In this way the next communications revolution will indeed be in step with transport, as Professor Hall has it. In future we shall be sitting smug in our village (or village-like suburb), in touch by remote control. At least, that’s the theory Isn’t it?
In 1993 science fiction writer Samuel Delany decided to see what the 23rd Psalm would look like in 2093 based on trends forced by electronic communication habits. How would the pithy, almost anorexic word use of our hasty times change the florid language of the past? The result is shown below.
2093
I have a supervisor
I need nothing more.
My sleeping, my eating, my drinking
Is observed and controlled.
Even if threatened by death,
I need not fear.
I need not think.
Controls and aids are all around me.
I am fed.
My enemies starve while they watch me eat.
My head is rubbed like a pet!!
My water dish is full to overflowing.
My whole life I will frisk about the palace!!
So much for the abruptness of the late 21st century. Compare the King James Bible version:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my souclass="underline" He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no eviclass="underline"
For thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my
head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the
house of the Lord for ever.
Sublime.
The Hunches of Nostradamus
2008 James Packer marries Elizabeth Murdoch (by arrangement through their brokers) to create the greatest media/gambling market at this end of the galaxy.
2009 Big Brother ‘final’ season adds spice by having one contestant with AIDS, one with Hepatitis A, B, and C and one with the gene for serial killing.
2010 ABC, in crisis, closes down Radio National, merges with SBS and restructures to add five extra layers of senior management.
2011 New technology allows viewers to bypass TV transmission and watch selected shows on the inside of eyelids. Over 400,000 episodes of The Bill and CSI made available.
2012 Device worn inside the nostril can receive phone calls, radio and stock options; to be stored in lower spinal cord, bypassing the brain.
2013 ITV in UK in controversy over The Bill showing non-simulated sex scenes and toilet close-ups while ignoring crime.
2014 Channel 9 sold to James Bond.
2015 Paris Hilton cloned.
2016 ABC closed.
2017 John Howard celebrates twenty years as PM by launching Cricket Channel.
2018 James Bazalgette, who saved London in the nineteenth century by inventing modern sewers, comes back from the dead to condemn his great-great-great (etc) grandson, who produced media sewage (Big Brother).
2019 New iPod is chip implanted in a baby’s brain. Wearer selects (limited) channels by twitching nose.
2020 Natasha Stott-Despoja becomes Australian PM. ABC reopened.
2. The Future of Science – The White Trash of the Pacific?
New ideas pass through three periods:
1. It can’t be done.
2. It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing.
3. I knew it was a good idea all along!
– Arthur C. Clarke
My father announced, ‘You’re going to do science.’ So that was that. It was the way things were done 50 years ago. I was thirteen and my life’s course was set.
Gwyn Williams was clear in his reasoning. Science was the means to build the Promised Land, and the British education system made you choose your specialty around puberty. Arts or sciences: the great divide. Accordingly, I joined the nerdy stream at my traditional grammar school, forsaking subjects I was best at-languages and art-to struggle with Wheatstone bridges and titration.
Gwyn’s reasoning wasn’t entirely askew. It was just four years after Watson and Crick (as well as Perutz and Kendrew) had published their sensational papers on the chemicals of life (DNA and haemoglobin), thus inventing the entirely new field of molecular biology; and it was 1957, when Sputnik was launched, starting the Space Age. Not a bad time to take up your test tubes. New Scientist magazine had just been launched, and the BBC carried science programs with the unmistakable brio of making history.
I coped with science at school. It was obvious who the ‘brains’ were. They seemed to know everything automatically. Author Bryan Appleyard has written of his own fury at the way his father would casually glance at problems set for homework and not only know the answers instantly but also imply that anyone with balls or gumption should do so too. Gwyn was the same. He had come first out of 2000 students at Cardiff University while at the same time working down the mines. I still remember my pink haze of panic when I was first asked to solve a problem-thinking it through didn’t arise. This was a macho test.
Years later I was aghast to hear the great chemist Professor George Porter say that his own, similar education ‘crippled’ his mind for much of his life. But how can you say you were disadvantaged when now you are a Nobel laureate, president of the Royal Society of London and member of the House of Lords? I asked him, dumbfounded. Because, he answered, from the age of fourteen he was given only chemistry. It was the narrow specialisation of our era. It took him years to try to put it right.
None of this mattered to me. I intuitively took my science education to be a preparation for life and not a job ticket. Scores of my friends have done the same. We I are well equipped to be journalists, broadcasters, in business, administrators, publishers and investors because we are grounded in a real world and not one entirely of cultural constructs.
In the 21st century much has changed. Science has been sidelined, whatever lip service politicians pay it. Science courses have been turned into box-ticking travesties, as ‘knowledge’ is tested on the conveyor belt of exams instead of through ideas-based essays, and the teachers struggle. How amazed I am now to recall the succession of Cambridge men with first-class degrees we had routinely placed before us as teachers at our humble red-brick Tooting Bee Grammar. In future, then, science needs to be rescued.
There are five reasons why science is essential to the nation. They are: