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Whither technology?
HE STORY is told that young King Solomon was given the choice between wealth and wisdom. When he chose wisdom, God was so pleased that he gave Solomon not only wisdom but wealth also. So it is with Science.” — Arthur H. Compton
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has declared 2005 as the World Year of Physics to commemorate the centennial of Albert Einstein’s seminal papers on relativity, radiation, molecular dimensions and Brownian motion, which changed the face of physics. The idea is to raise public awareness about physics and the numerous achievements made by eminent physicists.
“The creation of physics is the shared heritage of all mankind. East and West, North and South have equally participated in it.” — Abdus Salam
The 20th century ushered in a new era of discovery in physics. Many important breakthroughs occurred during this period when physicists tried to extend the laws of physics beyond the everyday experience, resulting in the birth of the atomic and subatomic world. This brought us to two conceptual revolutions represented by relativity and quantum mechanics, which gave birth to unification theories in physics, big-bang concepts in cosmology and genetic coding in biology. Likewise, technologies that nobody could even dream of previously, were made possible.
Physics is all encompassing, as it links the universe on the tiniest of scales (electrons and quarks) to the largest — galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the vast expanse of the universe itself. It makes time meaningful — from yoctoseconds to giga-years. It covers the energy scales from 3 centielectron volts — typical energy of a particle in Brownian motion — to tens of thousands of yottaelectron volts, the gravitational cutoff given by Planck’s mass. It is here that our understanding of the universe is again being challenged, now with an amazing, unbelievable and unexplained frequency.
New tools have been, and are being, invented by physicists that find applications not only in physics but also in chemistry, biology, medicine, computers and even finance. We can probe distances as small as attometers, measure time periods as short as yoctoseconds, and measure mass as small as one-billionth of a yoctogram. We can see the universe 300,000 years after the big bang by studying the microwave background radiation (CMB), which is a direct relic of the period when it became transparent to electromagnetic radiation after atoms were formed.
Measuring the fluctuations in CMB radiation through an orbiting observatory called Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe with a precision of a few parts in one hundred thousand, a rather dramatic conclusion has been made which holds that we understand about only four per cent of the universe’s composition. Almost nothing is known about 96 per cent of its mass-energy (23 per cent dark matter and 73 per cent dark energy), which works against gravity on large scales, suggesting that expansion of the universe is speeding up, and not decelerating as thought previously. We can calculate quantities with the precision of one part in a million and verify them experimentally with the same precision.
“Everyone can see how much physics has changed our view of the world and influenced our technology. Communications, energy production and medical images are just a few examples. Those advances did not occur (just) by trying to improve our existing technologies. ‘Electricity was not invented by trying to make better candles’ and there is no reason to believe that our century will be any different in that respect.” — C. Brézen
Thus, pure science is necessary and as M. Virasoro, a former director at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Italy, said: “….(T)he opportunity to participate in pure science is a basic human right.”
We have to provide this opportunity to all and through the National Centre for Physics, we will try to achieve this. But at the level the centre works, this would require prior steps to:
— Improve the high school system and have a higher flow of children in technical areas and science;
— Fix our technical education system to produce skilled and educated workforce;
— Create a better, higher education system to produce bright, talented and competitive engineers and scientists, and;
— Build infrastructure for research and training.
None of the above tasks is easy. However, a beginning has to be made.
This year we are celebrating the great achievements of many physicists and how our lives have been unrecognizably changed from those of our grandparents. However, the benefits of progress are yet to reach a third of our populations, although the wealth created by scientific and technological development could have abolished poverty altogether by now.
Unfortunately, this was not to be and today the chasm between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is actually getting wider. One-third of humanity simply needs low-cost housing, clean drinking water and, above all, equal opportunity for education — not laptops and cellular phones, which are toys for the rich.
A laissez-faire economy favours the rich. This phenomenon is not new. About eighty years ago, the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.” Even though modern peacetime technology does not directly promote the destruction of human life as nuclear weapons did, still Hardy’s view of technology has relevance.
If technology continues along its present trend and tends to accentuate inequalities in the distribution of wealth, besides ignoring the needs of the poor, the have-nots will revolt against the tyranny of so-called “progress.” Then, everyone will be a loser.
While on the issue of poverty, let me conclude by reminding you of a saying of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH): “It is near that poverty will become synonymous with Kufr”.
writer is director-general of the National Centre for Physics, a HEC-designated national professor and a fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences. Email:
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