their understanding is skimpy."
Lasers are changing that. In combination with nonlinear optics and Raman spectroscopy, a technique for mapping the wavelengths of light scattered from a material, lasers can look below the surface. They help differentiate light scattered by surface molecules from that scattered by bulk molecules deeper inside the material. "The surface molecules oscillate differently and respond differently to intense light, so produce different spectra," Townes said. Thus, lasers are opening up further study by allowing "more sensitivity and specificity," he said.
Further, many materials are normally attracted toward intense light "almost like falling into a gravitational well," Townes explained, because a molecule's energy inside the bright field is less than it is at the dimmer edges. Since a laser beam is far more intense at its center than at its edges, it can be used to pick up small objects, he said.
Such laser tweezers are of great interest in biological studies, because "you can pick up single cells, or move parts of a cell around, without injuring them," or "you can stretch out the double helix of a DNA molecule to look at it better."
Talk about being in on the ground floor of a new technology. In 1968 Vinton G. Cerf was a graduate student in computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). And in 1968, too, the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) issued a request for quotes (RFQ) for a communications network that could link the computers of some 20 universities. UCLA developed software for testing and measuring network performance. The ARPAnet was demonstrated publicly in 1972, after which ARPA continued intense investigation of packet-switching technology for mobile radio and satellite communications.
Meanwhile, other experts were independently working on getting local computers to communicate with one another. "We realized all these networks would need to be interconnected with the ARPAnet," explained Cerf, currently a senior vice president at MCI WorldCom Corp. "We called it the 'internetting problem,' which became the origin of the term 'Internet'."
Cerf is now working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and with Darpa (the current name for ARPA) to extend the Internet off the earth to Mars. "This isn't speculative," he declared. "We're engineering this for several Mars missions that will begin launching in 2003. By 2008, we'll have a two-planet Internet."
A Martian Internet will allow rovers and other entities on the Martian soil to communicate with six satellites in low Martian orbit and one in synchronous orbit (that satellite keeps pace with Mars' rotation, staying over just one geographical area of the planet at every moment of its 24-hour 37-minute day). The Martian Internet will also allow images, sounds, and measurements from the planet's surface to flow back to the earth. Earthbound scientists could respond and direct the artificially intelligent rovers' movements and scientific experiments in under an hour--whereas it was a matter of weeks in the 1970s to direct the Viking landers to scoop up Martian soil and chemically analyze it.
The ultimate use for an interplanetary Internet will be more ambitious--to "make the Internet accessible and workable for people mining asteroids or living in research outposts on the moon or in orbit around Mars," Cerf said. "We can even anticipate interplanetary colonization by the end of the 21st century."
Why work on protocols and interplanetary e-mail addresses so many decades in advance of their use? "I'm very conscious that it took more than 20 years to get where we are now in today's Internet--getting the protocols and the applications written on top of them," Cerf said. Plus, an interplanetary Internet faces challenges that are lesser issues here on the earth--such as the universe's speed limit, the speed of light. Even at 300 000 kilometers per second, signals still require anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes to make a round trip between the earth and Mars, depending on the relative positions of the two planets in their orbits. That state of affairs makes for exceptionally long intervals in accessing Web pages across interplanetary distances.
But Cerf and his colleagues are backed by $20 million seed money from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to engineer a working system. "I'm excited by the whole concept," Cerf exclaimed. "And the core team deeply cares about it. It's taking on a life of its own. Somewhere around 2020, we'll see an awakening of true commercialization of space." And, he said, the Internet will be there and waiting with "interplanetary gateways and a backbone across the solar system."
Journalist Trudy E. Bell, formerly a senior editor for IEEE Spectrum (1983-97) and an editor for Scientific American (1971-78), is the author of six books. She earned a master's degree in the history of science in 1972 from New York University.
Journalist Dave Dooling, co-author with Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway of Space Travel: A History (HarperCollins, New York, 1985), is the principal writer for the award-winning Science@NASA World Wide Web site.
Editor Janie Fouke is dean of engineering at Michigan State University in East Lansing. She was formerly on the faculty of the School of Medicine and the Case School of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, and was the first director of the division of bioengineering and Environmental systems within the National Science Foundation's Engineering Directorate.
Profiles of Vint Cerf and Wilson Greatbatch appeared in IEEE Spectrum, September 1996, pp. 56-63, and March 1995, pp.56-61, respectively. Brief profiles of Charles H. Townes and Arno Penzias were part of Spectrum's Silver Anniversary issue, 1988, on p. 61 and p. 65, respectively.
(c) Copyright 1999, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
"THERE ARE WIDE-RANGING POLICY, social, and economic issues concerning the new medium of the Internet," stated Vinton G. Cerf, now a senior vice president at MCI WorldCom Corp. "I don't believe they'll be settled easily or quickly, but they must be addressed within the next few years."
Cerf is known as one of the two "fathers of the Internet." The other is Robert E. Kahn, president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, in Reston, Va., where MCI WorldCom is also located. Together Cerf and Kahn designed the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) that gave birth to the Internet in the early 1970s. For their achievement, the pair received the U.S. National Medal of Technology in December 1997 from President William J. Clinton.
