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Edge
194— October 26, 2006 |
FESTIVAL DELLA SCIENZA 2006
It's that time of year and all roads lead to Genoa and the city-wide Festival della Scienza 2006 which opens today. Edge will be there once again, staging a panel discussion on "The Expanding Third Culture" (see essay below) with Seth Lloyd, Robert Trivers, and Gloria Origgi on Tuesday, October 31st at 3:00 pm. Numerous other Edge contributors will also be present during the two week festival. Edge Panel at Festival della Scienza, Genoa |
THE EXPANDING THIRD CULTURE
Just as science—that is, reliable methods for obtaining knowledge—has encroached on areas formerly considered to belong to the humanities (such as psychology), science is also encroaching on the social sciences, especially economics, geography, history, and political science. Not just the broad observation-based and statistical methods of the historical sciences but also detailed techniques of the conventional sciences (such as genetics and molecular biology and animal behavior) are proving essential for tackling problems in the social sciences. Science is the most accurate way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it is the human spirit, the role of great men in history, or the structure of DNA. Humanities scholars and historians who spurn it condemn themselves to second-rate status and produce unreliable results. [...more] |
WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS NO GOD
Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle - and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it - an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to 'sensible' religion, in order to present a united front against ('intelligent design') creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution. That is a valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus Creationism. But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with 'moderate' religion on one side, and I find myself on the other. [...more] |
THE UNIVERSE ON A STRING ...some have argued that if, after decades of research involving thousands of scientists, the theory is still a work in progress, it's time to give up. But to suggest dropping research on the most promising approach to unification because the work has failed to meet an arbitrary timetable for complete success is, well, silly. I have worked on string theory for more than 20 years because I believe it provides the most powerful framework for constructing the long-sought unified theory. Nonetheless, should an inconsistency be found, or should future studies reveal an insuperable barrier to making contact with experimental data, or should new discoveries reveal a superior approach, I'd change my research focus, and I have little doubt that most string theorists would too. But this hasn't happened. [...more] |
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 October 25, 2006 War & Peace Was Darwin's approach to science and religion healthy and logical? To answer that question I devised a threetiered model on the relationship of science and religion. 1. CONFLICTING-WORLDS MODEL. This "warfare" model holds that science and religion are mutually exclusive ways of knowing, where one is right and the other is wrong. In this model, the findings of modern science are always a potential threat to one's faith and thus they must be carefully vetted against religious truths before acceptance; likewise, the tenets of religion are always a potential threat to science and thus they must be viewed skeptically. 2. SAME-WORLDS MODEL. More conciliatory in its nature, this position holds that science and religion are two ways of examining the same reality; as science progresses to a deeper understanding of the natural world it will reveal that many ancient religious tenets are true. 3. SEPARATE-WORLDS MODEL. On this tier science and religion are neither in conflict nor in agreement. Today it is the job of science to explain the natural world, making obsolete ancient religious sagas of origins and creation. Yet, religion thrives because it still serves a useful purpose as an institution for social cohesiveness and as a guide to finding personal meaning and spirituality. |
Life can be that way when you study your own DNA. Dr. Venter, 60 years old, is best known for his role in the scientific fight to be the first to decipher the full sequence of the human genome, the billions of DNA letters, or chemical building blocks, that make up the average human's genetic code. In the late 1990s, he headed a private company, Celera Genomics, which tried to finish the task before the Human Genome Project, a public-sector effort paid for by the U.S. government and others. Both sides reached a negotiated "tie" announced by the White House in 2000. |
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I’m
a Celebrity, Get My Sequence! The prize, underwritten a multi-million dollar donation by Archon Minerals president Stewart Blusson, will go to the team that sequences the genomes of 100 people in 10 days, although unresolved for now is how complete those sequences should be. Will the bar be set at 90 percent, 99 percent, 99.9 percent, or what?... ...X Prize Foundation chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis said at a press conference that he wanted to make DNA relevant to people by finding "celebrities and leaders of industry willing to do this." Does this mean we can now expect a crush of celebrities lobbying to join the genome list? After all, who could resist the lure of their own personal genome, the ultimate 21st-century fashion accessory? Paris Hilton or Tom Cruise? David Beckham or Terrell Owens? Diamandis says reassuringly that additional members of the Genome 100 will also include “ordinary people” – presumably he means paupers lacking multi-million dollar bank accounts -- with some chosen by medical charities such as the March of Dimes. They will join a select club of sequenced human genomes headed by Craig Venter, the former Celera chief who donated his own DNA during the initial genome assembly six years ago, and James Watson, who is