7.2.09
About
Features
Editions
Press
Events
Dinner
Question Center
Subscribe

Edge 292
July 2, 2009

There is a simple way to produce a perfect model of our climate that will predict the weather with 100% accuracy. First, start with a universe that is exactly like ours; then wait 13 billion years.

THE PHYSICS THAT WE KNOW [6.29.09]
A Conversation with Gavin Schmidt

gavin schmidt

Introduction

There is a simple way to produce a perfect model of our climate that will predict the weather with 100% accuracy. First, start with a universe that is exactly like ours; then wait 13 billion years.

But if you want something useful right now, if you want to construct a means of taking the knowledge that we have and use it to predict future climate, you build computer simulations. Your models are messy, complicated, in constant need of fine tuning, exacting and inexact at the same time. You're using the past to predict the future, extrapolating the very complicated from the very simple, and relying on an ever-changing data stream to inform the outcome.

Climatologist Gavin Schmidt explains:

"How do you ask questions about expectations in the future? Obviously, you have to have things that are based on the physics that we know. You have to have things that are based on processes we can go and measure, that has to be based on our ability to understand the climate that we have now. Why do you get seasonal cycles? Why do you get storms? What controls the frequency of these events over a winter, over a longer period? What controls the frequency of, say, El Nino events in the tropical Pacific that have impacts on rainfall in California or in Peru or in Indonesia? How do you understand all of those things?"

"We approach this is in a very ambitious way."

"What we have decided, as a scientific endeavor, is to extrapolate as much as we can from our knowledge of the individual processes that we can measure: evaporation from the ocean, the formation of a cloud, rainfall coming from a cloud, changes in the wind patterns as a function of the pressure field, changes in the jet stream. What we have tried to do is encapsulate those small-scale processes, put them altogether, and see if we can predict the emerging properties of that fundamental complex system."

— Russell Weinberger

GAVIN SCHMIDT is a climatologist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, where he models past, present, and future climate. His essay "Why Hasn't Specialization Led To The Balkanization Of Science?" in included in What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, edited By Max Brockman

Gavin Schmidt's Edge Bio Page

[...Continue]



Max Brockman, ed. | What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science (Vintage)
Written by Sarah Boslaugh
Wednesday, 01 July 2009

Each essay is self-contained, making it possible to choose those most relevant to your own interest

 

If your favorite day of the week is Tuesday, because that's when the Science section of The New York Times is published, and your favorite NPR show is Ira Flatow's Science Times, then you'll love What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, a collection of essays written by young scientists about what they do and how they see the future of their fields. Even if you're not quite that much of a science geek, if you have an interest in the world around you and the process by which scientific research can both explain and mold that world, you'll enjoy this collection edited by Max Brockman. No expertise in any field is required to understand these essays; if you can follow Malcolm Gladwell, you'll have no troubles with What's Next?

Brockman's essayists represent a variety of fields, from physics to paleoanthropology, with a heavy leaning toward the human sciences. This is a good choice from the marketing point of view, since non-scientists tend to be more interested in topics relating to human psychology than, say, the role played by dark energy in accelerating the expansion of the universe, but fans of hard science may feel slighted. That objection aside, this is the perfect collection for people who like to stay up on recent scientific research but haven't the time or expertise to go to the original sources (which, in the case of modern science, usually means articles published in professional journals, which are not generally available to those without access to an academic library).

Each essay is self-contained, making it possible to choose those most relevant to your own interests. And it's a great airplane or beach book because you can read the essays in any order; each is brief enough to be read between the interruptions of gate announcements or children demanding attention. My personal favorite is "What Makes Big Ideas Sticky?" by UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman, which argues that ideas which mirror the structure and function of the human brain may seem so obviously true to us that they resist being discarded, even in the face of overwhelming amounts of scientific research demonstrating their lack of merit.

The collection closes with an essay by NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt entitled "Why hasn't specialization led to the Balkanization of science?" He argues that in contradiction to the stereotype of the scientist as someone who knows more and more about less and less, interdisciplinary research is central to modern science and describes both the factors which lead to greater isolation among fields of research, and those which encourage cooperation and sharing of ideas. Communication of major ideas in nontechnical language is one of the factors which encourages cooperation, and What's Next? represents an important contribution to that effort.

Sarah Boslaugh

256 pages. $14.95 (paperback)


Beyond Edge

"What To Read Now. And Why —Newsweek's Fifty Books For Our Times": 4. The Big Switch By Nicholas Carr. 17. The Trouble With Physics By Lee Smolin. 39. Why Evolution Is True By Jerry A. Coyne [...]

Malcolm Gladwell tales on the digital determinists re Chris Anderson's Free [...]

Lera Boroditsky: Language pervades the deepest domains of thought, shaping us from the nuts and bolts of perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions... more» [...]

"Dear Malcolm: Why so threatened?" Chris Anderson Responds to Gladwell [...]

Geoffrey Miller's "most expensive" and "happiness" lists [...]

"Lee Smolin argues against the timeless multiverse" [...]

*Check for more outside the box try www.edge.org, search unthinkable. [...]

Jerry Coyne asks"Which theology should we respect?" [...]

Malcolm is wrong...Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about. [...]

PZ Myers: "I may not be perfectly rational, but my magic invisible monkeys are!" [...]

Sputnik is back. This time it's Jonathan Harris, not the Russians. Don't miss it: The Sputnik Observatory. Edgy. [...]

"Dawkins sets up kids' camp to groom atheists." [...]

Sean Carroll: Many older scientists do all sorts of crazy things [...]

A.C. Grayling: "A preference for dogma over kindness, for superstition-based moralism over humaneness, is standard fare for religion". [...]

Craig Venter — The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews — Richard Dawkins [...]

Paul Krassner, Yippie! co-founder and provocateur takes on Larry King in mock interview [...]

Edge 291
June 24, 2009

BRAIN TIME [6.24.09]
By David M. Eagleman

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

DAVID M. EAGLEMAN is director of Baylor College of Medicine's Laboratory for Perception and Action at Oxford University, whose long-range goal is to understand the neural mechanisms of time perception. He also directs BCM's Initiative on Law, Brains, and Behavior, which seeks to determine how new discoveries in neuroscience will change our laws and criminal justice system. He is the author of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.

David M. Eagleman's Edge Bio Page

From WHAT'S NEXT? Dispatches on the Future of Science Edited By Max Brockman

[...Continue]


Beyond Edge

Sam Harris v. Philip Ball "What should science do?" ... Sam Harris and Philip Ball discuss the conflict between religion and science. They do not agree… [...]

Charlie Rose's "A conversation about Personalized Medicine with Steven Pinker, Anne Wojcicki, George Church and Linda Avey [...]

"A. C. Grayling on a neuroscientist's attempt to "rewire her own brain." [...]

"[Howard] Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences was a great idea and worth investigating. It's just not panning out. Hanging on to the theory for nostalgic or political value is not science. It's time that we begin to work with the reality that we have, not the one we wish we had. To do otherwise would be just plain stupid." [...]

Sean Carroll Science and Religion are Not Compatible [...]

"What getting mugged taught Douglas Rushkoff about the financial crisis" [...]

Michael Shermer "... the scientific method is the best tool ever devised to discriminate between true and false patterns, to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and to detect baloney". [...]

