This highly practical guide could be a French equivalent of a look-ahead book prepared by a head of the US National Science Foundation in America or the Russian Academy of Sciences. Pierre Papon is a graduate and professor emeritus of the Advanced School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry (ESPCI, where Marie Curie did her Nobel-winning research in Paris), and much at home with the written word (Papon published this book at the same time as the National Science Foundation's Suvra Suresh presented, as NSF director, a talk in Paris on “A New Era in Global Science and Engineering”, also on a 2050 horizon.)
Papon has divided his probe of the scientific and technical future into distinct but functionally interrelated sections. These are:
What vision of the world have science and technology bequeathed?
Science's “fracture zones”.
Science and technology as tested by society.
Will science and technology find a new social status?
A brief and informal coda that Papon calls “Bringing a new sense to progress”.
Humankind's endless curiosity is driven by two great questions, he notes, Whence the universe, and what are the forces at work within matter; and Resonating with physicist Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? essay of 1944, How did humans originate and develop such complex processes as thought and conscience? For Papon, all scientific progress today and tomorrow stem from these fundamental enquiries.
As an experienced researcher, teacher of science and manager of applied science policy, Papon knows better than predicting what might – or not – be sensational discoveries and innovative technologies over the coming one or two generations1. Instead he develops coherent foresight as to how the current disciplines of biology, physics and chemistry can be expected to evolve over three-plus decades of anticipated innovation. Advances in the neurosciences, for example, portend possibly important steps forward in our understanding of the processes of conscience, thinking things through, and understanding – not to forget the progress anticipated in clinical care, the mitigation of epidemics, the continuing improvement of public-health delivery, and the environmental benefits of biological diversity. While medical research is far from being a panacea today, Papon assays its results over the past two centuries as a boon to human welfare.
Perceiving dark forces
The future should bring us a better understanding, too, of a universe dominated by particles and wave mechanics, more and more familiarity with our own solar system and planetology, as well as extending our intellectual reach towards one or more (many?) universes. “Quantum physics,” however, “uses a probablistic approach to describe the real world: we do not know the the probability of the presence of particles at a single point in space.” Still looking ahead, the author asks if we need new atomic imagery; he wonders how close we might come to perceiving further and then understanding more clearly dark matter and dark energy. If there proves to be a totally new cosmos enveloping us, how shall we measure and understand that? Papon even asks if quantum data could be manipulated.
In a playful departure from his otherwise rigorous appreciation of the history and development of science and engineering, Papon recalls that Voltaire (one of the great contributors to the philosophy of Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe) lived at Ferney, no more than a “proton's leap” from CERN. CERN is the European Particle Physics Laboratory, where recent work may have at last uncovered the existence of the elusive sub-atomic particle known as the Higgs boson. “There, in the Canton of Geneva” [took place] “the admission of Switzerland into the European Union on 1 January 2023.“ This followed the end of Switzerland's banking secrecy and the “cascading” failures of Swiss banks. (Note the use of the future-historical tense.)
Thus we “remain” in the future. Knowledge expanding in various directions will depend increasingly, and concomitantly with, potential refinements of information theory and its applications in the expanding information technologies. “It is a fact that the internet” (see p. 59), “[while] enabling us to network multiple actors in society and the economy but without being a machine to govern the world, is none the less powerfully globalizing.“ The world has come a long way, indeed, from the physical servomechanisms of a century ago.
Do we understand gene function?
With the great advances made in molecular biology and genetics since the 1960 s, we know that information flow in a single direction (DNA → RNA) allows genes to guide the synthesis of proteins-enzymes, for instance. This leads, however, to the need for a better understanding of gene function because DNA has proved not to be the “pilot” of the living world. Will there thus emerge a systemic biology, that of a closed system activated by the interplay and retroplay of gene action? Do we need to rethink the entire experience of decoding the genome, lest we fall into the Dr Knock syndrome?2. Now that it is possible to decode entire genomes, will synthetic biology expand impressively? These are the kinds of life-science questions that preoccupy chemical physicist Pierre Papon.
The author estimates that science and its companion enterprise, technology, will respond to such growing influences as energy constraints, climate change, and new diseases. Yes, he says, new technology tends to eliminate jobs; but a larger population implies new housing, food and drink, body coverings, transport, and the energy therefore. Yet he has little confidence (for example) in humankind's future mastery of hydrogen as an unlimited source of new energy supply. He wonders, too, and with equal vigor if there will really emerge a revolution in the nanotechnologies. The author is prepared to remain, in these and other respects, a doubting Thomas.
One of the “fracture zones” (meaning breaks with the past) that preoccupies Papon is the twenty-first century's energy puzzle. He disagrees with an international study group‘s results published in 2011 that, by 2050, the world will have learned to become 77 per cent reliant on renewable sources of primary energy. Papon reminds that the steam engine required a century to develop optimally, that more recently energy from the atom required thirty years of applied research before it produced electricity. As he sees the challenge, work must continue unabated on all energy-source possibilities before one or more proves valid – whether before or after 2050. This will come about “only by mobilizing important industrial investments: there is no industrial or technical miracle in the kingdom of energy” (p. 187) – although not without a possible economic crisis throughout the world that could seriously limit the funds available for research.
Collaboration ever more intensive
A Renaissance man, Papon knows whereof he speaks. Besides having led the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique for some years, he later took over the management of France's agency for ocean research amd technology, Ifremer. He is completely at home with exploration and discovery, and gives his readers the full benefit of his long experience. To discover and innovate as well as meet social needs through research and invention, critic Papon urges new and more intensive intermingling among the worlds of governance, education and science, manufacturing and services, and communication and the arts. Such interrelationships have often been wanting in the Old World, but Papon champions their intensification to validate further – and continuingly – the sociocultural worth of research.
Another key relationship foreseen by the author will be that with the (by then) repeatedly Nobel-winning China. This country, together with the “associated State” of Taiwan, launched in 2027 an inhabited station orbiting the Moon. China's competitiveness, commented editorially The Financial Times in the same year, no longer depends on offering its cheap labor for export; it now relies on its own advanced technology.
The literature of anticipation seldom talks about future chemistry (a truism), but this book's author foresees two chemists from Shanghai winning Nobel prizes in Autumn 2027 for their work in massively transforming cellulose from vegetal husks and debris into affordable biofuels. And why not?
About the author
Jacques Richardson, formerly Associate Publisher of the French scientific monthly La Recherche, is a member of foresight's editorial board. He can be contacted at: jaq.richard@noos.fr
Notes
Papon abides by the remark of economist John Maynard Keynes to the effect that the inevitable never happens, but the unexpected does.
Dr Knock, in a drama by Jules Romain (1923), takes over the village clientele of a departing physician. After finding the village manifestly healthy, Knock proposes a free check-up to all inhabitants to confirm their solidity. During the initial consultation each villager learns how ill he or she truly is. The doctor then treats everyone – but no longer gratis, and transforms his tiny clinic into a large and prospering hospital.
