Apathy Sketchpad

When we got back to university this year, we were struck almost immediately by just how small the laboratory is now. The trouble, of course, is that the entire physics department is slowly being bought by the computing department. Well, when I say ‘entire’, that isn’t technically correct. It would be far more accurate to say that they are only buying our part. We’ve lost most of the third and fourth year labs now, we’ve lost large chunks of the mechanical workshop, and we’ve lost a computer cluster altogether. Interestingly, not one member of staff’s office (which all contain computers of their own) has been sold, and the research deck (which houses all the staff’s pet-projects) has remained entirely intact, despite having corridors as wide as most people’s living rooms. In fairness, it would be hard for the computing department to use corridor space bought from the research deck effectively, not least because there are only twelve men in the world who can find their way around it, but this is not a good trend, because my view of the future is that it will need an awful lot of physicists to invent all the things which so clearly need inventing.

My view of the future, it should be noted for the record, is rather warped — or at lease I hope it is. I fully expect that if Arnold Schwarzzeneger can be governor of California we are in for a very poorly dealt with few decades. This, in turn, means that any slight problems will be magnified by an inability to fix them efficiently, and therefore the economy will be in major turmoil. This has two main implications: firstly, since football is totally invincible, FIFA will use their control over the World Cup competition to influence all governments’ decisions to the point where they will effectively rule the world, and secondly, currency values will be so volatile that one day you will be able to afford a large country house, and the next day you won’t be able to afford a Lion bar. I expect people will get around this by adopting the WHSmith ClubCard reward point as the new standard currency. I also expect people will start to use electric wheelchairs not because they need to but because it’s easier.

But there are still a lot of things which need inventing. We need to invent a digital radio which is also a mobile phone, and can be worn like a tiny hearing aid by people who have perfect hearing anyway. We need to invent bass speakers which are loud, but which also sound a bit like the instrument which was recorded. We need to invent jam which comes in slices like cheese does.

First, though, we need to invent a way of storing music on discs. You probably think we have a perfectly adequate system for doing this already, but that is either because you are willing to put up with a lot of crap from record companies, or because your approach to listening to music is “out of box, into wall socket, listen to songs”. Don’t get me wrong; that’s a perfectly acceptable approach, but as a geek and a physicist I simply cannot take this view. There was a time, of course, when there was only one format you could buy music in — vinyl. This made things very simple. When cassette tapes first came out they made it very easy to record or copy music, and distribute it for free. This angered the record companies, who felt they should be paid huge amounts of money for delivering songs written and performed by other people to the general public, so they responded by ignoring the problem entirely. Luckily for them (or they thought so at the time) CDs were invented. At first people thought that CDs would fail because you couldn’t record on them, and in doing so demonstrated that three million people really can be wrong. CDs were, as you presumably already know, a roaring success. Later, some enterprising soul devised a way to make CDs in a drive which would fit into a home computer. Since CDs are digital media, it was then very easy to make perfect copies of any music you felt like copying. Around the same time, another equally enterprising but probably less sociable soul devised away to compress music to preposterously small files whilst keeping an impressive amount of quality, and broadband internet connections became extremely common. This made the record companies extremely angry indeed, and they set about solving the problem the only way they knew how — by suing everyone they could think of. First, they sued the person who wrote Napster. Then they sued the people who share music with it. Then they went after people who download music from it. Three students in America were asked for about nine hundred thousand dollars compensation after their hard disks were checked. Then the answer came along. Sort of. DVDs were just what the record companies wanted; they were high-capacity and digital, but couldn’t be copied nearly as well as CDs, they were region-coded so they could stagger releases for maximum profit (which almost worked), and most importantly, they were completely incompatible with CDs so people would have to buy their collection for a third time. (Of course, there were various other formats along in the meantime, most notably the MiniDisc, but that was only really used in car stereos so it clearly doesn’t count. In fact, I have only known one person ever to buy music on MiniDisc, and that was only because she thought it was a cassette.) The trouble with DVDs, though, is that they were first designed for videos and computer data, and now noone can quite decide how they would be best deployed to store audio recordings, or just how much people should be allowed to write to them with their flashy new DVD recorders, many of which will end up as the dusty digital equivalent of the Betamax. And that’s why we need to think of a standard which works properly and stick to it, before we all end up with record collections which cannot be enjoyed without eight or nine different machines to play them with.

This may seem like a very pessimistic view of the future, but I would rather buy a third copy of Rockin’ The Suburbs on whatever format comes next and pay for it with ClucCard points than wear silver bodysuits with triangles and aerials on them all day. On the other hand, I suppose, the future might equally turn out to be pretty much like the present but with taller buildings.