Literary visions of Utopia provide meaningful but ultimately speculative visions of the future. Indeed, the popular view of the future is that it is by definition uncertain. However, is this really the case?
Science allows us to apply data from the past to produce more robust models of the future. Thus an IAS workshop asked the provocative question Is the Future Deterministic? From the financial crisis of 2008, to the sudden explosions of populations in cities, seemingly minor triggers seem to push events over a tipping point and into an unstable state. Although the idea of the tipping point when applied to wider culture is a relatively new one – and indeed it forms a major ongoing project at Durham’s Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience – it is well established within evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory explains how certain species succeed whilst others suddenly become extinct, a process known as a ‘cascade’ that stems from a tiny environmental trigger. This workshop shared the idea of ‘cascade evolution’ across other disciplines, from geographic studies of urban change to information theory. It was complemented by a seminar series on Evolvability, which focused on how organisms and systems change over time.
Can Novelists Predict the Future?
The novelist and physicist Andrew Crumey asked this intriguing question in an Insights paper. Sometimes, novels make predictions about the future that turn out to be true. Are these lucky guesses? Or can the creative imagination really endow the novelist with some sort of prophetic ability?
The case for the latter seems to be tantalising. Gulliver’s T
ravelsimagined that Mars would have two moons long before astronomy confirmed this. The works of H.G. Wells visualised forms of aeroplanes and lasers before these were actually invented.
In a paper for the IAS Insightsjournal, Crumey explores a number of cases where novelists, by acting as perceptive observers of the present, seem to have been able to predict and even shape the future in some way.
In her paper for Insights, Henrietta Mondry discusses ‘Russia’s new dangerous ideology’:
www.durham.ac.uk/ias/insights/volume4/article2/
Visions
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