Josh Timomen's first RDF TV Video — Michael Shermer's "The Baloney Detection Kit" [...]

Sean Carroll Are we living in the Golden age of cosmology?" [...]

PZ Myers: "They want to blur the boundaries between legitimate science, which questions traditional dogma, and religion, which is traditional dogma, by playing favorites with religion in a game that apes scientific institutions."[...]

"Correspondence regarding the Templeton Foundation: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, AC Grayling, Edwin Cartlidge" [...]

Sharon Begley on Evo-Psych & Wilson, Gould, Buss, Miller— "Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?"[...]

Tim Radford re-reads Pinker's Blank Slate — "Are We Prisoners of Our Genes?"[...]

Edge 290
June 19, 2009

We discovered a new vein of research — the relation between physical and social or psychological concepts — that we came to by taking evolutionary principles seriously and applying them to psychology. We weren't using evolutionary psychology, which has largely been focused on mating and reproduction. Our focus, rather, was in terms of evolutionary biology and the basic principles of natural selection: and that field makes clear that humans must have had these kinds of mechanisms or these processes to guide our behavior prior to evolution or emergence of consciousness.

THE SIMPLIFIER
A Conversation with John A. Bargh

Introduction

"They say that in science there are complicators and there are simplifiers," says John Bargh, Yale social psychologist known for his early work on the topic of automaticity, and more recently for bringing experimental methodology to the philosophical question of free will.

According to Bargh, the tension between the complicators and the simplifiers is a good thing in any field of ideas or science. "I've always been a simplifier." he says, "looking for the simple mechanisms that produce complex effect, instead of building a complicated model. Once we find one of these veins — one of these avenues of research — we just go for it and mine it and mine it until we run out of gold.

Bargh's lines of research all focus on unconscious mechanisms that underlie social perception, evaluation and preferences, and motivation and goal pursuit in realistic and complex social environments. That each of these basic psychological phenomena occur without the person's intention and awareness, yet have such strong effects on the person's decisions and behavior, has considerable implications for philosophical matters such as free will, and the nature and purpose of consciousness itself.

He maintains that the resulting findings "are very consistent and in harmony with evolutionary biology. And this is very unlike psychology, which has always presumed a kind of consciousness bottle-neck or a self, some kind of a homunculus type of self sitting there, making all the decisions and deciding without any explanation of where they comes from or what's causing the self or what's causing the conscious choices. Emphasizing what our unconscious systems do for us, in turn, links us very strongly to other organisms and other animals very closely. Recent primate research is showing that primates are closer to us than we thought. They fall for the same kind of economic fallacies that Kahneman and Tversky talked about in humans 30 years ago."

Russell Weinberger
Associate Publisher, Edge

JOHN A. BARGH is professor of social psychology at Yale University and director of the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation) Lab.

John Bargh's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]


JUNE 17, 2009
Blinded Us With Science

Sure, we often hear from the prominent, popular scientists of today: Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson. But what about the next generation? Who are they, and what are they thinking about? The answers can be found in the engrossing essay collection What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, which offers a youthful spin on some of the most pressing scientific issues of today—and tomorrow.

Take, for example, Laurence C. Smith's essay on global warming. Instead of rehashing the debate, Smith wonders about the possibility of people migrating to the Northern Rim as temperatures rise and inhospitable environments become more livable. Associate professor of physics Stephon H. S. Alexander tackles dark energy; other pieces address memory, morality, why viruses matter and the inevitability of human extinction. Kinda scary? Yes! Super smart and interesting? Definitely.


NEW BOOKS

For prophetic visions of the future, some people turn to horoscopes. But if you want to know what the future holds, better to ask a scientist... more»


Does language shape our thinking?

An essay on how language influences thought from the pop-science anthology "What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science" has been posted on The Edge. Author Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems at Stanford, writes:

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

She brings up experiments and other examples involving use of language and direction, time, color and gender, all of which seem to demonstrate that yes, language shapes how we think.

But my favorite is this example above. Only a linguist — or perhaps a social scientist — would put Chomsky in a hypothetical.

— Carolyn Kellogg


Beyond Edge

Lawrence Krauss takes on the God Squad at the World Science Festival [...]

Clay Shirky's Ted Talk at the State Department: How Twitter can make history [...]

PZ Myers on Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution [...]

Antony Valenti goes beyond the pragmatic "shut up and calculate" mentality that stifled attempts to probe what Quantum Mecanics Really Means [...]

Look out, creationists. There’s a new sheriff in town, and he talks like an Oxford don [...]


Edge 289
June 12, 2009

HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? [6.11.09]
By Lera Boroditsky

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.

Lera Boroditsky's Edge Bio Page

From WHAT'S NEXT? Dispatches on the Future of Science Edited By Max Brockman



NEW SCIENTIST
June 9, 2009

Top scientists predict the future of science
By Amanda Gefter

FOR PROPHETIC visions of the future, some people turn to horoscopes or fortune tellers. But if you really want to know what the future holds, ask a scientist.

Not just a renowned, seasoned scientist, but a fresh mind, someone who is asking themselves the questions that will define the next generation of scientific thought.

That's precisely what Max Brockman has done in this captivating collection of essays, written by "rising stars in their respective disciplines: those who, in their research, are tackling some of science's toughest questions and raising new ones".

The result is a medley of big ideas on topics ranging from cosmology and climate change, to morality and cognitive enhancement.

The collection is diverse, but one theme resounds: when it comes to the human race, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We owe our evolutionary success to our unique modes of social behaviour.

Social species


In their essay "Out of our minds", journalist Vanessa Woods and anthropologist Brian Hare suggest that it wasn't intelligence that led to social behaviour, but rather social behaviour that paved the way for the evolution of human intelligence. "Humans got their smarts only because we got friendlier first," they write.

We are a social species, and we have our brains to thank. As Harvard University neuroscientist Jason Mitchell writes: "The most dramatic innovation introduced with the rollout of our species is not the prowess of individual minds, but the ability to harness that power across many individuals."

Language allows us to do this in an unprecedented way — it serves as a vehicle for transferring one's own mental states into another's mind. Lera Boroditsky — a professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems at Stanford University — has an interesting piece about the ways in which our native language shapes the way we think about such basic categories as space, time and colour. ...

[...continue]




ON "THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY"

JAMES O'DONNELL
Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, The Ruin of the Roman Empire

What strikes me most about Tapscott's essay is how far out of touch it is with current realities. Oh, I give you the NetGen kids pounding their phones to tweet each other and the hyper-multitasking and the creativity that arises in such settings. (I'm tweeting a little myself now, quite content that no one is following at http://www.twitter.com/Eugippius — all my tweets are quotations from Greek or Latin authors that I'm thinking about. Content of a new medium is always an old medium, and that can be quite powerful, bidirectionally.) I freely grant that there are dismal moments to be survived along the educational path. And I know with piercing claritiy just how challenging a business model we've chosen for ourselves. ...

MARC D. HAUSER
Psychologist and Biologist, Harvard University: Author, Moral Minds

I certainly don't think of my students as blank vessels, and I don't imagine colleagues of mine having similar conceptions. Rather, I think all good teachers think that their students have heavily loaded vessels, with strong conceptions of how the world works, but often, these views are either wrong or narrow minded. The art of good teaching is to allow the student to discover alternatives, to see the elegance of a good argument, and to understand how to engage in a conceptual revolution, overturning some of their cherished beliefs. This can happen in large class rooms or in seminars. ...

