The appliance of science: hope and fear in tomorrow's world Jim Al-Khalili

Meteorologists can now reliably tell us if it is going to rain tomorrow, but wouldn't dream of forecasting rain a year from now. Similarly, scientists find it much easier to predict what the world will look like in the next decade rather than in a century. This is because the technology of tomorrow relies on the science of today – it is only after we have understood a certain concept that we can think about how to put it to use. A famous example is Michael Faraday's research into electricity and magnetism in the 1830s. It was only decades later that others saw how to use this new knowledge to build electric motors and power generators, inventions that transformed our world.