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SHOW 202 TRANSCRIPT
What are the Next Breakthroughs in Science?

BREAKTHROUGHS are those magic moments when a new way of thinking becomes suddenly clear. Consider some of the major breakthroughs in the various sciences: in astronomy, an expanding universe; in physics, wave/particle duality; in geology, plate tectonics (continental drift); in biology, the structure of the DNA molecule; in neuroscience, electrical impulses in the brain. None of these advances were accepted easily when they were first introduced; most are now taught in high school. How are current beliefs challenged in science? Twigs snap at their weakest points; the same is true in science. Take a theory, test it, see where it fails; this is what leads to a better theory. What are the newest ideas floating around? What radically different scientific concepts will dazzle or perplex us? What can we expect in astronomy, physics, biology, brain science, behavioral science? You never know where or when a breakthrough will occur, but we invited a diverse group of distinguished scientists and thinkers to give us their best guesses.

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PARTICIPANTS

Dr. Francisco Ayala, a leading evolutionary biologist and philosopher at UCI, is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Francisco discusses the importance of Darwin's theory of natural selection to the science of biology, both its explanatory powers and potential overuse.

,b>Dr. Patricia Churchland, a philosopher at UCSD, focuses on neuroscience and has written a number of books on the mind-body problem. Pat discusses some important issues about the brain, embedded within her Top Ten List of unanswered questions in neuroscience.

Timothy Ferris is the best-selling author of nine books, including Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which won the American Institute of Physics Prize, The Mind's Sky, and most recently The Whole Shebang. Tim reflects on the scientific process and the nature of learning.

Dr. Rochel Gelman is a professor of psychology at UCLA, where she studies the thought processes of infants and young children. She is on the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Society and in 1998 was a recipient of the William James Fellow Award. Rochel discusses the process of cognitive change.

Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at Princeton University and the author of Universe Down to Earth, is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Neil looks forward to an era of great breakthroughs in astronomy.

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ROBERT: Neil, as a working astronomer and also as director of the Hayden Planetarium, you keep watch on the progress of your science. In the next ten years, how will breakthroughs happen in astronomy? 

NEIL: Well, I'm not sure how the other sciences move ahead, but in astronomy and astrophysics we get together as a community once per decade to prioritize--to advise Congress how money should be spent on such things as space science and new telescopes. We're living in a time when very few breakthroughs are made just by somebody who sits down with pencil and paper. Breakthroughs nowadays come from the frontiers of technology--from building bigger telescopes to see clearer and farther, better detectors to capture parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that haven't been searched before. So we have to plan our breakthroughs, because of all the expensive hardware we need.

ROBERT: Paid for by each of us.

NEIL: That's right; tax money pays for nearly all of it. So we're all participants in this cosmic discovery process. But that's nothing new. The discoveries in astronomy that turned the world upside down came through progressively bigger telescopes, so we can predict where breakthroughs might take place. For example, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), when it's launched in 2005, will enable us to observe the location of stars with unprecedented precision. This means, among other things, that we'll be able to detect slight wobbling in a star's position--which may indicate the presence of a planetary system. 
TIM: Exactly, because the gravity of a planet influences the motion of its host star. 

ROBERT: SIM will measure a given stellar distance from two separate locations, and that's what enables your unprecedented precision? 

NEIL: That's correct. Images from two space-borne telescopes separated by specific distances--a long baseline--interfere with each other, and when you combine that information it's as though you had a huge telescope with a diameter equal to that baseline, which produces very high resolution. It requires a substantial investment.

ROBERT: Francisco, you've been called the Renaissance man of evolutionary biology, a well-deserved appellation. Why do you think that the theory of evolution by natural selection is the single most important discovery in the history of science?

FRANCISCO: Because it opened up the explanation of organisms. Before Darwin's formulation, we did biology largely descriptively [that is, morphology and classification] with some empirical work [e.g., Mendel's genetic experiments]. The really fundamental questions started with Darwin. His insight has made it possible to ask why organisms are organized the way they are, how they develop, how they change. As I like to say sometimes, it's the completion of the Copernican revolution. Copernicus, Newton, and others made physics into a science; Darwin did the same thing for organisms. After Darwin, we can do biology. 
ROBERT: Now people are taking the next step, talking about evolutionary psychology and using biological evolution to explain everything from music and art to altruism and romantic love. Can you explain human psychology that way?