having his DNA unraveled by 454. Celebrity sequencing will attract a lot of publicity for the X Prize, but it risks trivializing the significance of genomic medicine. In only the rarest cases – such as certain forms of heart disease or cancer – will trawling through an individual sequence pinpoint flaws that underlie specific medical manifestations. The implications of personal genomics require a lot more public debate than they’ve been given so far. There is one silver lining in the Genome 100 however – the urgency that it will lend the cause of genetic privacy. At Harvard Medical School, George Church has taken great lengths to protect the anonymity of subjects volunteering for his personal genome project. By contrast, if Larry King finds his health insurance premiums soaring if any glitches in his sequence become apparent, he might have something to say about it. The latest effort to ban genetic discrimination passed the Senate unanimously, but remains tied up in the House of Representatives. Celebrities have had a powerful influence in the halls of Congress in raising awareness of medical concerns such as breast cancer, AIDS, and stem cell research. Maybe the Genome 100 gimmick is just what proponents of genetic non-discrimination needed. [...continued] |
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Entangled in the Matrix Net This documentary explores the curious relationship between the development of the Internet and Ted Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber). Mr. Dammbeck interviews several influential people, including John Brockman and Stewart Brand (old hippies turned founding members of the digerati); Robert Taylor, who helped to initiate the Arapanet (the precursor to the Internet); and the 90-year-old father of cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, who offers up a few wry observations about the nature of reality itself. Along the way, there are also traipses through Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, the Macy Conferences, Theodor Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, the connection between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the military, Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, Henry A. Murray and the LSD experiments at Harvard and crazy old Mr. Kaczynksi with his terror of mind control and supercomputers. Are you lost yet? I've watched the film a few times, and I'm still not quite sure what it all means, or if it means anything at all. Like the Internet itself, the bewildering density of information requires careful sorting. But one idea does jump out. John Brockman paraphrases a quote from Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist's Reflections on the Brain by J.Z. Young that states: "We create tools and then we mould ourselves through our use of them." In the brave new world of Google Video, YouTube, MySpace, et al., what does this mean? If we create technology and then become what we have created, have we now succeeded in making Jackass World?... ...So, are you being controlled by an elite group of cyber-hippies and ex-CIA military types without even knowing it? Or, as Theodor Adorno believed, lulled into a state of passivity and pseudo-individualization by pop culture. Or are you part of what Marshall McLuhan heralded as the new dawn in which "we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned." [Ed. Note: See the trailer] |
What
I want for Christmas is...an anti-religion
rant A
BOOK that rejects religion and argues for the
non- existence of God is heading to be the No
1 bestseller for Christmas. With Professor Dawkins about to travel to the US to publicise the book, sources in online sales say that his atheistic rant against all things religious is already trumping celebrity biographies and could take the top slot at the festival that celebrates the birth of the founder of Christianity. Transworld, its publisher, has had to run several reprints since the book was published just over two weeks ago. More than 100,000 copies have now been printed, making it the year's top-selling science book. An Oxford science professor, Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, uses The God Delusion to mount a bitter attack on religion in all its incarnations. He argues that monotheism and polytheism are equally absurd and attempts to knock down the 13th-century "proofs" for the existence of God drawn up by Thomas Aquinas. He attacks more modern concepts such as the "God of the gaps", condemns Creationism and blames religion itself rather than religious extremism for manifestations of fundamentalism, such as suicide bombers in Islam. In the book he writes: "Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe'. "Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy', then you can find God in a lump of coal." Rival science author Stephen Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London, whose latest book The Single Helix is due to be published soon, said: "The polls tell us there could be 20 million Creationists in Britain. "Twenty million people will not need a yule log this Christmas, they will be able to burn Dawkins's book instead. Personally, I do not care if they burn my own books, as long as they buy them first." ... |
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Just as science—that is, reliable methods for obtaining knowledge—has encroached on areas formerly considered to belong to the humanities (such as psychology), science is also encroaching on the social sciences, especially economics, geography, history, and political science. Not just the broad observation-based and statistical methods of the historical sciences but also detailed techniques of the conventional sciences (such as genetics and molecular biology and animal behavior) are proving essential for tackling problems in the social sciences. Science is the most accurate way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it is the human spirit, the role of great men in history, or the structure of DNA. Humanities scholars and historians who spurn it condemn themselves to second-rate status and produce unreliable results.