[...continue]


Beyond Edge

Daniel Engber's Edge Question response to "What have you changed your mind about?" begets a five-part series on animal research for Slate [...]

Carolyn Porco's Cassini Imaging Team releases "a series of images and movies, dramatic and stark, revealing the waves on the edges of the Keeler gap in Saturn's A ring to be mile-high giants, towering over the rings surrounding them". [...]

Don Tapscott talks about his Edge Feature, "The Impending Demise of the University", on Huffington Post. 91 comments in 18 hours. [...]

"Accommodation" debate: posts in chronological order (suggested presentation):

Nicholas Kristof's NYT column on Richard Nisbett's "Intelligence and How to Get It" [...]

Alan Alda, Edward O. Wilson at World Science Festival opening [...]

Dennis Overbye at Brian Greene's Cosmic Circus. [...]

Daniel C. Dennett and Richard Dawkins The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews [...]

Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews [...]

Edge 288
June 4, 2009

THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY [6.4.09]
By Don Tapscott

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

DON TAPSCOTT is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Don Tapscott's Edge Bio Page



REALITY CLUB
:
James O'Donnell, Marc D. Hauser

[...continue]




On "WILL WE DECAMP FOR THE NORTHERN RIM?"
By Laurence C. Smith

STEWART BRAND One of the finest short essays I've seen.

I'm eager to hear Smith's perspective on the Northern Rim as a climate driver. As the permafrost melts and the boreal forest marches north, what happens with methane and CO2 emissions? What happens with snow and vegetation albedo? What happens with cloud and precipitation regimes? How are coastal areas different from the vast inlands? ...

ALUN ANDERSON This is a fun essay if you read it backwards. The real conclusion towards the end is that we are talking about a "conversion from land that is hardly livable to land that is somewhat livable" which is perhaps not such a big change.

I don't think that the small change in winter low temperatures as climate warms is the constraint on the development of the Arctic.

The fundamental constraints are the world price of natural resources and the strength of the environmental lobby (outside of Russia). There has been development in the Arctic already, long before the temperature warmed a little bit. It is just very very expensive. ...

LAWRENCE C. SMITH Brand and Anderson's remarks highlight beautifully the strange dichotomy that our northern high latitudes have with the rest of the world. They are remote, marginal, and thinly populated yet also have enormous potential to play with the rest of us. One way, as Anderson describes, is through sharing of their vast resource wealth. It’s an iffy affair that depends crucially on the economics of transport, labor availability, and commodity prices; and often environmental regulation.

The prospect of southern refugees pouring into the Arctic — or even wanting to — is miniscule; time will whether coming decades will see the rapid growth of human activities in the North. But the pressures are there, and climate change is just one of several including demographic, political, and resource-based. Aboriginal people are in a surprisingly good position to advance northern development and with it, themselves. ...

[...continue]


NEW WILL WE DECAMP FOR THE NORTHERN RIM? [5.26.09]
By Laurence C. Smith


Already the impacts are obvious in the extreme north, where melting Arctic sea ice, drowning polar bears, and forlorn Inuit hunters are by now iconic images of global warming. The rapidity and severity of Arctic warming is truly dramatic. However, the Arctic, a relatively small, thinly populated region, will always be marginal in terms of its raw social and economic impact on the rest of us. The greater story lies to the south, penetrating deeply into the "Northern Rim," a vast zone of economically significant territory and adjacent ocean owned by the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. As in the Arctic, climate change there has already begun. This zone — which constitutes almost 30 percent of the Earth's land area and is home to its largest remaining forests, its greatest untouched mineral, water, and energy reserves, and a (growing) population of almost 100 million people — will undergo one of the most profound biophysical and social expansions of this century.

Laurence C. Smith is Professor and vice chairman of geography and professor of earth and space sciences at UCLA. He studies likely impacts of northern climate change including the economic effects in the Northern Rim.

Laurence C. Smith's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

From WHAT'S NEXT? Dispatches on the Future of Science Edited By Max Brockman



REALITY CLUB
:
Stewart Brand, Alun Anderson


The engrossing essay collection which offers a youthful spin on some of the most pressing scientific issues of today—and tomorrow...Kinda scary? Yes! Super smart and interesting? Definitely. The Observer's Very Short List

"A captivating collection of essays ... a medley of big ideas." — Amanda Gefter, New Scientist

"The perfect collection for people who like to stay up on recent scientific research but haven't the time or expertise to go to the original sources." — Playback.stl.com

WHAT'S NEXT? [5.26.09]
Dispatches on the Future of Science
Edited By Max Brockman

 

If these authors are the future of science, then the science of the future will be one exciting ride! Find out what the best minds of the new generation are thinking before the Nobel Committee does. A fascinating chronicle of the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night. Daniel Gilbert

"A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years."Steven Pinker

[ED. NOTE: What are "the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night?" Beginning today with Laurence Smith's "Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim", and in the coming weeks, Edge will publish a selection of the essays in Max Brockman's book What's Next: Dispatches On the Future of Science, published today by Vintage Books. —JB]


ONLINE Max Brockman: PREFACE

To generate this list of contributors, I approached some of today's leading scientists and asked them to name some of the rising stars in their respective disciplines: those who, in their research, are tackling some of science's toughest questions and raising new ones. The list that resulted amounts to a representative who's who of the coming generation of scientists.

Max Brockman
is a literary agent at Brockman, Inc.. He also works with Edge Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit foundation that publishes Edge. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, he lives in New York City. Max Brockman's Edge Bio page

ONLINE Laurence C. Smith: "WILL WE DECAMP FOR THE NORTHERN RIM?"

At stake is no less than the global pattern of human settlement in the twenty-first century.

Laurence C. Smith is Professor and vice chairman of geography and professor of earth and space sciences at UCLA. He studies likely impacts of northern climate change including the economic effects in the Northern Rim. Laurence C. Smith's Edge Bio Page

Christian Keysers: "MIRROR NEURONS: ARE WE ETHICAL BY NATURE"

Evolution has equipped our brains with circuits that enable us to experience what other individuals do and feel.

Christian Keysers, a neuroscientist, is professor of the social brain and scientific director at the Neuroimaging Center of the University Medical Center Groningen. His research contributed to the discovery of auditory mirror neurons and enlarged the concept of mirror neurons by applying it to emotions and sensations. Christian Keysers's Edge Bio Page

Nick Bostrom: "HOW SHALL WE ENHANCE HUMAN BEINGS?"

Given our rudimentary understanding of the human organism, particularly the brain, how can we hope to enhance such a system? It would amount to outdoing evolution....

Nick Bostrom, a philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. His research covers issues in the foundations of probability theory, global catastrophic risk, the ethics of human enhancement, and the effects of future technologies. Nick Bostrom's Edge Bio Page

Sean Carroll : "OUR PLACE IN AN UNNATURAL UNIVERSE"

The early universe is hot and dense; the late universe is cold and dilute. Well...why is it like that? The truth is, we have no idea.

Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist, is a senior research associate at Caltech. His research ranges over a number of topics in theoretical physics, including cosmology, field theory, particle physics, and gravitation. He is the author if a graduate textbook, Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity and cofounder and contributor to the Cosmic Variance blog. Sean Carroll's Edge Bio Page

Stephon H. S. Alexander: "JUST WHAT IS DARK ENERGY?"

Dark energy, itself directly unobservable, is the most bewildering substance known, the only "stuff" that acts both on subatomic scales and across the largest distances in the cosmos.

Stephon H. S. Alexander is an assistant professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on unresolved problems—such as the cosmological-constant or dark-energy problem—that connect cosmology to quantum gravity and the standard model of elementary particles. Stephon H. S. Alexander's Edge Bio Page

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: "DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL BRAIN IN ADOLESCENCE"

Using modern brain-imaging techniques, scientists are discovering that the human brain does indeed change well beyond early childhood.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.Her research focuses on the development of mentalizing, action understanding, and executive function during adolescence, using a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's Edge Bio Page

Jason P. Mitchell: "WATCHING MINDS INTERACT"

Perhaps the least anticipated contribution of brain imaging to psychological science has been a sudden appreciation of the centrality of social thought to the human mental repertoire.

Jason P. Mitchell is principal investigator of Harvard University's Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, where he uses functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and behavioral methods to study how perceivers infer the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of others. Jason P. Mitchell's Edge Bio Page

Matthew D. Lieberman: "WHAT MAKES BIG IDEAS STICKY?"

Big Ideas sometimes match the structure and function of the human brain such that the brain causes us to see the world in ways that make it virtually impossible not to believe them.

Matthew D. Lieberman, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA, conducts research in such social cognitive neuroscience topics as self-control, self-awareness, automaticity, social rejection, and persuasion. Matthew D. Lieberman's Edge Bio Page

Joshua D. Greene: "FRUIT FLIES OF THE MORAL MIND"

People often speak of a "moral faculty" or a "moral sense," suggesting that moral judgment is a unified phenomenon, but recent advances in the scientific study of moral judgment paint a very different picture.

Joshua D. Greene, a cognitive neuroscientist and a philosopher, is an assistant professor at Harvard University's Department of Psychology. His primary research interest is the psychological and neuroscientific study of morality, focusing on the interplay between emotional and "cognitive" processes in moral decision making. Joshua D. Greene's Edge Bio Page

ONLINE Lera Boroditsky: "DO OUR LANGUAGES SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?"

Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

Lera Boroditsky is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University. Her research centers on the nature of mental representation and how knowledge emerges out of the interactions of mind, world, and language. Lera Boroditsky's Edge Bio Page

Sam Cooke: "MEMORY ENHANCEMENT, MEMORY ERASURE: IS THIS THE FUTURE OF OUR PAST?"

Once we come to understand how our memories are formed, stored, and recalled within the brain, we may be able to manipulate them—to shape our own stories. Our past—or at least our recollection of our past—may become a matter of choice.

Sam Cooke, a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a neuroscientist who probes the biology of memory. Sam Cooke's Edge Bio Page

Deena Skolnick Weisberg: "THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF IMAGINATION"

The main goal of my research is to discover the nature of the what-if mechanism and how it allows us to create and comprehend fictional worlds.

Deena Skolnick Weisberg is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the psychology department at Rutgers University. Her research focuses primarily on the cognitive skills underlying the creation and representation of non-real scenarios—particularly stories, games of pretending, and counterfactual situations—and on how those skills mature in child development. Deena Skolnick Weisberg's Edge Bio Page

ONLINE David M. Eagleman: "BRAIN TIME"

The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally.

David M. Eagleman is Director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine The Dynamically Reorganizing Brain; and a book of fiction titled Sum. David Eagleman's Edge Bio Page

Vanessa Woods & Brian Hare: "OUT OF OUR MINDS: HOW DID HUMANS COME DOWN FROM THE TREES AND WHY DID NO ONE FOLLOW?"

In the 6 million years since hominids split from the evolutionary ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos, something happened to our brains that allowed us to become master cooperators, accumulate knowledge at a rapid rate, and manipulate tools to colonize almost every corner of the planet.

Vanessa Woods, author of It's Every Monkey for Themselves, is an award-winning journalist who has a double degree in biology and English from the University of New South Wales. She is a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group and studies the psychology of bonobos and chimpanzees in Africa. Vanessa Woods's Edge Bio Page

Brian Hare is an anthropologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy at Duke University. His research centers on human cognitive evolution, and his experience in the field includes work in Siberia, the jungle of Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Brian Hare's Edge Bio Page


Nathan Wolfe: "THE ALIENS AMONG US"

While viruses have to infect cellular forms of life in order to complete their life cycles, this does not mean that causing devastation is their destiny. The existing equilibrium of our planet is dependent on the actions of the viral world, and their elimination would have profound consequences.

Nathan Wolfe is the Lorry Lokey Visiting Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. His research combines methods from molecular virology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to study the biology of viral emergence. Nathan Wolfe's Edge Bio Page

Seirian Sumner: "HOW DID THE SOCIAL INSECTS BECOME SOCIAL?"

We would like to know what the conditions and selection pressures were that tipped the ancestors of the eusocial insects over the ledge and down toward eusociality.

Seirian Sumner is a research fellow in evolutionary biology at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London. Her research focuses on the evolution of sociality—how eusociality evolves and how social behavior is maintained.  She has worked with a variety of bees, wasps, and ants from around the world, studying their behavior through observation, experimental manipulation, and molecular analyses, including gene expression. Seirian Sumner's Edge Bio Page

Katerina Harvati : "EXTINCTION AND THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANKIND"

It is now clear that humans (whether fossil or living) are not immune from biological forces and that extinction was (and, indeed, is) a distinct possibility.

Katerina Harvati is a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology specializing in Neanderthal evolution and modern human origins. Her research interests include evolutionary theory, the relationship between morphological variation and genetic and environmental factors, and the evolution of primate and human life history. Katerina Harvati's Edge Bio Page

Gavin Schmidt: "WHY HASN'T SPECIALIZATION LED TO THE BALKANIZATION OF SCIENCE?"

Even as scientific output has increased exponentially, concerns have been raised that growing specialization will end by making it impossible for scientists in different fields to communicate, let alone collaborate.

Gavin Schmidt is a climatologist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, where he models past, present, and future climate. He is a cofounder and contributing editor of RealClimate.org, which provides context and background on climate science issues that are missing in popular media coverage.Gavin Schmidt's Edge Bio Page


The engrossing essay collection which offers a youthful spin on some of the most pressing scientific issues of today—and tomorrow...Kinda scary? Yes! Super smart and interesting? Definitely. The Observer's Very Short List

"A captivating collection of essays ... a medley of big ideas." — Amanda Gefter, New Scientist

"The perfect collection for people who like to stay up on recent scientific research but haven't the time or expertise to go to the original sources." — Playback.stl.com

WHAT'S NEXT?
Dispatches on the Future of Science
Edited By Max Brockman

If these authors are the future of science, then the science of the future will be one exciting ride! Find out what the best minds of the new generation are thinking before the Nobel Committee does. A fascinating chronicle of the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night. Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

"A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years." — Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought

"Brockman has a nose for talent." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author The Black Swan

"Capaciously accessible, these writings project a curiosity to which followers of science news will gravitate." — Booklist


The paradox of modern neuroscience is that the one reality you can't describe as it is presently conceived is the only reality we'll ever know, which is the subjective first person view of things. Even if you can find the circuit of cells that gives rise to that, and you can construct a good causal demonstration that you knock out these circuit of cells, and you create a zombie; even if you do that... and I know Dennett could dismantle this argument very, very quickly ... there's still a mystery that persists, and this is the old brain-body, mind-body problem, and we don't simply feel like three pounds of meat.

CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE [5.21.09]
A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer


JONAH LEHRER, Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist, has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.

Jonah Lehrer's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]


The Third Culture has grown beyond Edge, as scientists have become increasingly public — and even famous  — figures. Seed approached six thinkers to ask where we are now: Whether the Two Cultures are still divided, and what role the Third Culture is playing.

SEED CELEBRATES THE QUESTIONS C.P. SNOW RAISED 50 YEARS AGO BY ASKING: WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Introduction

"Are we beyond the Two Cultures?" asks Seed Magazine in its May 7 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture. Readers following Edge since it began 12 years, 285 editions, and 2,939,953 words ago, know how to answer this question. Fortunately, Seed follows up and asks "Where are we now?"

It's been clear for several years that the third culture I predicted I fifteen years earlier has been in need of an update. "There are encouraging signs," I wrote in "The Expanding Third Culture" (2006), "that the third culture includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists do. Like their colleagues in the sciences, they believe there is a real world and their job is to understand it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and understanding and knowledge accumulate through such challenges. They are not reducing the humanities to biological and physical principles, but they do believe that art, literature, history, politics—a whole panoply of humanist concerns—need to take the sciences into account."

Seed has played in this field of ideas, creating their own kind of culture, one that embraces artists, architects, novelists designers, musicians, etc., presenting their work in vibrant and imaginative ways.

In the videos below, Seed asks six notable scientists, authors, thinkers (all also early Edge contributors) to comment on where the third culture is today.

John Brockman

"May 7 marks the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture. Half a century ago the prominent novelist and speaker, who studied under Lord Rutherford, described a chasm between literary intellectuals and scientists, a gulf that impoverished both sides and impeded efforts to relieve suffering around the world. Science was not understood or respected by the dominant culture, to the detriment of all, he said. At some point scientists had ceased to be considered intellectuals, Snow noted, and though any educated person was required to know Shakespeare, almost none knew the second law of thermodynamics.

"Snow's words touched off decades of debate on both the existence of the "Two Cultures" and the possibility of a "Third Culture" — a group Snow envisioned as curious non-scientists who could bridge the gap between scientists and humanists. In 1991, literary agent John Brockman wrote an essay entitled "The Third Culture," which made the point that "scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." In 1991, his Edge Foundation launched a website  — Edge— explicitly to bring together intellectuals of the Third Culture — many scientists, but also writers and philosophers—with the goal of bringing empirical studies directly to the public. The Third Culture has grown beyond Edge, as scientists have become increasingly public — and even famous  — figures. Seed approached six thinkers to ask where we are now: Whether the Two Cultures are still divided, and what role the Third Culture is playing."


E.O. Wilson's Edge Bio Page

Janna Levin's Edge Bio Page






"For those seeking substance over sheen, the occasional videos released at Edge.org hit the mark. The Edge Foundation community is a circle, mainly scientists but also other academics, entrepreneurs, and cultural figures. ... Edge's long-form interview videos are a deep-dive into the daily lives and passions of its subjects, and their passions are presented without primers or apologies. The decidedly noncommercial nature of Edge's offerings, and the egghead imprimatur of the Edge community, lend its videos a refreshing air, making one wonder if broadcast television will ever offer half the off-kilter sparkle of their salon chatter. — Boston Globe

Mahzarin Banaji, John Bargh, Samuel Barondes, Yochai Benkler, Paul Bloom, Rodney Brooks, Hubert Burda, George Church, Nicholas Christakis, Brian Cox, Iain Couzin, Helena Cronin, Paul Davies, Daniel C. Dennett, David Deutsch,Dennis Dutton, Jared Diamond, Freeman Dyson, Drew Endy, Peter Galison, Murray Gell-Mann, David Gelernter, Neil Gershenfeld, Anthony Giddens, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Gilbert, Rebecca Goldstein, John Gottman, Brian Greene, Anthony Greenwald, Alan Guth, David Haig, Marc D. Hauser, Walter Isaacson, Steve Jones, Daniel Kahneman, Stuart Kauffman, Ken Kesey, Stephen Kosslyn, Lawrence Krauss, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Jonah Lehrer, Armand Leroi, Seth Lloyd, Gary Marcus, John Markoff, Ernst Mayr, Marvin Minsky, Sendhil Mullainathan, Dennis Overbye, Dean Ornish, Elaine Pagels, Steven Pinker, Jordan Pollack, Lisa Randall, Martin Rees, Matt Ridley, Lee Smolin, Elisabeth Spelke, Scott Sampson, Robert Sapolsky, Dimitar Sasselov, Stephen Schneider, Martin Seligman, Robert Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Gavin Schmidt, Lee Smolin, Dan Sperber, Paul Steinhardt, Steven Strogatz, Seirian Sumner, Leonard Susskind, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Timothy Taylor, Richard Thaler, Robert Trivers, Neil Turok, J.Craig Venter, Edward O. Wilson, Lewis Wolpert, Richard Wrangham, Philip Zimbardo

[Continue to Edge Video]


After all, we are witnessing the Waterloo of Wall Street. So, ironically, it was in the Canadian province of Ontario, in the small town of Waterloo, that a meeting was convened to shed new light on the world's financial debacle. In a densely packed conference schedule, the general approach was to take measure of the crisis not only in a new way, but with instruments never used before. Even the venue for event, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, was itself programmatic, though invitations to participate were sent far beyond the boundaries of economics and physics to mathematicians, lawyers, behavioral economists, risk managers, evolutionary biologists, complexity theorists and computer scientists.— Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

THE ECONOMIC MANHATTAN PROJECT — THE VIDEOS

Introduction

In December, Edge published "Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?" by Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, and Lee Smolin. The paper was prompted by a suggestion by Eric Weinstein for an "Economic Manhattan Project".

This led to the Perimeter Institute conference: "The Economic Crisis and its Implications for The Science of Economics". According to the organizers, "Concerns over the current financial situation are giving rise to a need to evaluate the very mathematics that underpins economics as a predictive and descriptive science. A growing desire to examine economics through the lens of diverse scientific methodologies — including physics and complex systems — is making way to a meeting of leading economists and theorists of finance together with physicists, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists in an effort to evaluate current theories of markets and identify key issues that can motivate new directions for research."


Eric Weinstein Nouriel Roubini Richard Freeman Nassim Taleb at Perimeter

The conference began on May 1st, with a day of invited talks by leading experts to a public audience on the status of economic and financial theory in light of the crisis. I was pleased to be invited and to listen to the first day of public talks.

Among those participating were Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb, Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Eric Weinstein, introduced by Theoretical Physicist Neil Turok, who recently moved Cambridge to become the Executive Director of Perimeter, and Lee Smolin, a founding member and research physicist. Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute, and one of the original Edge contributors, was also in attendance.


