Shifting Borderlines: How Science Fiction Is Becoming Science

The enabler of the quantum evolutionary leaps of our times is the rapid progression of science and the proliferation of scientific fields tackling very specialized subjects like bioinformatics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Science is growing fast and unabated. Wars, economic downturns, and all other detrimental events have little effect on the expansion of science. What started with few fields (mathematics, chemistry, biology) has mushroomed into thousands of domains that span every aspect of humanity. New disciplines like Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) are commanding armies of loyal followers that diligently strive to create the next substantial breakthrough in the field. The book consists of four chapters that are mostly dialogues about science, technology and the future. Each chapter starts with an introduction on the subject at hand and tails into a dialogue. Four main topics are discussed: Robotics: How some want machine to take over, others want machines to go away, yet everyone is in an urgent rush to surround himself with as much electronics as possible. The debate heats up to a boiling point on the topic of machine intelligence and its effect on humanity. Science Eccentricities: Why black holes suck, Relativity is about absoluteness, and the universe is multidimensional. Bio-Universe: How our age old pursuit to understand the intricacies of the inner space will be trivial compared to what is about to materialize in the coming few years, especially on the aging-combat front. The Future: Why a trip to the future might be much more complicated than Michael J. Fox's time machine journeys. The discussion heats up on paths of the future; the relatively near future. The cast includes Herbert, a brilliant physicist, Buzweil, an optimistic futurist, John a realistic conservative, and me...

Hammad Azzam is Collaboration Platform Director at British Telecom responsible for systems implementation of eCommerce solutions including Retail, Enterprise and Wholesale portals. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Tufts University in 1992 and his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from American University of Beirut in 1988. Hammad began his career as a Senior Member of Technical Staff at GTE Labs, the research arm for GTE, and was part-responsible for the design and development of national network management systems that monitored PSTN switches, SS7 networks, and broadband connectivity. When the telecommunications market decided to turn cannibal, GTE was consumed by the Verizon giant and Hammad continued his career in Verizon, eventually to become Vice President - Information Technology, responsible for the design, architecture, development, deployment and maintenance of Retail online systems. His areas of expertise include IT strategy and execution, eCommerce strategy and delivery, large scale project management, enterprise IT Systems, telecommunications OSS, broadband service fulfillment, information architecture and retrieval, Smart City design and operations, and new product development. His areas of research include eCommerce, information retrieval, bioinformatics, general management, and programmable logic devices. He lives with his wife Lina, and two daughters Tamara and Nadeen in Irving, Texas.