JOHN BROCKMAN is publisher and editor of Edge. |
THE EXPANDING THIRD CULTURE
Many people, even many scientists, have a narrow view of science as controlled, replicated experiments performed in the laboratory—and as consisting quintessentially of physics, chemistry, and molecular biology.
There are encouraging signs that the third culture now includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists do. They believe that there is a real world and that their job is to understand it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory power, and conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and understanding progresses and knowledge accumulates 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. As such they are not Marxist scholars, or Freudian scholars, or Catholic scholars. They think like scientists, know science, and easily communicate with scientists; their principal difference from scientists is in the subject matter they write about, not their intellectual style. Science and science-based thinking among enlightened humanities scholars are now part of public culture. But evidently this information hasn't caught up to the editors at our most highly regarded newspapers and magazines. Rather than trusting scientists to review books by scientists, the best and the brightest at the elite publications often turn to literary critics. Confronted with ideas that that upend the Freud, Marx, and modernism default, they pussyfoot around the challenge and the responsibility of presenting the public with an accurate representation of knowledge. Why learn about the human genome when you've already read Virginia Woolf? Why present informed articles and reviews to your readers when you can play the "isms" game, in which you can avoid intelligent discourse by the mere mention of useless terms such as "scientism" and "evolutionism". Not all intellectuals are of this frame of mind. One distinguished European novelist, who is also a publisher of literary novels and books by eminent scientists, threw up his hands as he exclaimed, "They don't know, they just don't know." To which might be added that a blissful state of ignorance is considered a credential in this world. Why else would reputable publications allow reviewers, ignorant in the sciences, to write about books by scientists?
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Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle — and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it — an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today. The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to 'sensible' religion, in order to present a united front against ('intelligent design') creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution. That is a valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus Creationism. But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with 'moderate' religion on one side, and I find myself on the other. WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS NO GOD
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...some have argued that if, after decades of research involving thousands of scientists, the theory is still a work in progress, it's time to give up. But to suggest dropping research on the most promising approach to unification because the work has failed to meet an arbitrary timetable for complete success is, well, silly. I have worked on string theory for more than 20 years because I believe it provides the most powerful framework for constructing the long-sought unified theory. Nonetheless, should an inconsistency be found, or should future studies reveal an insuperable barrier to making contact with experimental data, or should new discoveries reveal a superior approach, I'd change my research focus, and I have little doubt that most string theorists would too. But this hasn't happened. THE UNIVERSE ON A STRING BRIAN GREENE, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, is the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. |
THE UNIVERSE ON A STRING Seventy-five years ago this month, The New York Times reported that Albert Einstein had completed his unified field theory — a theory that promised to stitch all of nature's forces into a single, tightly woven mathematical tapestry. But as had happened before and would happen again, closer scrutiny revealed flaws that sent Einstein back to the drawing board. Nevertheless, Einstein's belief that he'd one day complete the unified theory rarely faltered. Even on his deathbed he scribbled equations in the desperate but fading hope that the theory would finally materialize. It didn't. In the decades since, the urgency of finding a unified theory has only increased. Scientists have realized that without such a theory, critical questions can't be addressed, such as how the universe began or what lies at the heart of a black hole. These unresolved issues have inspired much progress, with the most recent advances coming from an approach called string theory. Lately, however, string theory has come in for considerable criticism. And so, this is an auspicious moment to reflect on the state of the art. First, some context. For nearly 300 years, science has been on a path of consolidation. