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"Edge.org...a
Web site devoted to dis- cussions of cutting edge science." |
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Just
over a year ago, on a continent that sometimes seems so far,
far away, Prime Minister Blair delivered a speech entitled "Science
Matters." "First, science is vital to our country's
continued future prosperity," he said. "Second,
science is posing hard questions of moral judgment and of
practical concern, which, if addressed in the wrong way,
can lead to prejudice against science, which I believe would
be profoundly damaging. Third, as a result, the benefits
of science will only be exploited through a renewed compact
between science and society, based on a proper understanding
of what science is trying to achieve. [continued...]
Also...
The
Third Culture — Class of 2003
Seed presents and exclusive portfolio
of the icons and iconoclasts who redefined
science in 2003. With an introduction by
John Brockman. |
New Who's
in Charge?
Simon Blackburn
July-August, 2003
Freedom Evolves. Daniel C. Dennett. xvi + 347pp Viking, 2003.
$24.95.
Science
has always had things to say about human nature, and
now more than ever. The shelves of bookshops groan with
offerings that show how everything we think about ourselves
is being transformed by "revolutionary developments
in molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology,
artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory,
massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe,
fractals, complex adaptive systems, linguistics, superstrings,
biodiversity, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated
equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, virtual
reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. Among others." The
list comes from an article [*]
by literary agent John Brockman on the upmarket scientific
Web site Edge (www.edge.org). Out go
fuddy-duddy Shakespeare and Proust, Aristotle and Mill,
and in comes a chorus of scientific cheerleaders who
believe they have all the answers to life, human nature
and everything. But curiously absent are the voices of
historians, anthropologists and most psychologists, whose
empirical disciplines surely have some claim to tell
us more than a bit about human nature.
The
public may like the triumphal note of these books, but
it has fewer critical weapons at its disposal than some
of us might wish. Thank heavens, then, for Daniel Dennett,
a distinguished philosopher with an insatiable appetite
for science and especially for the places where science
needs interpretation. Scientists and philosophers need
one another, he observes: Philosophers need to know the
relevant scientific facts, and scientists need to know
the history of philosophy. As Dennett says in commenting
on Brockman's article, "Scientists who think their
up-to-date scientific knowledge renders them immune to
the illusions that lured Aristotle and Hume and Kant
and the others into . . . difficulties are in for a rude
awakening." Among the topics that show the need
for interpretation are consciousness (with its curious
habit of eluding science) and free will.......[continued] |
A
LITTLE SMALL TALK GOES A LONG, LONG WAY
By Harriet Swain
June
6, 2003
With
research cash increasingly targeted at interdiscipIinary
study and cutting-edge science becoming ever-more complex,
the aphorism 'it's not what you know but who you know'
has never been more apt. Harriet Swain explains why networking
is now a key academic skill
...Smolin,
along with Rees and Dawkins, has also been prominent
on a website (www.edge.org) run by John Brockman.
This site has brought together thinkers such as
Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Lynn Margulis
to explore what Brockman refers to as "the
third culture"—bridging the gap between
scientific ideas and the "intelligent reading
public". [Janna] Levin describes Brockman
as a man who "knows everybody", who "collects
people - and some pretty interesting ones".
She met [Brian] Eno through Brockman, who also
introduced Smolin and Jaron Lanier, inventor of
virtual reality, to each other. This introduction
was made at an event held to bring together Dawkins
and the web intelligentsia who were fascinated
by his "memes" theory—the idea
of cultural replicators such as tunes and ideas
being passed from person to person in a similar
way to genes—in some ways a paeon to the
powers of networking. |
THE
PHILOSOPHER AS SUPERSTAR ("Der
Philosoph Als Superstar")
By Andrian Kreye
June 5, 2003
...There
are many reasons for this intellectual isolationism.
One is purely practical: in the decades after the Second
World War, scientists at American universities and institutes
specialized like never before. This led to linguistic
microtopes that laid a high value on educational background.
The second is historical: Hardly any nation mistrusts
European intellectual life as much as the United States.
Didn’t founding fathers of the American pragmatist
school of thought like Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James,
and John Dewey themselves promote a turning away from
the abstractions of traditional philosophy?
