MICROCOSM
George Gilder
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989
426 pp., $ 19.95
George Bush, call your office! The Third Millennium has arrived, a shade early to be sure, in the form of a book I have delivered to your office, Microcosm. It has been inscribed:
For George Bush-
President of the Quantum Age.
Mr. President, do not resent Gilder's jumping the gun on the millennium, even though he's dragging it in on your watch. Gilder has always been way ahead of the curve. What's a dozen years out of a thousand?
As you will certainly recall from your days as vice president, President Reagan kept a copy of Gilder's last best-seller, Wealth and Poverty, on his desk in 1981, during the pitched battles on tax reform. If Wealth and Poverty by its actual political influence is arguably the most important book of the eighties, Microcosm stands an excellent chance of becoming the most important book of the nineties. It addresses the central policy challenges that fact America.
Message of the microcosm
It is hard to ignore a book starting with the statement: "In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things." Agree or disagree, here is a powerful proposition. And the rest of the book explores it, looking at what Gilder calls "the microcosm," actually, a series of small universes.
The first chapter is the most difficult; it is an account of the discoveries of quantum physics, but should not be skipped. "It is understandable," writes Gilder, "that humans resist the microcosm and even rebel against it…Defying the testimony of the human senses, the new physics is contrary to all human intuition and metaphor." Matter is not what it seems.
This point is critical because our technology, including ideology, is largely governed by the way we approach matter. It turns out that the revolution in physics is in fact a nearly alchemical transmutation, taking physics beyond its former focus on matter to focus on matter and energy simultaneously.
This transmutation is taking some time to penetrate our culture. While we are still within the first century of Quantum Physics, Microcosm, by making explicit some of its applications, will measurably add to the velocity of its progress.
Into the 'real world'
After quickly surveying quantum physics, Gilder proceeds to take a fascinating journey through the development of the computer. Form "Rococo cathedrals of refrigerated wires and tubes," we have moved to a microcosm in our
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