"K-tools, the instruments we use to generate knowledge, are the most important form of capital in advanced economies."
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Revolutionary Wealth
EXCERPT
Page 7
Capital Tools for Knowledge
The digital revolution is not the only source of fundamental changes heading in our direction. Our scientific knowledge base is exploding in all directions.
Astronomers are studying "dark matter". Scientists probing "anti-matter" have created anti-hydrogen. We are making breakthroughs in fields as diverse as conductive polymers, composite materials, energy, medicine, micro-fluidics, cloning, supra-molecular chemistry, optics, memory research, nanotechnology and scores of others.
Scientists in the U.S. are rightly lamenting recent cutbacks in spending for research in many fields -- and especially for basic research. But largely overlooked are advances being made in a special class of technology --- the tools available to research scientists.
The industrial revolution clicked into high gear and vaulted to a whole new level when, beyond merely building machines to make products, our ancestors began inventing machines to make more -- and better -- machines. Today we call them capital tools.
This same process on a vastly larger scale is now happening to what might be termed "K-tools" -- the instruments we use to generate knowledge, the most important form of capital in advanced economies.
Armed with advanced super-computers and super-software, the Internet and Web, scientists now also have access to powerful tools that facilitate rapid collaboration. They are forming more and more multi-national teams, pooling insights, methods and tools across time zones.
Another cluster of K-tools consists of fabulous instruments for visualization in the laboratory. In principle, researchers can -- or soon will be able to --"walk around" inside a single grain of rice to visually observe how its internal structures morph as it grows, then continue to watch them as the rice is stored, processed, shipped, and cooked. Researchers will be able, as it were, to stroll through an intestine as it digests the rice.
Scientific periodicals and web sites are filled with advertisements for better, faster, time-saving lab technologies. "Automate your research" reads one from Roche Applied Science. "Process virtually any sample material to isolate DNA, RNA, mRNA, and viral nucleic acids in less than two hours...Perform real-time PCR analysis...in less than 40 minutes...." Another, from AB Applied Biosystems, announces that "Whatever your path of discovery," its DNA analyzer "will get you there faster..."
But faster is astonishingly slow when it comes to nuclear physics. To study the erratic motion of individual electrons as they circle the nucleus of an atom, researchers need to fire extremely short bursts of electromagnetic radiation. The briefer the better.
Recently Dutch and French laser scientists broke records by creating pulses of strobe light lasting no more than 220 attoseconds -- i.e., 220 billionths of a billionth of a second. But to study what happens inside the nucleus, even that is too slow. So American researchers have been working on a "Lasetron" designed to create flashes measured in zeptoseconds -- billionths of a trillionth of a second.
In all these widely different fields, the next step is clear. What we are likely to see, before long, are not only more and more potent capital tools for knowledge acquisition, but capital tools for making those capital tools.
Excerpted from Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. Copyright © 2006 by Alvin Toffler. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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