As usual, John Brockman has asked a large number of prominent science types to answer a broad and general question, and posted the results to the Web. This year's question:
Many of the answers are of the form "I am optimistic that my personal research topic or political obsession will transform the world for the better," but not as many as I feared. A large number of physics types talk about the LHC and other experiments that are expected to come on line this year, and predict a new "Golden Age" for particle physics.
I haven't read all of them (or, really, all that many of them), but my two favorites from a quick scan are Jerry Adler's Sometime In the Twenty-First Century I Will Understand Twentieth-Century Physics and Frank Wilczek's Physics Will Not Achieve a Theory of Everything, which I like enough to quote a few paragraphs:
I'm optimistic that physics will not achieve a Theory of Everything.
That might seem an odd thing to be optimistic about. Many of my colleagues in physics are inspired by the prospect of achieving a Theory of Everything. Some even claim that they've already got it. (Acknowledging, to be sure, that perhaps a few i's remain to be dotted or a few t's to be crossed.) My advice, dear colleagues: Be careful what you wish for. If you reflect for a moment on what the words actually mean, a Theory of Everything may not appear so attractive. It would imply that the world could no longer surprise us, and had no more to teach us.
I don't buy it. I'm optimistic that the world will continue to surprise us in fascinating and fundamental ways.
That's a New Year's wish I can get behind. Here's to being surprised by nature this year, and for many years to come.
What are you optimistic about?
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I'd quibble with that. Having a Theory of Everything and being able to derive predictions from that theory are two very different things. With recent trends in physics I suspect that even if we had such a theory, what we could derive from that theory with current mathematical tools and computational technology would be quite limited. Now I'll grant that massaging predictions out of a pre-existing theory is not as sexy as discovering new laws of nature, but the results may nonetheless be surprising.
As Bob Laughlin loves to point out, we already have a Theory of Everything for macroscopic physics, but that didn't spell the end for table top science. He expounds on this point (with David Pines) here (PNAS article, subscription not required). I don't see how a Theory of Everything for physics that humans don't experience every day would change much, either.