Question: What scientific discovery do you think will change the world?

Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 15 Mar 2012:

Thats a really tough one. I think scientific discoveries are continually changing the world, even if they are only subtle ways. Sometimes these things happen unintentionally. For example, the internet which I think has changed the way we view the world fundamentally, was originally conceived as a means of sharing information between scientific facilities.

The concept had been around for a while and networked computers were not a new thing but in the mid 1980’s people at CERN began to expand their networks to share data across the whole of europe, onto America and then into Asia and so on. I’d say that was really a defining scientific discovery for our Era.