...The intellectuals with the greatest influence over the destiny of
the nation are the leading thinkers of the conservative Neocons, who
develop their concepts outside of public view in the debating clubs
of think tanks.
One exception is the natural scientists, who, in recent years, have
rehabilitated the idea of the public intellectual. This began out of
pure professional necessity. Interdisciplinary work compelled researchers
to write texts that colleagues outside of their own fields could also
understand without specialized training. Thus a new form of scientific
literature came into being, which...John Brockman named "The Third
Culture." Natural scientists, according to Brockman, are tackling
humanity’s biggest questions, those which were previously in
the domain of humanities scholars and clerics. He has in mind above
all authors such as neuropsychologist Steven Pinker, biologist Stephen
Jay Gould, or mathematician Marvin Minsky—who in their books
mount direct attacks on the humanities. |
[5.29.03]
SCAN
YOUR EYES ACROSS THIS
By Dan
Dubno
"Katinka
Matson, an amazing digital artist, merging the technological
with the botanical in a beautiful way. "
 Katinka
Matson’s Scanner Art
Finally, about Katinka’s flowers! I hope you
take a long look at our "photo" essay (really a "scanner" essay)
of a few of Ms. Matson’s remarkable studies. (I regret
that to publish her work on our website, we had to make dumbed-down
petite versions.) When printed on large paper or shown, as
they should also be, on high-definition television screens,
Katinka’s scanned creations are towering, dense and
richly hued. For several years, using the same digital flatbed
scanners most of us simply copy documents with, this Manhattan-based
artist unlocked the simple elegance of nature. Without cameras
or special lenses, Katinka Matson captures the unfiltered
raw vibrancy of lilies, tulips, and daisies. Closer to painting
with nature than to containing and “capturing” it,
Ms. Matson’s work is raw, striking, if not shocking.
There is honest power in this fusion of technology with n
ature and it’s made possible by an inkjet printer and
a humble scanner.
See
CBS News Video & "Scanner Essay" on
Katinka Matson's Art
Katinka
Matson is cofounder of Edge and it's resident
artist. Her work can be seen at katinkamatson.com. |
BRILLIANT!
By Robbie Hudson
March 9, 2003, Sunday
Farewell, Dolly: Robbie Hudson finds the cloned sheep honoured at
brilliant scientific forum www. edge.org.
Are you going to be part of the last generation to die, or the first
one to live for ever? Ask this on a daytime phone-in show and you would
attract fanatics calling down divine vengeance.
Canvass a select group of theorists who like to "ask each other
the questions they are asking themselves", however, and you might
prompt a serious discussion of issues usually consigned to science fiction.
This is Edge's raison d'etre. The website grew out of a debating society
called the Reality Club. Taking the debate online gave us access to its
intelligent forum, where luminaries such as the experimental psychologist
Steven Pinker and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins lock horns
with other able minds.
Edge's huge list of topics includes mankind's ability to become one with
machines, and the implications of Dolly the cloned sheep's recent death.
An enjoyable feature is the annual question asked of the contributors.
This year's was: "Imagine you are George W Bush's scientific adviser.
What would you do?"
Suggestions included $ 1 billion to be spent on science fellowships for
scholarsfrom Muslim countries and travel to Mars.
Edge's combination of political engagement and blue-sky thinking makes
stimulating reading for anyone seeking a glimpse into the next decade.
Copyright © 2003 Times Newspapers
Limited |
THE
THIRD CULTURE
Editorial
February 28, 2003
Education during most of the 20th century divided, all too neatly, between
liberal arts and the sciences. You studied one or the other, but rarely
both. It was C.P. Snow who divided the world of the intellect into literary
criticism and science. But in recent years, science, once relegated by
academia to the sidelines as a sort of technical specialty, has been
where most of the worthwhile intellectual activity has been taking place.
And a lot of what science is discovering tends to stand much of what
literary intellects believed on its head.
