OK, the monkey business may have been a little too abstract for a good audience participation entry. So let's fall back on a classic:
What science-related superpower would you most like to have?
Because this is a Dorky Poll, "science-related superpower" here means a supernatural ability that is useful for doing science. Because battling crime is passé.
Personally, I think I'd have to go with the ability to manipulate small objects remotely. I'm a big guy, and I have big hands, and you know what they say about big guys with big hands...
That's right, they have a lot of trouble turning screws in small spaces. And I work with lasers and optics, where all of the critical adjustments are made by turning tiny little screws, which are frequently located behind or underneath other things, in places where my hands don't fit.
The ability to turn small screws with my mind, from a distance, would be invaluable to me as an experimental physicist. To hell with invisibility, or the power of flight-- I need to be able to tweak up my lasers more efficiently.
So, what superpower would make your scientific career easier?
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The power to attract funding at will!
Determine the convergence of any series, and the closed form of any differential equation at a glance.
The power to control time and space would be pretty helpful.
For engineering, the power to decide who lives and dies. That'd be cool.
For computer science, the power to determine whether and when an algorithm will halt.
The ability to accurately measure anything with a glance (preferably from afar). No more screwing with weights or measures... I want to be able to look at a truck and know "5,100 kg". And "66 degrees". And "102m away". And "11.2m long". And how many calories it'd have if I could somehow consume it. :)
As a computer scientist, I'm not sure this power would actually help out my career at all, but it would sure be convenient. It'd help in the kitchen too.
The ability to project my thoughts into computer chips, so that the software will do what I want it to do without my having to jump through umpteen hoops to get it done.
No, really. I have long since lost count of the number of days I've lost because the data analysis software actually gets in the way of my data analysis. Often it's because some programmer somewhere has made some gratuitously brain-dead assumption about how the user wants to do things, like try to convert the string I'm explicitly reading as a string to some kind of number. IDL is one of the worst offenders (as I have mentioned before, I'm locked in, so don't suggest other packages), but I've encountered it in many other software packages, too.
The ability to visualize something but make it appear physically. That way you can inspect it, rotate it, re-shape it, etc., in a less taxing way than doing so "in your head."
The ability to concentrate would come in handy.
The ability to create an exact visual representation of what I or anyone else is hearing. No more inaccurate short-time Fourier transforms, I want a three-dimensional chart that shows frequency (fundamental and partials) and amplitude over time accurate to the perceptual limit of the listener. That isn't too much, is it?
I'd like the Atom's powers: the ability to shrink down to subatomic size. That way I could do all my surface analysis measurements visually instead of relying upon Raman spectroscopy and XPS. Could you imagine writing that up in the experimental section of a paper (The P.I. then shrank down to 1 angstrom tall and walked across the electrode surface...). I would be able to make observations that would blow away any work done by Dr. Ertl, the 2007 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.
Of course, Hollywood's been setting on this technology since the late 80's (e.g., "Innerspace" and "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids"). If the movie studios would release these developments to the general public, so much more could be accomplished in lieu of just making crappy movies!
I'm a linguist, so there'd be nothing more useful than knowing all the languages of the world. (Well, actually, all and only the logically possible human languages.)
I'd like to have a macroscopic version of Heisenburg uncertainty. Imagine: I could defeat criminals by taking advantage of their inability to simultaneously know both my position and momentum to perfect precision.
Two criminals are robbing a bank. Suddenly, out of no-where, our hero, The Heisenburg Representation, swoops in!
Criminal #1: Oh no! It's The Heisenberg Representation!
The Heisenburg Representation: Yes, it is I, The Heisenburg Representaion. Whereever the Justice operator observes an eigenvalue of "evil," whereever innocent wavefunctions are in danger of collapse, I'll be there!
Criminal #2: Man, that name sucks.
THR: Yeah, I know.
Criminal #1: But still, there he is! At precisely the opposite end of the bank!
Criminal #2: Yes. . . but is he coming? Or going?
Criminal #1: I . . . don't know!
The robbers, dazed and confused, are easily knocked unconscious by our hero, The Heisenburg Representaion!
Man, I'd be unstoppable.
#9: "(The P.I. then shrank down to 1 angstrom tall and walked across the electrode surface...)"