FRANCISCO: Oh, yes, you can explain much of human psychology. There's a kind of altruism--parental love and sacrifice, for example--which can be explained biologically. Now, true altruism--doing something that benefits others at a cost to me--may be outside of biology. 

ROBERT: But some people are trying to account for every human emotion and behavior using technical evolutionary arguments--

FRANCISCO: Right, and I spend a lot of my time refuting those arguments. 

ROBERT: I'd rather not be on the opposite side from you. Pat, as a leading theorist in the neurosciences, you've been developing a Top Ten list of core questions about brain and mind. Assuming you're not competing with David Letterman, can you give us a few?

PAT: One that may surprise you is why we sleep and how we dream. It's a remarkable fact that we spend about a third of our lives asleep. Why we do it, what the mechanism is, and why it's so important isn't really understood. Why the brain needs to sleep remains a puzzle, though we know that keeping an animal awake for a long period of time--even for only two or three days--can lead to its death. [Similarly, preventing humans from dreaming can cause psychological disturbances]. Another question concerns the nature of neural development: How does the fertilized egg mature into a fully developed human with a fully developed brain?

ROBERT: How does each of our hundred billion neurons find its thousands of specific connections? Think of the possible permutations there!

PAT: We're learning that the old argument over nature versus nurture, of which much was made, turns out to be a lot more complicated. As you know, most of our DNA [the nucleic acid molecule that carries genetic information] does not code for proteins; most of it is regulatory. And much of what happens in our development depends on this regulatory DNA, which governs when certain genes are turned on. And the environment, both within the organism and outside it, also has a big influence on when genes are turned on and how the organism develops. Of course, once the organism is born the environment plays an even larger role.

ROBERT: Tim, in addition to being a distinguished author, you're also a generalist scholar and something of a polymath. Let's talk about the process of science. Is there a difference in the creative process in big science--the large particle accelerators, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Human Genome Project--versus the fabled solitary scientist working alone?
TIM: Sir Fred Hoyle had a nice way of putting it. He said that the trouble with running a big laboratory is that you can't go fishing on Friday afternoon, because you have meetings scheduled--and that's a pity, because it's when you're out fishing that you come up with the good ideas that carry the research forward. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with big science, but, as [the theoretical physicist] Freeman Dyson likes to say, it's a little like an ecosystem--a healthy science should contain some big projects, some middle-sized ones, and some small ones. The most dangerous kind of project, as Dyson notes, is the big project in which national prestige has been tied up to such a degree that the nation cannot afford for it to fail. An experiment that can't fail is usually a mistake, since it must be either absurdly expensive or inappropriately cautious in its design. 

ROBERT: When it's more politics than science, it's almost non-science. Rochel, as a cognitive psychologist, you've expanded our knowledge of how children think and babies count things. Analyze our scientific colleagues here--not that they're children and we'll assume they can count. Does cognitive psychology provide any insights on how science develops and theories change?

ROCHEL: Yes, it does. The short answer is that change comes with great difficulty where scientific theories are concerned. The mind is a learning machine, such that it has structures it prefers to use, like any biological entity. In other words, when you already know something in an organized way, it's easy to learn more about it.
ROBERT: To learn more about the same thing in the same way?

ROCHEL: Well, it needn't be exactly the same thing. For example, if you know something about numbers, it's easy to learn that there's another number. But if you don't know anything about, say, negative numbers, it's very hard to learn about them. The reason is straightforward: these are different structures. The human mind prefers structure--and likes it. If you don't have some structure to start with, you've got this enormous problem of erecting a new conceptual framework without any data. It's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem then: how do you get to the middle of the lake without a boat? So it's very hard to bring about scientific change of the kind Newton made. 

ROBERT: Let's talk about how breakthroughs happen in science. But first, let's define what a breakthrough is.

NEIL: I think there's an important distinction to be made here. Yes, there are, in the history of science, breakthroughs that constitute shifts in our worldview, and we all know what they are--Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger. However, a different kind of breakthrough also occurs in science that doesn't necessitate discarding a pre-existing framework or unthinking something we've thought before. And that's because there was nothing to think before--the breakthrough is simply something new. For example, Tim [Ferris] mentioned Sir Fred Hoyle, who played an important role in discovering that the heavy elements in the universe are formed in the middle of stars, which blow up and spread this material around in interstellar space--a process leading to the formation of planets and life. That realization didn't require any shift in paradigm; it didn't bury some previous conception. We just didn't know where the heavy elements came from; then we got the data, and there it was.

ROBERT: That was a real breakthrough?

