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Next pageIn the last section I've tried to highlight what I believe to be one of the most important changes during the last hundred years. In the 19th century Engineering dealt with the smelting metal, moving earth, building railways, roads and bridges. It was concerned with supplying heat and light, food and water. In other words, we were using Engineering to manipulate our physical surroundings. During the 20th century Engineering started to be applied to the non-physical aspects of our environment, to carrying out calculations, processing and storing information, to cryptography and to automatic control. As a result we now have a group of engineering disciplines, namely Communication Engineering, Computer Engineering and Control Engineering that all deal with something that has no physical existence, namely Information. I think that this was the big step during this last century.
I think this process is going to go a lot further during the 21st century. It has already started to change the way in which we look at the Universe. It seems that Information may be a more fundamental component of the Universe than we thought. Everything we know about the Universe comes to us as information. At the boundaries of our studies (the very small and the very large) strange and illogical things seem to be happening. For example, it is not possible to pin down exactly where a sub-atomic particle is located and it sometimes seems to behave as though it has no definite location at all. An even more startling effect is that two fundamental particles can be 'linked' so that changes in the properties of one will also change the properties of the other. The information on these changes seems to pass through a 'communication channel' that operates over any distance with zero time delay. In Astronomy the reverse happens. There seems to be an upper speed limit set by light and no matter what our reference frame is, light always appears to travel at the same speed. (The 'explanation' is that rate of passage of time is dependent on the velocity of the observer.) In practice this means that we can only find out that something has happened some time after it has happened.
Recently some very strange and very significant discoveries have been made in the area of quantum mechanics. Scientists have found out how to manipulate the information describing a fundamental particle and have managed to demonstrate in the laboratory the instantaneous movement of such a particle from one point to another by changing its quantum descriptors (i.e. its personal 'information'). As a result you will now find papers appearing in the Scientific Journals on 'Quantum Teleportation'. It also seems that information itself is different at the quantum level, which opens up the possibility of information processing beyond the capabilities of existing computing systems. There are already serious proposals for the use of these techniques being floated.
At the moment Quantum Mechanics is still treated as a branch of physics but I sometimes wonder if it would be more sensible to treat it as a branch of Information Theory. In any case, these developments are bound to have repercussions on the Engineering of Information Systems.
For example, if instantaneous transmission is possible is there the possibility of producing control systems having zero time delay? What would the implications of this be on the stability of such systems? Or perhaps it might be better to look at these effects from the other side. Does the quantum uncertainty of a particle's position and velocity merely represent the equivalent of instability in some 'information' analogue of a Nyquist system, when we push the measurements beyond certain limits? If it is an instability effect, one might be able to work out a way of stabilising the system and actually being able to get precise information. Alternatively, perhaps there is some quantum-mechanical trick that provides precise information rather than instantaneous transportation.
This of course is all wild speculation, but I am convinced that something startlingly new is going to come out of these areas. Professor Smith is likely to have an interesting time over the next few years!