Already the stuff of public debate are business issues, such as preserving confidentiality in financial transactions in electronic commerce; verifying the authenticity of transactions, sources, and customers; protecting intellectual property; taxing electronic transactions; determining liability for illegal content.
But, Cerf pointed out, there are many sociopolitical issues as well.
One example is international agreement about freedom of speech. "Freedom of speech is viewed differently from one country to the next," he observed. "Yet the Internet and the Web are so decentralized, knowing no geopolitical boundaries, that the 'Net is the ultimate tool of free speech.
"Technological and political attempts to restrict it are not very successful. Take the requirement in China that every Web link must go through a proxy server [a computer that filters every Web search and download]. All it takes is a phone call outside China for a user to land on something that is not a proxy server," Cerf observed.
"Thus, it's no surprise that the Saudi Arabian government has religious concerns about the Internet--because with widespread access, its nation's population would likely be exposed to things they consider immoral. The German government has also expressed concern about the Internet's being misused by skinheads or neo-Nazi groups to spread hate speech."
Vinton G. Cerf (F), who received his IEEE Fellow award in 1988 "for contributions and leadership in the design, development, and application of internet protocols," was the founding president (1992-95) of the Internet Society. He also serves as technical advisor to production for the popular science fiction television show,"Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict."
"I HAVE A TWO-MINUTE PRESENTATION ON SUCCESS and failure that I always give when I'm invited to lecture at a company or school," said Wilson Greatbatch, inventor of the implantable cardiac pacemaker, for which he was inducted into the National Inventors' Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in 1986.
"I don't think that the good Lord cares whether you succeed or fail," is what Greatbatch says. "But I think He does care that you try--and that you try hard.
"You shouldn't fear failure, because failures are valuable learning experiences. If everything you do works out well and you have no failures, it means you're not trying hard enough. Moreover, your most abject failure may be part of some grand success in the good Lord's sight that may not even take place in your lifetime.
"Similarly, you shouldn't crave success. If you ask for financial reward, or peer approval--the worst cross that we scientists have to bear--or even gratitude or appreciation for what you do, you're asking to be paid for what you should be doing as a freely-given act of love.
"You should do your work because it is a good thing to do. Your reward is not in the results, but in the doing.
"If you can get the fear of failure and the craving for success out of your system, it will leave you with a clearer mind to concentrate on the core of the problem in front of you. You can focus on what really needs to be done, free from all the encumbrances the world would so willingly lay on you--and 90 percent of life's stresses will drop away.
"Only then will you find true happiness.
"Our mental hospitals are full of people who couldn't bear failure or bear success," mused Greatbatch. "That will never happen to me, because I just don't care! So I say to students in commencement addresses: go forth and select something you want to do that is a good thing in the Lord's sight. Then study it, work at it, live it. Work harder at it than you have ever worked before. Don't fear failure and don't crave success. Just enjoy your total immersion in it.
"And things will work out. The good Lord will smile on your efforts and you'll be left the happiest person in the world."
Wilson Greatbatch (F), who received his Fellow award in 1971 "for vital contributions to biomedical engineering," is an adjunct professor at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Houghton College, all in New York State.
"OVER THE LAST DECADE, THERE'S BEEN A TREMENDOUS INCREASE in the ability of people to communicate any time, any way, anywhere," said Jack S. Kilby. Inventor of the monolithic integrated circuit, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in 1982. "But we've not yet seen enough of it to understand what the real social implications are.
"Any major change has both up sides and down sides," he continued. "The Internet seems completely innocent, but people have found ways to use it for evil purposes--such as guys hitting on young girls and luring them away from home, as recently happened around here. It's of minor proportions, but it's real.
"But I don't think there should be centralized controls," he said. "I think everyone has to be aware of the possibility that any change will have its good and bad effects. For example, newspapers are now filled with articles on the hazards of automobile air bags, which were viewed as an unmixed blessing 10 years ago.
"Every technology has its unanticipated consequences. And many of them are good. The personal computer is one," Kilby said. "When mainframe or minicomputers cost a million dollars apiece 25 years ago, anyone with one would have shot you if you'd wanted to use it to write a letter! Who then would have thought that 25 years later one of the computer's main uses would be word processing, and that PCs would be sold in retail stores for under $1000 or even under $500?"
Jack S. Kilby (F), who received his IEEE Fellow award in 1966 "for contributions to the field of integrated circuits through basic concepts, inventions and development," was responsible for all integrated circuit development from 1958 to 1970 at Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas. Now retired, he lives there still.
"FAME FOR HAVING BEEN INVOLVED in fundamental advances in science often puts you in the position of having to defend or explain science--of having to answer such questions as 'how can you prove that?' That gets down to examining basic assumptions of what science is or isn't," said Arno A. Penzias meditatively. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1965 discovery that the universe is bathed in microwave background radiation at a temperature of 3 K. Their observation was widely acclaimed as crucial evidence supporting George Gamow's Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. The Big Bang theory, in Penzias' words, postulated "that the universe was created out of nothing with a positive energy, that it seems to expand forever, and that the laws of physics applied immediately after the moment of creation."