NEIL: It was a tremendous breakthrough, but it didn't entail this problem that Rochel [Gelman] refers to, about having to acquire new structures in order to receive the new idea. It was received because it made perfect sense. We had no previous concept to contradict.

ROCHEL: That helps, but--

NEIL: And I submit that most scientific discovery unfolds in just this way.

ROCHEL: I understand, and I'm inclined to agree with you. For one thing, it means that scientists don't change theories very quickly. 

ROBERT: That's good. 

ROCHEL: That's good. Science shouldn't be in a rush to throw away a theory on the basis of one experiment that doesn't work. But there's a different point of view on this, which involves the transmission of knowledge to the young. They have difficulty coming to understand what we, sitting here, know are breakthroughs in science.

ROBERT: Why is that?

ROCHEL: Well, for example, the natural way to think about the way things move in space is rather close to an Aristotelian theory of motion [i.e., that a constant motion requires a constant cause, that as long as a body remains in motion a force must be acting on that body]. This is so foreign to modern scientific thought about motion [i.e., Newton's first law, that a body in motion remains in motion unless slowed by external forces such as friction] that what you have here are two conceptual structures that have no overlap. You not only have to get rid of one, you have to establish a new one, and change the meaning of terms.

TIM: Compounding that is the strange conservatism of our lower schools. Even though relativity is no more intrinsically difficult to understand than Newtonian mechanics, every generation is first taught Newton and then, later on, relativity. It's something like the doctrine of original sin--all students have to recapitulate the historical process by which we got to relativity. I have no idea why, except that there are very few high school teachers who are equipped to teach relativity. 

ROCHEL: It's a bad reason, of course, but it's a fact. There are occasional shifts in the educational system. Here's an interesting case in point. In the seventeenth century, Pepys wrote in his diary about how proud he was that he was teaching himself long division. It used to be that you had to go to Cambridge or Oxford to learn long division. We teach it now in the fourth grade--but I can assure you that that doesn't mean the kids can understand it. 

FRANCISCO: I have a very simple definition of a breakthrough in science. A breakthrough is a solution to a problem--but it's a solution that opens up new questions that either we haven't thought of asking before or had no way of answering before. But breakthroughs come in many sizes: a major breakthrough opens up major questions; a small breakthrough opens up small questions. And of course there are the kinds of incremental discoveries that don't open up anything but just fill in details. 

ROBERT: Let's go through some fields of science and talk about breakthroughs that you'd like to see. Start with physics.

NEIL: There are many small breakthroughs that together become something big. Take the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. Over an extended period of time, astronomers realized that there was a slight discrepancy between Mercury's actual orbit and what was predicted by Newton's law of gravitation. The last time they'd faced this problem was with disturbances in the orbit of Uranus, the seventh planet. Back then, people said, "Well, Newton has been right for so long--maybe there's some other planet out there influencing Uranus." And there was, and that's how Neptune, the eighth planet, was discovered. OK, now what about Mercury? A new planet had worked before--how about trying that again? There was speculation that another planet existed inside the orbit of Mercury, and this mystery planet was even given a name--Vulcan--but there was no Vulcan. Mercury's orbit, sure enough, required a whole new paradigm. It was Einstein's general theory of relativity that precisely predicts this observed behavior of Mercury's orbit. So a slight discrepancy, one that presumably could have been swept under the rug or just explained away by some traditional means, became part of a true breakthrough. 

ROBERT: What's coming next?

NEIL: I'm expecting an ocean on Europa, the fourth largest satellite of Jupiter--one of the moons originally seen by Galileo. We have almost incontrovertible evidence for the presence of a subsurface ocean. Europa is covered in ice, yet when you look at the surface of the ice you see flow patterns and fracture patterns, which indicates that something liquid is below. In the old days, we used to think that sunlight was the sole source of energy, but this concept has been broadened. We know that Europa is being pumped with energy because of the variations in gravitational force as it orbits Jupiter. It's like what happens when you play squash or racquetball for a long time--the ball gets hot if you hit it hard and often enough. A similar action is taking place on Europa; that action is an energy source, and you may have liquid water beneath the ice. Anyplace on Earth where you've got liquid water and a source of energy, you've got life. It's tantalizing to think that Europa might harbor alien life. At the very least, we'd have liquid water on another world. I can't wait. 

ROBERT: Francisco, what breakthroughs do you anticipate in the life sciences?

