Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9305230195
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By WILLIAM J. BROAD THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Worldwide, up to 4 million scientists are thought to be wired into the rapidly expanding maze of interconnected networks that number 11,252 and collectively are known as the Internet, or sometimes just the net. Thousands of scientists hook up for the first time every day.
This patchwork of electronic conduits can link a lone researcher sitting at a glowing computer screen to such things as distant experiments and supercomputers, to colleagues on faraway continents in a heretofore undoable kind of close collaboration, to electronic mail, to mountains of data otherwise too expensive to tap, to large electronic meetings and work sessions, to bulletin boards where a posted query can prompt hundreds of replies and to electronic journals that disseminate findings far and wide.
Moreover, all this can happen with blinding speed at a fraction of the cost of other types of communication, often over vast distances. All it takes is a personal computer and a phone line.
"It's the most fundamental shift since Gutenberg," said Dr. Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who directs the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.
"The Internet is basically a space and time destroyer," he said. "It shrinks distance and time to zero. It's as if all the world's scientists were in one room, available at one computer. Needless to say, this is having a profound impact on the way science is done."
Stephen S. Wolff, head of networking at the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that runs the nation's top science network, said the emerging era meant "you can be physically isolated without being intellectually isolated. That's a profound change."
The shift is clear to Dr. Brendan D. McKay, a computer scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Three years ago over the networks he got an electronic query about his work from Dr. Stanislaw Radziszowsky, a mathematician at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Since then, the two have exchanged more than 1,000 messages over the nets in a partnership undaunted by a physical gap of thousands of miles. While one works, the other sleeps.
A hint of the emerging power of the nets occurred in March as a robot from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution explored the bottom of the Gulf of California.
More than a mile down, surrounded by inky darkness, the robot scrutinized hot vents and similar bizarre life forms. Instantly, its raw data were flashed over a tether to a surface ship and then, via satellite, to computer networks and researchers around the globe.
A very different realm is slated for exploration by environmental scientists at the Polytechnic University of New York.
Over the networks, they are preparing to hunt for treasures of existing environmental data hidden inside hundreds computers around the world, such as those at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, the World Health Organization in Geneva and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which has acres of satellite data. The scientists' aim is to open such out-of-the-way archives to routine analysis.
The social repercussions of this electronic upheaval have only started to be studied. However, early analyses suggest that the revolution is boosting productivity as it breaks social and geographic barriers.
"The old means of distributing information were very unfair," said Dr. Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who in 1991 founded an electronic publication available on the nets.
"When I was at Harvard, I'd get preprints by virtue of being on a very select mailing list," he said, referring to manuscripts of articles slated to appear in journals. "The rest of the world, the postdocs, would have to wait to get their stuff months later. In a field that's rapidly developing, that means everything."
by CNB