That's why the name for the field before "Nanotechnology" was "Angstromics."
This was a very old idea before Hollywood heard the news. Honey, I Shrank the Citation. As I wrote in the Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide:
1858: Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens", with a beautiful girl living on a molecular-scale world within a drop of water. First use of the Microcosm in science fiction, inspiring many later stories such as Ray Cummings' (1919) "The Girl in the Golden Atom"
And, yes, that's one of my favorite science-useful superpowers. Lisa Randall did something fun with it in her brilliant and quirky best-seller:
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.
What happens when you get smaller than a Planck length, i.e. approximately 1.6 Ã 10^â35 metres, 6.3 Ã 10^-34 inches, or about 10^-20 times the diameter of a proton, that assumption looks pretty silly. My mentor and coauthor Richard Feynman emphasized in Quantum Electrodynamics that an electron had to be a zero-diameter point, with no spacial extent, but QED, for all its glory, begins to break down at small enough lengths.
The topology of space-time at the smallest lengths is wildly in non-consensus right now. Google "Planck length" and "wormholes" to get started.
And, yes, "Max Planck" is a very "manly" name. Kind of the Dick Wolf or Wolf Blitzer of Physicists.
Dangit, #1 beat me to "attract funding at will", so I'll have to go with "eternal good health."
Science is an endurance sport after all. Eternal good health (as in "eternal life" but without withering away to nothing like the guy in the old Greek fable) would allow me to keep exploring science for as long as it took to figure it all out.
THAT would be a pleasant way to spend eternity, in my opinion...
The ability to go long periods of time with no sleep. Would especially help when having to nightshift when observing.
Jonathan (#12): Thank you for the sci-fi history, but c'mon, those people only _wrote_ about this stuff. I mean, in 1987, director Joe Dante used the latest in Hollywood technology to shrink the incomparable Dennis Quaid down to the size of a human cell! Assuming there's some sort of Moore's Law for human miniaturization, we certainly must have the ability to shrink a person down to at least a nanometer by now.
I agree with the concentration and low-sleep powers. But, as a mathematician, I would say any of the following powers would make my life much easier:
(1) The ability to instantly know how to calculate a value for delta in terms of epsilon in analysis problems.
(2) The ability to instantly know which variable to do induction on.
(3) The ability to tell whether an argument would work without having to go through the details.
(4) (Perhaps most importantly) The ability to instantly know which notation will *not* cause my collaborators to spend an hour trying to decide if it's a good notation.
How about the ability to violate the SLoT?
And for those who would like to shrink, Fantastic Voyage with Raquel Welch in a wetsuit [1966] was pretty good.
The ability to see objects with arbitrary angular resolution, wavelength, and intensity (this would mean both being able to see the atoms in a table and see extremely distant galaxies without using a microscope or a telescope).
Time travel. Even if your travel was restricted within the boundaries and duration of your natural life span, you'd still be able to meet your deadlines and publish first.
#18: Yeah, but would anyone believe you? You'd never get published!
Working in industry, I would say the ability to place molecules where I wanted them to go. Or, the ability to analzye a defect in a product or application.
One question I like to ask is, "Would you rather have a cool super power or a cool super name?"
The ability to tell the difference between experimental artefacts and Nobel-Prize-winning blips in the data.
RE #11. . .
I really should have kept reading past the third line of the post. Sorry about that.
I've only just begun my grad studies in physics, so I don't know what research superpowers would be handy just yet. But I am studiying advanced quantum mechanics, and right now, the ability to find the unitary transformation operator U'(t) for a given Hamiltonian H = Ho + H' in the interaction representation faster than a speeding bullet would come in pretty handy.
Hell, maybe I can be the spunky grad-school sidekick.
Damn, but this thread invites to many off beat comments about wet suit dreams and shrinkage, or not (# 17)!
Sciencepowers I would like to have:
- The ability to interface my mind with arxiv et cetera references and absorb it fast as light.
- The ability to bend space, time and the funding agency as much as a black hole.
- The ability to peer review by just peering at it.
But what I really want is supersymmetric abs. :-P
An addition to #2:
Not only to be able to determine convergence of a series at a glance, but more importantly to determine the sum of a convergent series(other than geometric series). You would definitely be able to impress your friends with that(maybe).