Failures of imagination

I mentioned this in my last post, but it deserves its own post. Failures of imagination have been a big deal and I believe that any scientist, or really anyone making long-term plans should be aware of this kind of thing. They were first described by Arthur C Clarke in an essay called "Hazards of Prophecy". I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here are a few good parts.

 The second kind of prophetic failure [ed: The first one what he calls a "failure of nerve"] is less blameworthy, and more interesting. It arises when all the available facts are appreciated and marshaled - but when the really vital facts are still undiscovered, and the possibility of their existence is not admitted.

 He then goes on to describe how a philosopher, Augustus Comte tried to suggest that astronomy should only be limited to discussions of the solar system, ignoring the distant stars. Little did Comte know, the spectroscope, which allows for the analysis of stars' compositions, was invented shortly after his death. While Comte's mistake is understandable, it is important to remember that you should never believe that something like a spectroscope can't be invented. Or as Clarke put it:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Another, slightly less optimistic example of a failure of imagination is that of the biologists who predicted massive, thorough understanding of many human diseases as a result of the human genome project. These scientists were so stuck on the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology (that DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins) that they could not imagine how little we knew. Therefore, they thought that simply sequencing the human genome would open up medicine to innumerable discoveries. As we now know, sometimes DNA gets regulated (but we don't really know how), and RNA gets modified (which scientists other than me seem to understand somewhat) and proteins can do all sorts of crazy things that are quite hard to predict.

I know scientists, particularly the ones that get a lot of popular press, are awful about this sort of thing. If you see it happen, you should yell at them, yell at the media, and yell at me if you want to.