FRANCISCO: Well, if I knew what the next breakthrough was going to be, I'd make it myself. One of the few cases where biology has become big science is the Human Genome Project, which is the monumental effort to sequence every component of every gene of the DNA of human beings [chapter 23]. It will give us lots of answers--and lots of questions--concerning disease. It's also going to open up new areas, including the functioning of the nervous system. Many discoveries will be made as a consequence of completing the genome. Of this much I'm certain.

ROBERT: Rochel, what do you see on the horizon in the behavioral sciences?

ROCHEL: My best guess is that we're going to learn a fair amount about the right way to describe cognitive architecture. Cognitive architecture has to do with how the brain organizes itself to process information coming in from the outside, in a way that gives it meaning.

ROBERT: Could this revolutionize education?

ROCHEL: There would certainly be major consequences--no question. However, we could probably revolutionize education just by understanding how some conceptual changes occur as a result of development and experience. 

ROBERT: Thomas Kuhn--my namesake, no relation, though I did audit his course at MIT--wrote a famous book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and in it he developed the concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift, which have had great influence on the philosophy of science. 

NEIL: What Kuhn meant by "paradigm" is simply the prevailing scientific attempt to understand the world, which is usually some landscape [or framework] that emerges to which everyone gets attached. And the longer that landscape is in place, the more embedded it becomes--whether or not it's in fact the ultimate landscape you're looking for. That's the paradigm. And a paradigm shift is when the prevailing scientific landscape is abandoned for another landscape someplace else--in other words, not just a redesign of the one you're inhabiting. A paradigm shift is a scientific revolution. 

ROBERT: Like the shift from Newtonian to relativistic physics?

NEIL: Yes. Classical physics to modern physics--relativity, quantum mechanics--was such a shift. So, too, was plate tectonics [commonly known as continental drift] in the earth sciences. Who could imagine that pieces of the earth's surface would be moving around? Although the continents do look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in some places. But when the evidence [such as seafloor spreading] accumulated [in the 1950s], that enabled the paradigm shift. Some people accepted it more quickly than others--students quite easily. Older scholars who were invested in the original framework were often resistant. 

FRANCISCO: Let me pick up the matter of plate tectonics. Most of the geology we had before the theory was accepted continues to be valid science. The theory of plate tectonics is now well-established and a major advance, but I don't see it as a leap, as it were, from one hill to another. Likewise, in biology we've had a few major discoveries, like natural selection, genetic inheritance, the structure of DNA. But that doesn't mean that everything that went on before no longer applies. 

ROBERT: But evolution by natural selection was a paradigm shift. 

FRANCISCO: I wouldn't call it that. What happened with Darwin is that biology then took on its modern meaning. Before Darwin, as I've said, we didn't have modern biology in a fundamental sense. You can call these things paradigm shifts; I prefer to call them major advances. 


ROBERT: There was a classic paradigm shift in geology, with the replacement of catastrophism by uniformitarianism in the early nineteenth century, thanks to the work of men such as James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Uniformitarianism is the theory that all geological phenomena are produced by forces that have operated uniformly and gradually throughout the history of the earth. Before that, people still believed that the earth had been sculpted once and for all by the Noachian flood as described in the Bible. Catastrophism has re-emerged recently, in that cataclysmic events are now also seen as contributing to the earth's natural history--like the giant asteroid impact that's thought to have altered the world's climate enough to kill off the dinosaurs. For years, any form of catastrophism was ridiculed; now it's accepted. So that's a double paradigm shift.

FRANCISCO: But [the extraterrestrial cause of the Cretaceous extinction] was a major discovery, not a paradigm shift. I don't see that it changes the overall way of thinking in science. 

NEIL: It most certainly does if you're interested in how planetary systems are altered. Here, floating around the solar system, are these large objects, and here on Earth is the fossil record, showing major extinction episodes; and this particular extinction matched the evidence of an impact.

FRANCISCO: The other mass extinctions aren't explained yet.

NEIL: There is one extinction, of course, where we have the smoking gun--the crater and the deposits [at the Cretaceous-Tentiary boundary]--the famous impact that took out the dinosaurs about sixty-five million years ago. All I'm saying is that we do know the sizes of objects flying around the solar system and we [have some statistical idea] of how often we can expect them to hit the earth. So I tell you, the biologist, that I'm going to hand you a four-thousand-megaton explosion every certain amount of years, and then you decide what it will do to the surface of the earth. I promise you there will be major biological effect.