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered laws of motion that apply equally to a planet moving through space and to an apple falling earthward, revealing that the physics of the heavens and the earth are one. Two hundred years later, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell showed that electric currents produce magnetic fields, and moving magnets can produce electric currents, establishing that these two forces are as united as Midas' touch and gold. And in the 20th century, Einstein's work proved that space, time and gravity are so entwined that you can't speak sensibly about one without the others. This striking pattern of convergence, linking concepts once thought unrelated, inspired Einstein to dream of the next and possibly final move: merging gravity and electromagnetism into a single, overarching theory of nature's forces. In hindsight, there was almost no way he could have succeeded. He was barely aware that there were two other forces he was neglecting — the strong and weak forces acting within atomic nuclei. Furthermore, he willfully ignored quantum mechanics, the new theory of the microworld that was receiving voluminous experimental support, but whose probabilistic framework struck him as deeply misguided. Einstein stayed the course, but by his final years he had drifted to the fringe of a subject he had once dominated. After Einstein's death, the torch of unification passed to other hands. In the 1960's, the Nobel Prize-winning works of Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg revealed that at high energies, the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces seamlessly combine, much as heating a cold vat of chicken soup causes the floating layer of fat to combine with the liquid below, yielding a homogeneous broth. Subsequent work argued that at even higher energies the strong nuclear force would also meld into the soup, a proposed consolidation that has yet to be confirmed experimentally, but which has convinced many physicists that there is no fundamental obstacle to unifying three of nature's four forces. For decades, however, the force of gravity stubbornly resisted joining the fold. The problem was the very one that so troubled Einstein: the disjunction between his own general relativity, most relevant for extremely massive objects like stars and galaxies, and quantum mechanics, the framework invoked by physics to deal with exceptionally small objects like molecules and atoms and their constituents. Time and again, attempts to merge the two theories resulted in ill-defined mathematics, much like what happens on a calculator if you try to divide one by zero. The display will flash an error message, reprimanding you for misusing mathematics. The combined equations of general relativity and quantum mechanics yield similar problems. While the conflict rears its head only in environments that are both extremely massive and exceptionally tiny — black holes and the Big Bang being two primary examples — it tells of a fissure in the very foundations of physics. Such was the case until the mid-1980's, when a new approach, string theory, burst onto the stage. Difficult and complex calculations by the physicists John Schwarz and Michael Green, who had been toiling for years in scientific obscurity, gave compelling evidence that this new approach not only unified gravity and quantum mechanics, as well as nature's other forces, but did so while sweeping aside previous mathematical problems. As word of the breakthrough spread, many physicists dropped what they were working on and joined a global effort to realize Einstein's unified vision of the cosmos. String theory offers a new perspective on matter's fundamental constituents. Once viewed as point-like dots of virtually no size, particles in string theory are minuscule, vibrating, string-like filaments. And much as different vibrations of a violin string produce different musical notes, different vibrations of the theory's strings produce different kinds of particles. An electron is a tiny string vibrating in one pattern, a quark is a string vibrating in a different pattern. Particles like the photon that convey nature's forces in the quantum realm are strings vibrating in yet other patterns. Crucially, the early pioneers of string theory realized that one such vibration would produce the gravitational force, demonstrating that string theory embraces both gravity and quantum mechanics. In sharp contrast to previous proposals that cobbled gravity and quantum mechanics uneasily together, their unity here emerges from the theory itself. While accessibility demands that I describe these developments using familiar words, beneath them lies a bedrock of rigorous analysis. We now have more than 20 years of painstaking research, filling tens of thousands of published pages of calculations, which attest to string theory's deep mathematical coherence. These calculations have given the theory countless opportunities to suffer the fate of previous proposals, but the fact is that every calculation that has ever been completed within string theory is free from mathematical contradictions. Moreover, these works have also shown that many of the prized breakthroughs in fundamental physics, discovered over the past two centuries through arduous research using a wide range of approaches, can be found within string theory. It's as if one composer, working in isolation, produced