We are the final frontier. The Guardian asks leading scientists what they think will be the next revolution in science. (It’s almost a trend, spawning books like The Next Fifty Years.)
First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren’t special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection. Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. So what’s next? What will be the fourth revolution?
‘We will invent our successors’ — Seth Shostak
‘We will understand the human mind’ — John Sulston
‘The existence of parallel universes’ — Michio Kaku
‘We will change our genetic makeup’ — Norbert Gleicher
‘We will find out if we are alone’ — Colin Pillinger
‘Humans become a collective intelligence’ — John Barrow
‘We’ll understand thoughts and feelings’ — Steven Pinker
‘The end of the individual’ — Susan Greenfield
‘What if God lives in a part of our brain?’ — Nancy Rothwell
‘What it means to be a person’ — V S Ramachandran
‘Conscious machines’ — Igor Aleksander
‘Higher dimensions’ — Lisa Randall
‘Humans are less miraculous than we thought’ — Stephen Wolfram