Edge 219 - August 9, 2007 is now online. About half way down a very long webpage titled Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society by Freeman Dyson is a subsection called “5. Bad Advice to a Young Scientist.” Dyson writes:

A year later, I met Crick again. The war was over and he was much more cheerful. He said he was thinking of giving up physics and making a completely fresh start as a biologist. He said the most exciting science for the next twenty years would be in biology and not in physics. I was then twenty-two years old and very sure of myself. I said, “No, you’re wrong. In the long run biology will be more exciting, but not yet. The next twenty years will still belong to physics. If you switch to biology now, you will be too old to do the exciting stuff when biology finally takes off”. Fortunately, he didn’t listen to me. He went to Cambridge and began thinking about DNA. It took him only seven years to prove me wrong. The moral of this story is clear. Even a smart twenty-two-year-old is not a reliable guide to the future of science. And the twenty-two-year-old has become even less reliable now that he is eighty-two.

The question this brings to my mind is what would young Crick and young Dyson think today is the most exciting science for the next twenty years. That answer for me is easy: network science, which shows up in both physics and biology — plus in human interaction — and will reveal the double helix kind of principle that is causing the smartmob era.

Edge 219 - August 9, 2007 is now online. About half way down a very long webpage titled Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society by Freeman Dyson is a subsection called “5. Bad Advice to a Young Scientist.” Dyson writes:
A year later, I met Crick again. The war was over and he was much [...]