“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” Richard Feynman
Last week, as I emerged from Penn Station in New York City, I strolled up Seventh Avenue and out of the corner of my eye caught sight of the large Borders book store that commands the corner of Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street. What flashed through my mind at that moment was “I never thought I’d live to see the end of books.” As a kid, I’d spend the entire day closeted in my room reading a book with a dictionary beside me on the bed. I loved unlocking the meaning of big, prepossessing words as I made my way through stories that were just a little too difficult for me. Looking back on it, I see that I was making a kind of intellectual journey through worlds that were otherwise inaccessible to me as a child of Jewish middleclass suburban Baltimore. Later on, in my undergraduate years, I used to sit in the Divinity School Library at Duke University, my Biblical Hebrew text before me, surrounded by dictionaries and concordances – all in an effort to untangle a foreign, dead language and try to reconstruct a way of experiencing the world that could only be understood through surviving fragments of text. When I got out of college and no longer had to read what was on a syllabus, I went on wild reading binges, foraging through the St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City. For me, reading has always been another way of seeing and experiencing the world and books have been my passport.
But, now I own a Kindle and my dictionary is no longer beside me. Instead, I click my Kindle’s home key and enter the word I don’t know to instantly have it defined by my favorite dictionary (the OED), and then click back to exactly where I stopped reading. I made the transition to the Kindle with some trepidation – after all, I LOVE books. I had about three days of feeling very strange about not flipping a page and the heft of the reading device not feeling right and not really liking the percent completion display which was my only way of knowing how much I’d read and how much more there was to go. But then, that was that, and I was on my way to loving that my dictionary was right there, all the time. When I saw the Borders bookstore in New York City, I had just finished reading an article in The New York Times about the coming-to-me-soon future in which I would be able to borrow books from my library on my Kindle. In fact, if I owned a Nook or a Sony e-Reader, I could do that already. In my soon-to-be future, I wouldn’t have to go to my library to borrow a book. I already don’t have to go to a bookstore to buy one and I don’t have to pay at all for classics like my favorite Edith Wharton or to finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The future has already arrived and I am smack in the middle of it, I just hadn’t noticed.
Yesterday, I read another article in The New York Times about supercomputers used for scientific visualization that are called macroscopes. Macroscopes are “…a new class of computer-based scientific instruments…composite tools, with different kinds of physical presences that have such powerful and flexible software programs that they become a complete scientific workbench.” These supercomputers make “…it possible to uncover phenomena and processes that in the past have been, ‘too great, slow or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.’” Macroscopes can see the future creeping in on you in ways that human beings cannot.
What’s also amazing about these supercomputers is that the technology itself is affecting the very nature of the scientific research process. From the lone independent researcher toiling away in isolation, it is now more likely that hundreds or even thousands of researchers in disparate geographies and ranging across many different disciplines collaborate on and jointly publish research, no longer isolated, but intensively connected through these supercomputers. And the supercomputers themselves are not one piece of equipment or software housed in one place, but can themselves be collaborations of different pieces of equipment and applications in far-flung corners of the world. The unrelenting force of collaboration – called the “killer app” by one scientist in the article – is also making what seemed like a risky approach, developing software in an open-source mode, now seem like the only way forward. Technology has managed to destroy a culture and build a new one, in this case, seemingly without the calamity that accompanies most destruction.
The same is going on in the organizations where we work. They are already different, but we are swept along in the currents and can’t really appreciate the full extent of how much the future is already here until, perhaps, we read an article about borrowing books from a library on an e-Reader without visiting the library and catch a glimpse of a Borders bookstore on the street corner 15 minutes later.
Sources:
- “Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science,” John Markoff, The New York Times, April 26, 2011.
- “Kindle Users to Be Able to Borrow Library E-Books,” Julie Bosman, The New York Times, April 21, 2011.
