Number 60 (Story #4), December 27, 1991 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein FORECASTING PHYSICS DISCOVERIES is a very imperfect science. Just compare recent discoveries with the prognostications set forth in the most recent report issued by the Physics Survey Committee of the National Research Council. According to Daniel Kleppner of MIT, a member of the Committee, the 1986 report (the so-called Brinkman report, named for the committee chair, William Brinkman, then of Sandia) did not foresee such important developments as high-temperature superconductivity; atom cooling to microkelvin temperatures; buckyballs; supernova 1987A; complexity, chaos, and nonlinear dynamics; superdeformed nuclei; large scale structure of the universe, such as the extremely uniform cosmic microwave background and the existence of huge voids and superclusters of galaxies; and the study of "mesoscopic physics," physics which involves quantum effects in micron-sized systems, such as tiny rings. (Physics Today, December 1991.)