Abstract:
Science funding always seems to need the promise of something exciting, and even a little ‘sci-fi', at the end of the road to keep the dollars flowing. What's more appealing, the potential of an invisibility cloak or a "planar hyper lens"? Sorry, Congressional committee chairmen are rarely optical engineers.
The result of hype winning out over substance is nothing new and it's difficult to attribute a particular cause to why it occurs. But Eric Drexler on his blog Metamodern offers not only a possible reason for its habitual occurrence but even a solution.