I've been thinking about one of Arthur C Clarke's favorite subjects: the competition between transportation and communication. He suggested that one or the other would be perfected in the distant future, but that perfecting one would render the other unnecessary. In other words, if you could reach any point on the earth in half an hour there would be little point to making something like a life-size three-dimensional holographic video communication system.
Turning from the distant future to the present, people wonder why we still have political conventions and physics conferences. It is an interesting question. Many newspaper commentators say that U.S. political party conventions are "obsolete." Because of changes in the primary system, the nomination occurs before the convention. The convention is a mere formality. I disagree. First, it is possible that no one will win a primary in the future and a convention will be necessary. Second, conventions still serve vital purposes. Mainly, they bring delegates, candidates, representatives, enthusiastic supporters and even families together to have a good time face to face. People schmooze, plan for the future, politic, divvy up the campaign funds, and hold training sessions about how to raise money how to conduct campaigns. For a political junkie it is wonderful fun. It fires up supporters and helps the campaign that follows. What you see broadcast on the television in the main hall is only a small part of what goes on. Conventions are particularly important for the Democratic Party because it is informal at best and usually in chaos. As Will Rogers said, "I am not a member of any organized party -- I am a Democrat." I think it will be a long time -- if ever -- before telepresence and communications can replace the kind of face-to-face interactions people benefit from at a convention. My wife remarks that Americans love conventions, meetings, trade shows, labor unions bashes, national meetings of Baptists, the NIWeek with 3,000 employees, comic book conventions, Dragon*con parades, Chowder and Marching societies, and other gatherings of people with common interests. This sort of thing is more common in the US than Japan. I expect it is more common than in Europe. Visitors to the US from Europe in the 19th century remarked on this. I think physics conferences are also held in person partly because scientists, like everyone else, like to schmooze, and meet face-to-face to chat informally. It is also a good place to find a job, or poach someone else's star employee. ICCF17 was broadcast via Skype for the first time in the history of cold fusion conferences. Several people told me they saw some sessions. As a way to get technical information from the lectures or from something like Celani's demonstration, a Skype video or a YouTube video is pretty good. Some people even participated in the conference via Skype, making short presentations or asking questions during the Q&A session. The ICCF17 Preparata medal was presented to John Bockris in absentia. Bockris is old and cannot travel. He made a short presentation by prerecorded video. A video of the presentation is being sent to him. For everyday business meetings or planning sessions with people you already know well, I think Skype and other virtual conference is already a better choice than most business meetings. It is particularly good for people widely separated time zones. You can see from photos of the White House Situation Room and other expensive facilities that political leaders and captains of industry already use high tech video presence, probably about as readily and as often as Woodrow Wilson used telephones in 1914. The telephone was still a high-tech gadget in 1914. Some top leaders felt it was beneath their dignity to use it full-time. Even if the President did not use the telephone on an everyday basis back then, his staff certainly did. Someone like the Assistant Sec. of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt did. The first -- and perhaps last -- U.S. president to be addicted to telephones was LBJ. Much of what he did is lost to history because he conducted so much business by phone. Nowadays, presidents use e-mail, like everyone else. There was no overseas telephone service until the 1930s, when radio-based service was introduced. That is how FDR and Churchill chatted during WWII, on scrambled telephones. They did not discuss secrets in detail because AT&T worried that the Germans might be able to unscramble the transmission. FDR and Churchill conducted most communication by cable. Getting back to the future . . . I expect that compared to political conventions, or trade shows, future physics conferences are likely to have more virtual participation than they do now, but I expect there will be actual, physical participation. In the distant future, I expect that people will live Mars and various other planets. Once this happens, physical participation in conferences will once again become necessary just it was before the 21st century. The time delay for a signal to reach from Earth to Moon is around 1.3 seconds, maybe three seconds round-trip. A person could participate in a physics conference from the moon with virtual presence. Some people have already tried using robots for enhanced participation in meetings, allowing the virtual participant to move from room to room or get close to someone before talking with him privately. Someone on the moon participating in a physics conference on earth could give a lecture or participate in the Q&A session. The three second gap would be annoying but not much worse than today's gap with Skype. However, once you go to Mars or any other planet the time delay would be far too great for any kind of real-time participation. It makes the JPL remote operation of robot explorers extraordinarily difficult. - Jed