the greatest hits of Beethoven, Count Basie and the Beatles. When you also consider that string theory has opened new areas of mathematical research, you can easily understand why it's captured the attention of so many leading scientists and mathematicians. Nevertheless, mathematical rigor and elegance are not sufficient to demonstrate a theory's relevance. To be judged a correct description of the universe, a theory must make predictions that are confirmed by experiment. And as a small but vocal group of critics of string theory justly emphasize, string theory has yet to do so. This is a key point, so it's worth serious scrutiny. We understand string theory much better now than we did 20 years ago. We've developed powerful techniques of mathematical analysis that have improved the accuracy of its calculations and provided invaluable insights into the theory's logical structure. Even so, researchers worldwide are still working toward an exact and tractable formulation of the theory's equations. And without that final formulation in hand, the kind of detailed, definitive predictions that would subject the theory to comprehensive experimental vetting remain beyond our reach. There are, however, features of the theory that may be open to examination even with our incomplete understanding. We may be able to test the theory's predictions of particular new particle species, of dimensions of space beyond the three we can directly see, and even its prediction that microscopic black holes may be produced through highly energetic particle collisions. Without the exact equations, our ability to describe these attributes with precision is limited, but the theory gives enough direction for the Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic particle accelerator now being built in Geneva and scheduled to begin full operation in 2008, to search for supporting evidence by the end of the decade. Research has also revealed a possibility that signatures of string theory are imprinted in the radiation left over from the Big Bang, as well as in gravitational waves rippling through space-time's fabric. In the coming years, a variety of experiments will seek such evidence with unprecedented observational fidelity. And in a recent, particularly intriguing development, data now emerging from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory appear to be more accurately described using string theory methods than with more traditional approaches. To be sure, no one successful experiment would establish that string theory is right, but neither would the failure of all such experiments prove the theory wrong. If the accelerator experiments fail to turn up anything, it could be that we need more powerful machines; if the astronomical observations fail to turn up anything, it could mean the effects are too small to be seen. The bottom line is that it's hard to test a theory that not only taxes the capacity of today's technology, but is also still very much under development. Some critics have taken this lack of definitive predictions to mean that string theory is a protean concept whose advocates seek to step outside the established scientific method. Nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly, we are feeling our way through a complex mathematical terrain, and no doubt have much ground yet to cover. But we will hold string theory to the usual scientific standard: to be accepted, it must make predictions that are verified. Other detractors have seized on recent work suggesting that one of string theory's goals beyond unification of the forces — to provide an explanation for the values of nature's constants, like the mass of the electron and the strength of gravity — may be unreachable (because the theory may be compatible with those constants having a range of values). But even if this were to prove true, realizing Einstein's unified vision would surely be prize enough. Finally, some have argued that if, after decades of research involving thousands of scientists, the theory is still a work in progress, it's time to give up. But to suggest dropping research on the most promising approach to unification because the work has failed to meet an arbitrary timetable for complete success is, well, silly. I have worked on string theory for more than 20 years because I believe it provides the most powerful framework for constructing the long-sought unified theory. Nonetheless, should an inconsistency be found, or should future studies reveal an insuperable barrier to making contact with experimental data, or should new discoveries reveal a superior approach, I'd change my research focus, and I have little doubt that most string theorists would too. But this hasn't happened. String theory continues to offer profound breadth and enormous potential. It has the capacity to complete the Einsteinian revolution and could very well be the concluding chapter in our species' age-old quest to understand the deepest workings of the cosmos. Will we ever reach that goal? I don't know. But that's both the wonder and the angst of a life in science. Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty. [First published as an OpEd piece in The New York Times, October 20, 2006). |
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher |
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