FRANCISCO: I agree that it will have a major effect, and I don't want to underestimate the value of that discovery. But I still have to account for the origin and the extinction of the millions of species that once existed on Earth. Impacts [or other catastrophic events] may account for a good part of those extinctions, but I still need other data. 

TIM: The term "paradigm shift" doesn't really help much, in my view. All such changes can be accounted for by the single word "learning." If you start out as a freshman in college and your goal is simply to graduate knowing more about the things you already know, you will not have had a very good education. You should come out as a substantially different person, because you've learned entirely different ways of thinking as well as lots of new facts. The same is true in science, but again it's just learning. There's a recent tendency, among some people in the humanities, to claim that science is what they call "socially conditioned"--which means either that science is done by human beings and human beings interact socially, or that social conditions affect how scientists think.

ROBERT: Is this deconstruction of science accurate or meaningful? And is it important or trivial?

TIM: It's important only if, as a result of such social conditioning, experimental results are skewed in some fundamental way, or are fabricated or falsified--but those cases are so rare that in the end it hardly seems worth basing such extravagant claims on them. So observations that science is socially conditioned are accurate or meaningful only insofar as they're trivial. 

ROCHEL: Wait a minute. To say that all change is just learning is to beg the question, because exposure alone doesn't guarantee the acquisition of an organized new knowledge. 

TIM: Then you haven't learned. 

ROCHEL: Well, it's not clear that you haven't learned anything. You may have learned a bunch of facts that you may not understand. And learning with understanding is very different from just learning. 

TIM: I don't call it learning if it doesn't include understanding.

ROCHEL: Well, a lot of people do. It's really not trivial to focus on the fact that the word "learning" itself has different meanings in different conceptual systems. I don't care if people want to call [these ways of thinking] paradigms or not. But conceptual systems do organize the meaning of our technical terms. 
NEIL: I think there's an important point here. There are certain things about the world around us that don't make sense, but are nevertheless true. Take quantum mechanics, for example, which describes nature as behaving in ways that are counterintuitive--that have no counterpart in our normal, macroscopic lives. You can never understand quantum mechanics, in some sense. All you can ever do is grow accustomed to it and accept it for what it is, knowing that it works. Who can really understand how something can be both a wave and a particle at the same time? There are many things that you just accept without actually understanding them.

PAT: Rochel [Gelman] is clearly right here, in that there are superficial ways of adopting knowledge, and there are also ways that indicate a true understanding. Let me give you an example. I came across a Betty Crocker cookbook that told you how a microwave oven worked. Here's the explanation [as closely as I can recall it]: the microwaves come into the oven and they cause the water molecules to move faster and faster. Well, she should stop there, right? If she [or more likely her ghost writers] really understood what temperature is, she should stop. But she continues: ...so that they rub against one another more and more, creating more and more friction, and that makes more and more heat. Now, this is a good example of what Rochel means. The writers of that cookbook profoundly do not understand that temperature is really just the motion of molecules. But in science education, we do want students to appreciate things at a deep level--which is partly why we have them do experiments as well as just memorize facts.
NEIL: Yes, but today it's technology that exposes the universe to us, by taking us farther and farther beyond our five natural senses--until we get to the point where it's nearly impossible to say to students, "I want you to take this home and comprehend this," when in fact what they'll be doing is manipulating equations. A predictive capability is not the same as true understanding.

PAT: It's no different from learning by doing anything. If I try to explain to people how to paddle a canoe, they're not going to be able to do it; they have to actually get in the canoe and they have to learn the feel of the canoe.

NEIL: But to get into an atom, to get the feel of an atom, you have to be an electron.

PAT: No, no, you just have to learn to do the experiment. 

FRANCISCO: We do depend on our senses, but these often give us only a kind of superficial knowledge. True knowledge comes from discovery. Discoveries arise from hypotheses, and hypotheses are creations of the mind. To imagine what is possible--this is removed from the senses. But that's where great science comes from.

ROCHEL: I have no quarrel with that, but you can't just say to people, "Go out, do an experiment, and discover." It helps to know what you're doing, to know that the experiment is a good one. 

FRANCISCO: So there's learning and there's learning. For me, profound learning is generating new ideas and making discoveries.

ROBERT: That's Tim [Ferris]'s idea of learning, in its largest sense. But let's turn to something more profound. There was once a professor who had a cute theory about the relationship between the amount of time a species spends mating and the relative importance of that species. Francisco, as our resident biologist, what's your take on that?

