title: The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century
author:  John Brockman 
description: Scientists love to speculate about the direction research and technology will take us, and editor John Brockman has given a stellar panel free rein to imagine the future in <i>The Next Fifty Years</i>. From brain-swapping and the hunt for extraterrestrials to the genetic elimination of unhappiness and a new scientific morality, the ideas in this book are wild and thought-provoking. The list of scientists and thinkers who participate is impressive: Lee Smolin and Martin Rees on cosmology; Ian Stewart on mathematics; and Richard Dawkins and Paul Davies on the life sciences, just to name a few. Many of the authors remind readers that science has changed a lot since the blind optimism of the early 20th century, and they are unanimously aware of the potential consequences of the developments they describe. Fifty years is a long time in the information age, and these essays do a credible and entertaining job of guessing where we're going. <i>--Therese Littleton</i>
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  SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
  
  
  Richard Dawkins
  
  
  Queen Elizabeth Hall Lecture, London, 24th March 1998. Series title: Sounding
  the Century (‘What will the Twentieth Century leave to its heirs?’)
  
  
  With trepidation and humility, I find myself the only scientist in this list
  of lecturers. Does it really fall to me alone to ‘sound the century’ for
  science; to reflect on the science that we bequeath to our heirs? The
  twentieth could be science’s golden century: the age of Einstein, Hawking and
  relativity; of Planck, Heisenberg and Quantum Theory; of Watson, Crick, Sanger
  and molecular biology; of Turing, von Neumann and the computer; of Wiener,
  Shannon and cybernetics, of Plate Tectonics and radioactive dating of the
  rocks; of Hubble’s Red Shift and the Hubble Telescope; of Fleming, Florey and
  penicillin; of moon landings, and – let’s not duck the issue – of the hydrogen
  bomb. As George Steiner noted in the previous lecture, more scientists are
  working today than in all other 