Nassim Taleb at Perimeter: there's too much in the fourth quadrant to clean up.

Eric Weinstein set the stage with a statement on his talk, which began the proceedings:

An unexpected economic crisis provides an excellent opportunity to better understand the state of Economic theory as a science. While there appears to have been a broad systemic failure within the community of professional economists to predict the current collapse, it must be noted that there have been scattered successes which appear striking and demand our attention. The goal of this conference is to bring together economists, biologists, mathematicians, physicists, programmers, and financial professionals to explore the opportunities for bringing economic theory into closer contact with the more traditional sciences as the basis for ongoing work, partnership, and collaboration.


Eric Weinstein: Success is not an option

Jordan Mejias, arts correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and frequent Edge contributor, attended as well. His interesting report ran on the front page of the FAZ Feuilleton.


Jordan Mejias

I am pleased to present the video presentations of Eric Weinstein; Nouriel Roubini; Nassim Taleb, a panel discussion of Eric Weinstein, Nouriel Roubini, Richard Freeman, and Nassim Taleb; Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander; a panel discussion of Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Bill Janeway, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose; and Doyne Farmer.

John Brockman


A SCIENCE LESS DISMAL: WELCOME TO THE ECONOMIC MANHATTAN PROJECT
Eric R. Weinstein


INTERPRETING THE FAILURE TO PREDICT FINANCIAL CRISES AND RECESSION
Nouriel Roubin
i


UNTITLED
Nassim Taleb


PANEL DISCUSSION
Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb , Richard Freeman, Eric R. Weinstein


SCIENTISTS, SCIENSTERS, ANTI-SCIENTISTS & ECONOMISTS
Emanuel Derman


THE ADAPTIVE MARKETS HYPOTHESIS AND FINANCIAL CRISIS
Andrew Lo


HUMAN EVOLUTION AND ECONOMICS
Richard Alexander


PANEL DISCUSSION
Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Bill Janeway, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose


PHYSICISTS ATTEMPT TO SCALE THE IVORY TOWERS OF FINANCE (TEN YEARS LATER, LOOKING FORWARD)
Doyne Farmer


[...continue]


The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PUBLICATION OF
C.P. SNOW'S REDE LECTURE,
"THE TWO CULTURES"
[5.7.09]

Today, May 7, 2009, marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of C.P. Snow's Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures". In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. This never happened. Although I borrowed Snow's phrase in my 1991 essay "The Third Culture", it does not describe the third culture he predicted.

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers isn the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. Increasingly, The Third Culture has moved into the mainstream and the questions it is asking are those that inform us about ourselves and the world around us.

I am pleased to honor the memory of C.P. Snow and his "Two Cultures" by presenting "The Third Culture" on Edge, from 1997 to today (2,939,953 words).

John Brockman, Editor

[...continue]


The threat of deadly new viruses is on the rise due to population growth, climate change and increased contact between humans and animals. What the world needs to do to prepare.

THE AGE OF PANDEMIC [5.7.09]
By Larry Brilliant

LAWRENCE B. BRILLIANT, is chairman of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee and chief philanthropy evangelist at Google.He is a medical doctor who was a professor of international health and epidemiology at the University of Michigan from 1976-1986 and prior to that he lived in India and worked as a medical officer for the United Nations World Health Organization helping lead the successful effort to eradicate smallpox. He is a founder and a director of the Seva Foundation, an international organization dedicated to fighting blindness. Brilliant will soon begin work as president of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund.

Larry Brilliant's Edge Bio page

[...continue]


My organization and its collaborators have recently set up virus monitoring stations in China, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet this is just a beginning. To establish a worldwide safety net, we would need to monitor thousands of people exposed to animals in dozens of sites around the world — not only hunters but also people working on farms and in animal markets. It is important that the American government make pandemic prevention a priority and devote more resources to expanding disease surveillance in people and in wild and domestic animal populations throughout the world.

HOW TO PREVENT A PANDEMIC
By Nathan Wolfe

NATHAN WOLFE is the Lorry Lokey Visiting Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (www.gvfi.org). His research combines methods from molecular virology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to study the biology of viral emergence.

Nathan Wolfe's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]


MADDOX BY HIS SUCCESSOR [4.26.09]
By Philip Campbell

It has been said of the archetypal Great Man (by Nietzsche) that "he is colder, harder, less hesitating and without fear of opinion". To me, whether Maddox was a Great Man or not, that seems a fair description. Nietzsche also said that such a person "wears a mask: there is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame." Maddox was as capable as anyone of openly enjoying people's company or, when necessary, of good poker-like negotiation. He was someone for whom collegiality mattered, but for whom it was ultimately impersonal. He was a good judge of people, often supportive, never (as far as I know) betraying the interests of his staff whereas, in professional contexts, he could be ruthless and always retained a cool-headed detachment. These qualities, combined with his journalistic virtuosities, made him a controversial editor but also a great one.

PHILIP CAMPBELL succeeded John Maddox as editor of Nature in 1995.

Philip Cambell's Edge Bio Page.

[...continue]


"We met, he kissed me, and then it all fell apart. We just couldn't agree about Jerry Fodor and Bill Bryson. A poignant pic." Armand Marie Leroi

EDGE LONDON DINNER — 2009 PHOTO ALBUM
April 20, 2009 — Zilly Fish, London


Terry Gilliam & Brian Eno


Alfonso Cuarón


Armand Leroi & Andrew Franklin, Profile Books

Terry Gilliam & Brian Eno & Alfonso Cuarón & Armand Leroi & Andrew Franklin, Profile Books & Bruno Maddox & Roger Highfield, New Scientist & Richard Dawkins & Sally Gaminera, Transworld Publishers & Brenda Maddox & Katinka Matson Edge Foundation & Maja Hoffmann, Luma Foundation & Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Gallery & Toby Coppel & Stefan McGrath, Penguin Press & Andrea Cane, Mondadori & Russell Weinberger, Edge Foundation & Peter Sillem, S. Fisher Verlag & Gino, Zilli Fish & James Geary & John Lloyd, QI & Thomas Rathnow, Siedler Verlag & Britta Egetemeier, Piper Verlag & Rupert Sheldrake & Nicholas Humphrey & Vittorio Bo , Genoa Science Festival & Lewis Wolpert & Tom Standage, The Economist & Phillip Campbell, Nature & Jeremy Webb, New Scientist & Helen Conford, Penguin Press & Mark Henderson, The Times; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc. & Albert Bonnier, Bonnier Publishing & Slav Todorov, Quercus Publishing & Alok Jha, The Guardian & Anjana Ahuja, The Times & AC Grayling & Dominque LeGlu, Éditions Robert Laffont & Will Goodlad, Penguin Press & Matt Ridley & Lala Ward & David Goodhart, Prospect & Timothy Taylor & Geoffrey Carr, The Economist & Nick Bostrom & Armand Leroi & Andrew Franklin, Profile Books

[...Continue to Photo Album of the Edge London Dinner - 2009]


The central idea we were working on was this idea of de-localized information — information for which I didn't care what computer it was stored on. It didn't depend on any particular computer. I didn't know the identities of other computers in the ensemble that I was working on. I just knew myself and the cybersphere, or sometimes we called it the tuplesphere, or just a bunch of information floating around. We used the analogy — we talked about helium balloons. We used a million ways to try and explain this idea.

