"Science, Disrupted: Beyond the limits of intuition, computation, and measurement" was a breakout session at DARPA's "Wait, What?" forum. It was hosted by DARPA's Defense Sciences Office and moderated by Ivan Amato.
Advances in physical sensing, leaps in computing power, an abundance of data and a host of other capabilities are advancing a revolution in science unlike any in the last 400 years, and are allowing us to tackle wicked problems that were intractable just a few years ago. New materials are being designed and constructed one atom at a time, for example, and intelligent computers are becoming active partners in scientific discovery, reading scientific papers and generating new hypotheses. Scientists are using lasers to chill individual atoms to ultracold temperatures and capturing those atoms in predefined lattices to uncover the deepest mysteries of matter, including superconductivity. Such advances, in turn, are disrupting long-held scientific intuitions and the conduct of science itself—the discoveries, the communities, the fundamental theories. Participants considered new opportunities - and perhaps some new limits - that await us at the scientific frontier.