FRANCISCO: I'm all in favor of that theory, because I like to do research with Drosophila, the little fruit flies that live for two weeks. When they mate they stay at it, passing sperm for half an hour. Lower organisms like paramecia, little single-celled creatures, mate even longer--for twenty-four hours.

ROBERT: Twenty-four hours spent mating? How long do they live?

FRANCISCO: Oh, just a few more hours--paramecia mate for most of their lives. And so I wonder why humans are called higher organisms. 

ROBERT: Could this be a breakthrough in international as well as personal relations? Now, please pick a field of science and a favorite breakthrough you'd like to see before the end of your lives, which I trust will be long ones. 

NEIL: What's underappreciated is the role of high-performance computing as a frontier in scientific discovery. Not only does it enable us to model systems in ways that weren't previously possible, it can even be the source of discovery of new theories. High-performance computing can become as important to us as telescopes and microscopes were to past generations. 

PAT: I'd like to see better, easier, more efficient methods of contraception. 

TIM: That's a good one, a hard act to follow. But I'd like to see a breakthrough in what's probably the biggest idea of the twentieth century, which is quantum mechanics--because, as Neil was pointing out, we don't really understand it yet. I think there's something deeper than the quantum. I'd like to know what that is.

ROCHEL: I'd like to see a successful way to stop our bones from deteriorating and breaking as a function of use.

FRANCISCO: I'd like to understand the fundamental biology of the parasite that causes malaria. Five hundred million people a year suffer from malaria; one million children die in tropical Africa alone from this disease. It would be wonderful to put an end to it.

ROBERT: Any other breakthroughs, desired or expected within your lifetime?

NEIL: Another go-round? Well, the Human Genome Project, as Francisco pointed out at the start of the show, will give us tremendous insight into disease and other enemies of human life. We can almost talk now about living to the age of a hundred and fifty. Let's try for five hundred--why not? In fact, one of my regrets with regard to my inevitable death is that I won't be around to see some stunning scientific development or other. Every week, I look forward to reading Science and learning what's happening in different fields. And I love every minute of it.

PAT: Although the brain seems in some ways to be an input-output device, in fact it's not. It does get input, of course, and it does have output. But far and away the brain's greatest activity--what we sometimes call spontaneous activity--is the seemingly random [but surely not meaningless] electrical activity that involves neither input nor output. We really don't have the right concepts to think about something that's intelligent, that solves all kinds of problems, that perceives, makes decisions--but isn't an input-output device. This means that we need not only breakthroughs in basic neuroscience but also a certain kind of conceptual innovation just to imagine what that intelligent non-input-output device may be. 

TIM: It's of course inherently difficult to predict a real breakthrough. A great breakthrough in science is like a great work of art--that is, it's intrinsically creative and therefore unpredictable. My definition of a breakthrough is that it changes not what you think but how you think. But if I have to back another horse...it would be information theory. If we had a proper information theory, it could deal with complicated things like living organisms and the brain. I'm speculating here, because we don't have that theory yet. But what attracts me about the idea is that so many things can be analyzed in terms of the transmission of information. Even evolution, for instance, can be viewed as a sort of communication channel. 

ROCHEL: How is it that human beings do so many simple things that computers can't? For example, we have no trouble walking around and not falling down. We have yet to build robots that can do that. We have no trouble understanding speech, whereas speech machines and generators are not all that terrific. So what I'm looking forward to is a deeper understanding of the great accomplishments of human beings.

FRANCISCO: What in our biology makes us human? I'd like to see the answer to that question in my lifetime, which will require that I live many, many years. The answer no doubt relates to our genes. Yet we're so different from other animals: we have language, culture, technology; we do all sorts of things that other animals cannot. What in fact is the critical difference between humans and other animals and what happened in evolution to cause it? What makes us human?

ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

BREAKTHROUGHS in knowledge are a perennial passion of the human imagination. Even the search is glorious. The very word "breakthrough" evokes the notion of dramatic scientific change--it has the right sound--even though real progress is almost always progressive, not radical. When data begin not to fit the current scientific model, a kind of stress builds up; it's then that the twig snaps and old theories in, say, astronomy or biology, can't be reconciled or repaired, but must be replaced with new theories. Breakthroughs are rare and risky; they are initially unacceptable to most, but ultimately obvious to all. Some have said that we are at the end of science, with no more breakthroughs coming. Does that sound right? You keep watching and we'll keep watch; that's how we'll get closer to truth.

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