LORD OF THE CLOUD
John Markoff and Clay Shirky Talk to David Gelernter
[4.24.09]
An Edge Roundtable


Video 1

David Gelernter .....

"...prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web. He understood the idea half a decade before it happened." (John Markoff)

"...is a treasure in the world of computer science...the most articulate and thoughtful of the great living practitioners" (Jaron Lanier)

"...is one of the pioneers in getting many computers to work together and cooperate on solving a single problem, which is the future of computing." (Danny Hillis)

"...is one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time." (Bill Joy)

In 1991 Gelernter had published a book for technologists (an extended research paper) called Mirror Worlds, claiming in effect that one day, there would be something like the Web. As well as forecasting the Web, the book, according to the people who built these systems, also helped lay the basis for the internet programming language "Java" and Sun Microsystems' "Jini."

Gelernter's earlier work on his parallel programming language "Linda" (which allows you to distribute a computer program across a multitude of processors and thus break down problems into a multitude of parts in order to solve them more quickly) and "tuple spaces" underlies such modern-day systems as Sun's JavaSpaces, IBM's T-Spaces, a Lucent company's new "InfernoSpaces" and many other descendants worldwide.

By mid-'92 this set of ideas had taken hold and was exerting a strong influence . By 1993 the Internet was growing fast, and the Web was about to be launched. Gelernter's research group at Yale was an acknowledged world leader in network software and more important, it was known for "The Vision Thing", for the big picture.

In this audacious Edge manifesto, "The Second Coming", he writes: "Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us."

In his manifesto, Gelernter further developed ideas he had been working on since the 1980s. One such idea was that of the cyberbody as a "cloud":

17. A cyberbody can be replicated or distributed over many computers; can inhabit many computers at the same time. If the Cybersphere's computers are tiles in a paved courtyard, a cyberbody is a cloud's drifting shadow covering many tiles simultaneously.

He also inroduced his idea of the "life stream":

38. A "lifestream" organizes information not as a file cabinet does but roughly as a mind does.

39. A lifestream is a sequence of all kinds of documents — all the electronic documents, digital photos, applications, Web bookmarks, rolodex cards, email messages and every other digital information chunk in your life — arranged from oldest to youngest, constantly growing as new documents arrive, easy to browse and search, with a past, present and future, appearing on your screen as a receding parade of index cards. Documents have no names and there are no directories; you retrieve elements by content: "Fifth Avenue" yields a sub-stream of every document that mentions Fifth Avenue.

40. A stream flows because time flows, and the stream is a concrete representation of time. The "now" line divides past from future. If you have a meeting at 10AM tomorow, you put a reminder document in the future of your stream, at 10AM tomorrow. It flows steadily towards now. When now equals 10AM tomorrow, the reminder leaps over the now line and flows into the past. When you look at the future of your stream you see your plans and appointments, flowing steadily out of the future into the present, then the past.

Today, Bill Gates's name is synonymous with Microsoft Basic. A mention of Bill Joy in the press is usally accompanied by acknowledgement of his early development work on UNIX. Ted Nelson is always associated with hypertext. Jaron Lanier is often identified and credited with his pioneering work on virtual reality. But rarely are "cloud computing" and "lifestreams" (or "lifestreaming") presented in connection with, and with proper credit to, the visionary behind them.

Edge asked John Markoff, who covers technology for The New York Times, and first brought Gelernter's ideas to a wide reading public with his 1991 New York Times profile, and social software seer Clay Shirky. a professor at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), to talk to Gelernter about his ideas. The roundtable took place in New York City on April 25, 2009.

John Brockman


DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide. He is the author of Mirror Worlds, and Drawiing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

David Gelernter's Edge Bio page

JOHN MARKOFF covers the computer industry and technology for The New York Times. He is the coauthor ofTakedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura), and author of What The Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

John Markoff's Edge Bio page

CLAY SHIRKY is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology—how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. He is the author of Here Comes Everybody.

Clay Shirky's Edge Bio page


Video 2

[...continue]


logo

In this Edge Video, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen looks at one test he's developed to see if there are differences between males and females in the mind.

"It turns out that when you test newborn babies—this experiment was done at the age of 24 hours old, where we had 100 babies who were tested looking at two kinds of objects—a human face and a mechanical mobile. And they were filmed for how long they looked at each of these two objects. What you can see here is that on the first day of life, we had more boys than girls looking for longer at the mechanical mobile and more girls than boys looking at the face. So you can see that these differences when they emerge, first of all they seem to emerge very early—at birth—suggesting that there may be a biological component to a sex difference in, in this case, interest in faces; and secondly, they don't apply to all males or all females, these differences emerge as statistical trends when you compare groups."

SIMON BARON-COHEN is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His several books include Mindblindness; and The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain.

Simon Baron-Cohen's Edge Bio Page

This is sixth in a series of Edge Videos of "table-top experiments" presented as part of the 2007 Edge/Serpentine collaboration during Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon in London, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist under the leadership of Director Julia Peyton-Jones. Edge presenters were zoologist Seirian Sumner, archeologist Timothy Taylor, evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, geneticist Steve Jones, physicist Neil Turok, embryologist Lewis Wolpert, and psycholgist Steven Pinker and playwright Marcy Kahan. The live event was featured at the Serpentine as part of the Edge/Serpentine collaboration: "What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm? Formulae For the 21st Century."

Writing in Sueddeutsche Zeitung ("Short Answers To Big Questions"), Feuilleton editor Andrian Kreye noted that:

The experiment is not only represents a collaboration by Brockman and Obrist's of their own work; it is also a continuation of a movement that began in the '60s on America's East Coast. John Cage brought together young artists and scientists for symposia and seminars to see what what would happen in the interaction of big thinkers from different fields. The resulting dialogue, which at the time seemed abstract and esoteric, can today be regarded as the forerunner to interdisciplinary science and the digital culture.

[...continue]


Science is the greatest achievement of human history so far. I say that as a huge admirer of the Renaissance and Renaissance art, music and literature, but the world-transforming power of science and the tremendous insights that we've gained show that this is an enterprise, a wonderful collective enterprise, that is a great achievement of humanity. How are we going to make more people party to that? That's a pressing question for our century.

PRESSING QUESTIONS FOR OUR CENTURY [4.16.09]
A Talk With AC Grayling

AC GRAYLING is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. His most recent book is Ideas That Matter.

