Revolutionary advances at the interfaces between previously separate fields of science and technology are ready to create key NBIC transforming tools (nano-, bio, info-, and cognitive based technologies), including scientific instruments, analytical methodologies, and radically new materials systems. The innovative momentum in these interdisciplinary areas must not be lost but harnessed to accelerate unification of the disciplines. Progress can become self-catalyzing if we press forward aggressively, but if we hesitate the barriers to progress may crystallize and become harder to surmount.

It was 1992, and I had been renting her apartment in Prague for about a year. I had gone to the former Eastern Bloc shortly after graduate school on a United States government fellowship, and I felt it my duty to show by example how the free world worked. I thought I had been a model tenant. I kept the place neat, I paid my rent faithfully, I even made sure to put out fresh flowers when I knew she was coming over.

But that was the problem: I didn't always know she was coming over. She used to come in when I wasn't home, on tips from the neighbors.

This fall, with UConn colleague Dr. Chandra Raychoudri, Mallett will begin work on building a "ring laser"--basically, a device that will create a circulating light beam, perhaps within a photonic crystal that will bend the light's trajectory and slow it down.

Then, a neutron particle will be sent into the space in the center of the beam. In short, the beam--perhaps two beams in one model, with the light traveling in opposite directions--is expected to twist the space-time inside the circle into a loop.