So, anyway, says John Brockman, an author and the editor and publisher
of the Web site, edge.org. Brockman has a theory about the way in which
science has flowed over into the liberal arts and forged a partnership
between the two disciplines that Brockman calls "the third culture." Brockman
argues that a growing number of scientists are writing elegant books
and articles linking science and its discoveries to the real world of
the average person.
What used to be the purview of philosophers and poets, interpreting the
world for the rest of us, has been taken over by scientists. Brockman
argues that scientists look forward and change the world, while philosophers
and, perhaps less so, poets examine and interpret their predecessors.
While not knocking history, Brockman wonders at the value of the intellectual
debate over "who was or was not a Stalinist in 1937, or what the
sleeping arrangements were for guests at a Bloomsbury weekend in the
early part of the 20th century."
Meanwhile, science is about "the new and important ideas that drive
our times: revolutionary developments in molecular biology, genetic engineering,
nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory,
massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals,
complex adaptive systems, linguistics, superstrings, biodiversity, the
human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata,
fuzzy logic, virtual reality, cyberspace and teraflop machines. Among
others."
Brockman offers examples of where science and art ought to, but don't
always, come together. The art critic who doesn't understand visual perception
is suspect. So are those who balk at genetic modification though ignorant
of evolutionary biology and genetics.
Naturally, Brockman's theories are subject to demeaning and intellectual
disagreement, and to Brockman's credit, he provides his critics space
to make their points. But the basic point belongs to Brockman, who has
stirred the thought pot and added new spices. Many whose education spanned
the middle of the last century can identify with Brockman's description
of the sciences as technical specialties. The adage popular then was
that students who got A's did the technical work, while people who managed
only C's wound up running things.
That this adage may no longer hold true seems like progress.
Copyright © 2003 Winston-Salem
Journal |
The
Engine of Prosperity
Academics Demand a New Science Policy from Bush
by Andrian Kreye
January 14, 2003
Because the last decade brought forth not only scientific successes,
but also a new scientific culture, the struggle for the future no longer
takes place in privileged circles, but on the public stage...The worldview
with the greatest profile in this regard is the "third culture," because
it attempts to find scientific answers to the most important questions
facing humanity. New York literary agent John Brockman coined the term...and
conducts its most important debating club on his internet platform, Edge (http://www.edge.org).
[English
translation | German
original] |
Ideas — Criticism — Debate
January 6, 2003
Essays
and Opinion (Lead
item)
If you had the President’s ear, what would you advise him was the
most urgent scientific issue the country faces? Energy? Stem-cell research?
Bioterror? Science teaching?... more |
 Posted
by timothy on Monday January 06, @04:15AM
from the what-would-sauron-do dept.
murky.waters writes "The responses to this year's Edge.org question
have been published; basically, people were asked to imagine they were
nominated as White House science adviser and the President asked them
what are some important issues in science and what we should do about
them. There are 84 responses, ranging in topic from advanced nanotechnology
to the psychology of foreign cultures, and lots of ideas regarding
science, technology, politics, and education. The responses were written
by academics (e.g. Roger Schank, Marvin Minsky), journalists (Kevin
Kelly), Nobel Laureates (Eric Kandel), and others (Alan Alda). Some
of responses are politically loaded but the majority has either a more
specialised proposal, or general remarks about our world. Many are
absolutely fascinating: funny, insightful, interesting, hell even informative.
... One of the most public supporters of the Singularity 'religion',
Ray Kurzweil, is a regular at Edge, and currently discussed issues
range from said transhumanism to early-universe theories, and many
other kinds of exciting and novel science." ( Read
More...)
|
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January 4, 2003
 t
the end of every year, John Brockman, a literary agent and
the publisher of Edge.org,
a Web site devoted to science, poses a question to leading
scientists, writers and futurists. In 2002, he asked respondents
to imagine that they had been nominated as White House science
adviser and that President Bush had sought their answer
to "What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation
and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin
to deal with them?" Here are excerpts of some of the responses.
Mapping
the Planet • Professor PlayStation • Little Geniuses
• Think Small • Science Without Secrets •
Fending Off the Big One • Intellectual Globalization
• Cassandras of the Labs • Really Popular Science
[Click
here for The New York Times Op-Ed page—free
registration required] |
|