"I originally came to science thinking that theories are proven or disproven," Penzias continued. "In actuality, they are accepted or abandoned. Scientists can't prove theories in absolute terms--'proof' comes down to practical experience.
"When scientists describe science to the public, though, we tend to present our stuff as truth. But we tend to forget underlying assumptions that are basically unprovable--such as, that the simplest theory is the right one. There's more of a human element in science than the public usually knows. Science is not so unreliable that any crazy idea is to be admitted--but it's a thin line, and a lot shakier than supporters of the scientific method would have you believe.
"My personal perspective is that when we discovered the microwave background radiation in the 1960s, cosmology became an experimental science for the first time," he continued. "That observation implied that the universe is really knowable and can be subjected to laboratory tests in a way that was not possible before. The fact that we have so much observational evidence about cosmology means we can no longer say--as we could before the 1960s--that we have solved the problem but we just can't test the solution."
The very existence of so much observational evidence, however, poses a regressive conundrum that has "driven cosmologists to a state of uncomfortable awkwardness," Penzias observed. Although the existence of the 3-K microwave background radiation was a central prediction of the Big Bang theory, the Big Bang theory itself raises disturbing questions: What existed before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang? Why did the universe come into being? In short, "you're left with a mystery that goes beyond physics," Penzias said. "All physics does is describe one thing in terms of another. It doesn't explain things."
So, for the past 35 years, many cosmologists have been proposing alternative theories of "a universe that needs no explanation," Penzias said. "A universe that needs no explanation is one that's always been here, or one that needs no net energy, or one in which the observed excess of matter over antimatter is a random local variation." There are, for example, quantum cosmological variants on an older theory that the universe is oscillating--that the Big Bang for which Penzias co-discovered observational evidence is only the most recent of an infinite series of Big Bang explosions, because the universe keeps collapsing back onto itself. In other words, it is a closed, not an open, system.
"But each of those alternative theories has observational consequences that have to be explained away," Penzias noted, "such as postulating subatomic particles for which there are no other data. Now, you can always make a theory more complicated to fit the facts. And quantum cosmologists, in their search for a universe that requires no explanation, have been driven to extraordinary complexity. But just because a complicated theory can be made to fit the data doesn't mean it's correct. The theories are so contrived, in fact, that workers in any field other than cosmology wouldn't look at a theory with such baroque assumptions," Penzias said. "The Big Bang model is still the simplest explanation of the observations.
"Moreover, no cosmological theory yet explains how or why the universe came into being. The universe seems to have an inherently unknowable--I won't say biblical--part to it. So we certainly can't say that everything's been done and there's no room left for wonder.
"So we enter the 21st century with the same picture of the universe that George Gamow would have understood half a century ago," Penzias mused. "And we are still left with the mystery of existence.
"That, to me, is remarkable."
Arno A. Penzias is a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Park, Calif. His scientific career began when he joined Bell Laboratories in 1961, and culminated in a series of managerial positions in Bell Labs' research organization, among them vice president of research.
"IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE LASER, people kidded me that it was a solution looking for a problem," remarked Charles H. Townes, member of the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. In 1964, Townes shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Soviet scientists Alexander Prokhorov and Nicolai Basov for fundamental work in quantum electronics, which led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle. "'What can it be used for?' they asked. Now, of course, we know that was a limited, shortsighted approach. But back then, nobody had any grasp of what the laser could do."
In Townes's view, the unexpected richness of the laser's history in science and engineering points up a vital lesson: "As a society, we must be sure we don't focus all efforts just on things we are sure will pay off economically. We need to devote some resources to exploring things that may revolutionize our understanding. We must continually emphasize that, and take the risk.
"Too often today you hear the argument that 'we have only limited dollars, so let's spend them on something useful.' Businesses especially have that viewpoint, because they must report their earnings every three months--so they feel they have to look very short-term and get results quickly. Moreover, since a company executive is seldom in place for more than 10 years, he usually wants to do something during his tenure that looks good for him.
"But the long-term scientific and technological needs of our nation require a longer view than the next quarter or even the next 10 years. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Robert Solow [winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987] has tried to quantify the payoff of research. In the United States, for every dollar of products sold, less than a penny is invested in R&D--yet R&D has much more than a 1-percent effect on the final product. So economically speaking, investing more in scientific research is sensible."
Observing that the fundamental laws of electromagnetism that underlie most of the 20th century's high technology were first articulated more than a century ago, Townes commented: "Legislators and citizens don't have enough understanding of science and how discoveries come about to comprehend how today's technology stemmed from developments of the past. We need more people who are educated in science and engineering going into public affairs.
"The things we don't know about today will probably be still more useful in the 21st century than the things we think we can foresee," Townes said thoughtfully. "Most of the truly important developments in the 20th century have come as a surprise. So in the 21st century, we have to remain open to new things. Yes, some esoteric explorations won't produce economic results. But others will be revolutionary. And at the outset, we do not necessarily know which will be which."
Charles H. Townes (F), who received his Fellow award from the Institute of Radio Engineers (one of the two predecessor societies of the IEEE) in 1962 "for fundamental contributions to the maser," is University Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
(c) Copyright 1999, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.