AC Grayling's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]


subscribe
Email address:
Your name
(required) :
country:

subscribe

"Brilliant, essential and addictive...It interprets, it interrogates, it provokes."
PUBLICO ((LISBON)

"Not just wonderful but plausible."
WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Where the dawning of the age of biology was officially announced."
SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG

"Thoughts to make jaws drop."
FAZ

"The world's finest minds ...an intellectual treasure trove... intense, enlight-ening reading."
SF CHRONICLE

"A jolt of fresh thinking ... bracing, possibly shriek-inducing, and bound to wake you up."
GLOBE AND MAIL

"Passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions."
TORONTO STAR

"Hard to beat."
NATIONAL REVIEW

"The world's best brains."
THE TIMES

"Provocative."
THE TELEGRAPH

"Splendidly enlightened."
THE INDEPENDENT

"The coolest online forum."
IL GIORNALE (MILAN)

"A remarkable feast of the intellect... an amazing group of the most interesting people on the planet." O'REILLY RADAR

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture."
EL MUNDO

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine."
THE INDEPENDENT

"The intellectual elite."
THE GUARDIAN

"Praised by everyone...they are the frontier."
SCOTSMAN

"Persuasively upbeat."
O. THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

"Much to astonish...vitally engaging."
THE INDPENDENT

"Uplifting ...enthralling."
MAIL ON SUNDAY

"Sparky andprovoking ... radiates bright ideas."
THE INDPENDENT

"Truly incendiary."
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

"Fascinating and provocative reading."
THE GUARDIAN

"Brilliant... a eureka moment at the edge of knowledge."
SUNDAY TIMES

"A major force on the intellectual scene in the US ... required reading."
IRISH TIMES

"Intellectual and creative magnificence."
SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

"Astounding reading."
BOSTON GLOBE

"Fascinating website."
TORONTO STAR

"Unprecedented roster of brilliant minds ... nothing short of visionary."
SEED

"Fantastically stimulating ...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world."
BBC RADIO 4

"Brilliant minds at work... exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling."
EVENING STANDARD

"The most explosive ideas of our age."
SUNDAY HERALD

"Scientific pipedreams at their very best."
THE GUARDIAN


"Wonderful reading."

THE TIMES

"Strangely addictive."
THE TELEGRAPH

"The greatest virtual research university in the world."
ARTS & LETTERS DAILY

"Audacious and stimulating."
LA VANGUARDIA

"Brilliant!
SUNDAY TIMES

"
A running fire of a provocative and fascinating theses."
LA STAMPA

"One of the most interesting stopping places on the Web."

NEW YORK TIMES

"A stellar cast of thinkers."
THE GUARDIAN

"The ultimate scientific seminar series."
THES

"Fascinating and thought-provoking ...wonderful, intelligent."
AMERICAN SCIENTIST

"Today's visions of science tomorrow."
NEW YORK TIMES

"A major force on the intellectual scene in the US ... required reading."
IRISH TIMES

"Thrilling."
FAZ

"Awesome ... brilliant."
WIRED

"Websites of the year ... Inspired Arena...the world's foremost scientific thinkers."
SUNDAY TIMES

"Deliciously creative ... the variety astonishes ... intellectual skyrockets of stunning brilliance. Nobody in the world is doing what Edge is doing."
ARTS & LETTERS DAILY

"Marvellous ... highly recommended."
PROSPECT


"Profound, esoteric and outright entertaining."
MERCURY NEWS

"Terrific, thought provoking." THE GUARDIAN

"The brightest scientists and thinkers ... heady ... deep and refreshing."
— Kevin Kelly, WIRED

"Fascinating survey of intellectual and creative wonders of the world ... Thoughtful and often surprising ...reminds me of how wondrous our world is." — Bill Gates, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"An Enjoyable read".
SALON.COM

"A-list: Dorothy Parkers Vicious Circle without the food and alcohol ... a brilliant format."
WIRED

"Big, deep and ambitous questions... breathtaking in scope."
NEW SCIENTIST

"Lively, sometimes obscure and almost always ambitious."
THE INDEPENDENT


"Open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful ... an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world ... an ongoing and thrilling colloquium. "— Ian McEwan, THE TELEGRAPH

MORE


subscribe


AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES AND ONLINE

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

The world's finest minds have responded with some of the most insightful, humbling, fascinating confessions and anecdotes, an intellectual treasure trove. ... Best three or four hours of intense, enlightening reading you can do for the new year. Read it now."
San Francisco Chronicle

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture."
El Mundo


Praise for
What Have You Change Your Mind About?

"The splendidly enlightened Edge website (www.edge.org) has rounded off each year of inter-disciplinary debate by asking its heavy-hitting contributors to answer one question. I strongly recommend a visit." The Independent

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." El Mundo

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." The Independent

"They are the intellectual elite, the brains the rest of us rely on to make sense of the universe and answer the big questions. But in a refreshing show of new year humility, the world's best thinkers have admitted that from time to time even they are forced to change their minds." The Guardian

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." The Times

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures."The Telegraph

The world's finest minds have responded with some of the most insightful, humbling, fascinating confessions and anecdotes, an intellectual treasure trove. ... Best three or four hours of intense, enlightening reading you can do for the new year. Read it now." San Francisco Chronicle

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." The News & Observer

"A jolt of fresh thinking...The answers address a fabulous array of issues. This is the intellectual equivalent of a New Year's dip in the lake — bracing, possibly shriek-inducing, and bound to wake you up." The Globe and Mail

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." The Toronto Star

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" National Review Online


WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?
Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better
Edited by John Brockman
Introduction by DANIEL C. DENNETT



[2007]

"The optimistic visions seem not just wonderful but plausible." Wall Street Journal

"Persuasively upbeat." O, The Oprah Magazine

"Our greatest minds provide nutshell insights on how science will help forge a better world ahead." Seed

"Uplifting...an enthralling book." The Mail on Sunday


WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
Edited by John Brockman
Introduction by STEVEN PINKER
Afterword by RICHARD DAWKINS


[2006]

"Danger — brilliant minds at work...A brilliant bok: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling." The Evening Standard (London)

"A selection of the most explosive ideas of our age." Sunday Herald

"Provocative" The Independent

"Challenging notions put forward by some of the world's sharpest minds" Sunday Times

"A titillating compilation" The Guardian

"Reads like an intriguing dinner party conversation among great minds in science" Discover


WHAT WE BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PROVE?
Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
Edited by John Brockman
Introduction by IAN MCEWAN


[2006]

"Whether or not we believe proof or prove belief, understanding belief itself becomes essential in a time when so many people in the world are ardent believers." LA Times

"Belief appears to motivate even the most rigorously scientific minds. It stimulates and challenges, it tricks us into holding things to be true against our better judgment, and, like scepticism -its opposite -it serves a function in science that is playful as well as thought-provoking. not we believe proof or prove belief, understanding belief itself becomes essential in a time when so many people in the world are ardent believers." The Times

"John Brockman is the PT Barnum of popular science. He has always been a great huckster of ideas." The Observer

"An unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing short of an oracle — a book ro be dog-eared and debated." Seed

"Scientific pipedreams at their very best." The Guardian

"Makes for some astounding reading." Boston Globe

"Fantastically stimulating...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world.... Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question." BBC Radio 4

"Intellectual and creative magnificence" The Skeptical Inquirer



[2008]



"Compelling"
"Stellar"

"Important"

[2006]

"Irresistible"
"Excellent"
"Fascinating"


[2006]

"incisive"
"deeply passionate"
"engaging"

[2004]

"Intriguing"
"Engrossing"
"Invigorating"



[1994]

"Rousing"
"Astonishing"
"Bloodthirsty"


[2000]

"Dazzling"
"Wondrous"
"Outstanding"


[2002]


"Provocative"
"Captivating"
"Mind-stretching"

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher

Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant
contact: editor@edge.org
Copyright © 2009 By Edge Foundation, Inc
All Rights Reserved.

|Top|