The bold innovators in this special issue will help shape the 21st century. It would be easy to presume that the past 100 years were the golden age of discovery. Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. The pace of innovation in the United States is roaring and will only accelerate in the years to come. Einstein worked out the theory of relativity with paper and pencil and could only speculate on the true nature of subatomic particles.
Meteorologists use computer models to more accurately predict the course of killer hurricanes.
Astronomers armed with telescopes of awesome size and clarity have for the first time recorded the reflected light of a planet outside our solar system. Into the 1980s, biologists scoffed at the suggestion that it was possible to catalog the 3 billion DNA base pairs in the human body. In 2000, the rough draft of the human genome will be delivered, ahead of schedule, thanks to robots and high-speed computers. The marriage of machinery and computational muscle is yielding astonishing insights. Neurologists use magnetic resonance imagers to watch the brain at work, thoughts and feelings lighting up the screen like ghostly messages from the netherworld.