These two documents, although written only five years apart, are philosophically and strategically as different as day and night.

The striking difference in the scope and scale of these two documents is further evidence of the rapid pace of transformation that is now apparent across all globalized disciplines.

Quantum information science being a globalized discipline—arguably the most globalized discipline—we are led to wonder, what new topics and new results might/will the second edition of Quantum Computation and Quantum Information cover?

Of your current crop, Timo Hannay’s talk on the future of the scientific enterprise was especially good (IMHO).

In reading it, I was astonished by the close, explicit parallels between Hannay’s strategic thinking, and the strategic thinking in the US Army’s newly-released FM 3-07 Stability Operations.

In particular, paragraphs 1-23 through 1-43 of FM 3-07 (covering Conflict Transformation, Legitimacy, Capacity Building, and Rule of Law) very closely parallel the concluding slides of Timo Hannay’s talk.

More broadly, the overall philosophy of “learn and adapt” to an globalized mission domain is common to both works … it sure seems that each is strongly influenced by the other (as is to be expected, since both enterprises are becoming global).

This striking parallelism between twenty-first century military enterprises and twenty-first century scientific enterprises is a good example of an eventuality that (in historian Stephen B. Johnson’s phrase) “few expect and even fewer want.”

But on a planet with an increasingly globalized culture, shouldn’t we expect—and even welcome—the convergent evolution of previously separate enterprises?

And isn’t it very commonly the case, that the most far-reaching innovations—in pretty much every sphere of human endeavor—are those that few expect (initially at least) and even fewer want?