Time Research

Short description of the future field

Time Research belongs to the new future fields, which have been elaborated within the Foresight-Process as focal issues in future research activities. Interviews with experts at home and abroad as well as an online survey and bibliometric investigations led to the following definition and delineation:

Definition and Delineation

The factor time is not yet adequately understood and is therefore a bottleneck in many developments. Research into time is the central aspect of a future field that extends into many applications, including issues such as the chronological sequence of complex processes in making applications faster, more efficient, cost-effective and intelligent, or in parallelising and synchronising processes (e.g. Internet servers, production processes). The issue of dynamic and chronological development on various time scales, especially of non-linear processes, can also only be dealt with in the long term.

One very dynamic future topic in time research is chronobiology (research into natural rhythms and biological clocks), which produces findings on precisely-timed medication delivery, for example. Chronobiology could boost developments in automated pharmaceutics (»missile drugs«, depots, »targeted drugs«), possibly helping to alleviate the side-effects of nocturnal or irregular working hours. It could also be used to identify optimal times for learning, for example. Now would be a good time to start a programme making the transfer from basic to clinical research.

New implications will emerge from these new findings for society and the time management of individuals (e.g. in shift work or security monitoring by people) in the long term.

Central research aspects of time research include understanding and specifically being able to control time as a factor with the help of time efficiency research, precise time measurement (e.g. for GPS applications in precision agriculture, remote maintenance of machines) and time resolution (e.g. 4D precision). This could optimise existing technologies as well as lead to completely new time technologies.

More on this topic

Report

The complete chapter on this new future field from the Foresight report is available for download here.

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