The relentless and rapid advance of modern technology presents interesting opportunities for society in these exciting times.
The exponential rate of increase in the availability of technology allows the dreams of people to become reality. These days, such dreams are less and less impeded by any inability of industry to actually build or develop the device or design that somebody has drawn on a piece of paper.
‘Piece of paper’ – well, that was an expression; it is more likely that the design or three-dimensional representation was on a computer screen, easily transferable to almost anybody anywhere by rapid electronic means.
This modern ability is amazing, and yet, today, most of us rarely stop to give it a moment’s thought. But think back about half a century, to World War 2, and also back an entire century, to the Boer War. Imagine Royal Air Force night fighter aircraft trying to find enemy bombers, in the dark, over the English Channel. They went around in circles, and zig-zagged, hoping to find a target. How the pilots must have dreamed of having ‘X-ray eyes’ to find their targets.
Then along came the first radar, but the system was big and difficult to use. Radar could only be placed on land, and the approximate positions of enemy aircraft were then radioed to the fighter pilots.
The pilots would have laughed at ‘science fiction’ stories of fighter aircraft of the future being able to ‘see’ an enemy aircraft, over 100 km away, and then to fire a heat-seeking missile that hunted out the enemy by itself. But in the twenty-first century that scenario is reality.
In the Boer War, the Boer troops could move rapidly over vast areas of ground, to hunt out the slow-moving British military columns, because the Boers, with considerable local knowledge, had a ‘terrain map’ stored in their heads, which the foreign British did not have. Neither the Boers nor the British would have believed way-out ‘science fiction’ stories of global positioning system navigation or of terrain mapping navigation capability in cruise missiles, which is now available in the twenty-first century.
The point is that what may appear impossible or unlikely now can become reality in a very short time, in the twenty-first century, because the technology exists, as building blocks, to turn somebody’s mind pictures into working models.
From one day to the next, the public discover new technology items on sale or intruding into their lives to some degree. Last week, I saw a car that has self-repairing headlight glass – if the glass gets scratched, it repairs itself.
The self-cleaning paint that I have mentioned before is now being advertised as coming out on new cars soon.
The public awareness of science is an important issue. It needs attention. But what do we tell the public? There is so much technology – so much that is new – and it is all becoming so complex. There is no way that scientists can tell the public everything. So, of course, a challenge presents itself: Who tells what to whom?
A danger that presents itself is the adage that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’, which was uttered by Alexander Pope in 1711 – so, even then, a similar problem must have presented itself. Pope’s quotation is nearly always misquoted as ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.
Knowledge is never dangerous, but learning can be, as when a person has learnt just enough to think that he knows what he is doing, but, fact, does not.
We have the continuous climate change saga in which nearly every person and his dog thinks he or she knows what solar power is, but do not know that it produces direct current, and not alternating current; they think they know what wind power is, but have never heard of laminar flow; and don’t know the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt hour. They think they know all about nuclear power, and write letters to newspapers, but don’t know what fusion is and cannot tell the difference between a gamma ray and a beta particle.
How can a person have a strong opinion on heart surgery techniques when he or she does not know the difference between a vein and an artery?
So the challenge is: How do we encourage the public understanding of science without inducing a public abuse of scientists?