|
"Praised
by everyone from the Guardian, Prospect magazine, Wired, the New
York Times and BBC Radio 4, Edge is
an online collective of deep thinkers. Their contributors aren't
on the frontier, they are the frontier." |
 |
"There
is much in many of these brief essays to astonish, to be appalled
at, to mull over or to wish for...Most of them are vitally
engaging to anyone with an ounce of interest in matters such
as being or whatever." |
|
"What's
the big idea?...When the lightbulb above your head is truly
incendiary." |
 |
"...fascinating
and provocative reading." |
 |
"If
you think the web is full of trivial rubbish, you will find
the intellectual badinage of edge.org to be a blessed counterpoint." |
 |
"Recommended
read to detox a tired mind." |
 |
"...reads
like an intriguing dinner party conversation among great minds
in science. Don't
expect to find answers here. Brockman will have you asking
more questions than when you started—and may even change
your mind about the ideas you've always been convinced are
right." |
|
"Brilliant... a eureka moment
at the edge of knowledge, as scientists ponder the imponderable.
... Visiting Edge will make pseudo-scientists
feel cleverer, and the rest of us more than usually stupid,
as we discover, with a jolt of pleasure, how little we really
know about the world." |
 |
"He
(Ian McEwan) loves
the spirited playfulness evident in places such as John Brockman's
celebrated website Edge, where "neuroscientists might
talk to mathematicians, biologists to computer-modelling experts",
and in an accessible, discipline-crossing language that lets
us all eavesdrop. 'In order to talk to each other, they just
have to use plain English. That's where the rest of us benefit.'
" |
 |
"www.edge.org...has
established itself as a major force on the intellectual scene
in the US and as required reading for humanities heads who
want to keep up to speed with the latest in science and technology." |
 |
"Intellectual
and creative magnificence." |
 |
"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 |
 |
"Astounding
reading." |
 |
"...the
fascinating website edge.org." |
 |
"An
unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is
nothing short of visionary." |
 |
"Fantastically
stimulating...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world....
Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question." |
 |
"Danger
— brilliant minds at work... exhilarating, hilarious, and
chilling." |
|
"A
selection of the most explosive ideas of our age." |
|
"Scientific
pipedreams at their very best." |
|
"Strangley
addictive." |
 |
"Brockman's
cross-fertilising club, the most rarefied of chatrooms, has
its premises on his website www.edge.org. Eavesdropping is
fun. Ian McEwan, one of the few novelists who has contributed
to Edge's ongoing debates, suggests that the project is not
so far removed from the 'old Enlightenment dream of a unified
body of knowledge, when biologists and economists draw on each
other's concepts and molecular biologists stray into the poorly
defended territory of chemists and physicists'." |
|
"Brilliant! Stimulating reading." |
|
"One of the most interesting
stopping places on the Web." |
 |
"A
stellar cast of thinkers tackles the really big questions facing
scientists." |
|
"It
is like having a front-row seat at the ultimate scientific
seminar series." |
|
"Fascinating...a
lot of fun." |
|
"Fascinating and thought-provoking
...wonderful, intelligent." |
|
"Today's visions of science
tomorrow." |
|
"You
can improve your own science education at www.edge.org." |
|
"Clever
minds debate on Edge about God and the world: what
life is, what will result from global warming, or what the
most recent discoveries in immunology research tell us. It
is almost as colorful as the days of Louis XVI, when philosophers,
writers, and political thinkers disputed one another in Parisian
living rooms — and prepared the way for revolution." |
|
"Awesome indie newsletter with
brilliant contributors." |
|
"Everything is permit-ted,
and nothing is excluded from this intellectual game." |
|
"Websites of the year. ..Inspired
Arena...the world's foremost scientific thinkers." |
|
"Deliciously creative ... the variety astonishes ... intellectual
sky- rockets of stunning brilliance. Nobody in the world is
doing what Edge is doing." |
|
"High
concept all the way...the brightest
scientists and thinkers ... heady ... deep and refreshing." |
|
"A marvellous showcase for
the Internet, it comes very highly recommended." |
|
"Profound, esoteric and outright
entertaining." |
|
"A terrific, thought provoking
site." |
|
"....a fascinating survey of
intellectual and creative wonders of the world...Thoughtful
and often surprising ...reminds me of how wondrous our world
is." —
Bill Gates |
|
"One of the Net's most prestigious,
invitation-only free trade zones for the exchange of potent
ideas." |
|
"A-list: Dorothy Parker's Vicious
Circle without the food and alcohol ... a brilliant format." |
|
"Big, deep and ambitous questions...
breathtaking in scope." |
|
"Has raised electronic discourse
on the Web to a whole new level." |
|
"Lively, sometimes obscure
and almost always ambitious." |
|
Rocky Mountain News, The Mail On Sunday, The New York Times, The Independent, Charleston City Paper, O, The Oprah Magazine, SEED, The Telegraph, Süddeutsche Zeitung, E-Flux, The Bismark Tribune, Globe and Mail, The New York Times, El Norte, Scientific American, The Dallas Morning News, The Hindu, The Guardian Review, signandsight.com, perlentaucher.de, Arts
& Letters Daily, The Guardian Weekly,, Süddeutsche Zeitung, BoingBoing, Chicago Sun-Times, The Scotsman, The Observer, Boing Boing, The Times (London), The Chicago Tribune, The Toronto Star, The Age (Melbourne), El Pais, Discover, Süddeutsche Zeitung, El Norte, The Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, BoingBoing, Townsville Bulletin, The Independent, Prospect, The Australian, The Irish Times, The Skeptical Inquirer, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Reforma, Canberra
Times, Journal Les Affaires, Tonight (South
Africa), The
Telegraph, Genome
Technology Online, Le
Monde (Paris), The New York Times
Magazine, The
Independent, The
News & Observer,
BoingBoing, Weekend
America, The
Guardian, The
News & Observer, Reforma, Scientific
American, The Guardian, Toronto
Star, Los
Angeles Times, Central
Daily.com, New Scientist, San
Francisco Chronicle, Economic Times-India
Times, The Charleston Post-Courier,Wall
Street Journal, Seattlelest, Wall
Street Journal, Open Source/Chris
Lydon, Welt
Am Sonntag, Cordis News, Canadian
Technology News, The News-Sentinel, The
Times (London), The
Guardian, The Times
(London), Seed, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Arts
& Letters Daily, Huffington
Post
|
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
January 1, 2008
CARROLL: We've always bickered
By Vincent Carroll, Editor, Editorial Pages
Science snubbed
...Take
the fact that The New York Times' "100 Notable Books
of the Year" from its Book Review includes no science books. The
reader who pointed this out to me saw it reported on John Brockman's Edge Web site. Brockman's indignant assessment: "Given the well-documented
challenges and issues we are facing as a nation, as a culture, how
can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on
ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no
science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver
Sacks in The New Yorker's list of Books From Our Pages?"
Since Brockman wrote those words nearly two weeks ago, the Times' three daily reviewers have published lists of their favorite books,
too. Only one is about science - although science decades old (Uncertainty:
Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science).
Brockman
argues that "Elite universities have nudged science
out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum" and thus produce
graduates "who don't even know that they don't know." Maybe
so, but those graduates, if they work at a paper like the Times, must
know this much: Their readers include many people trained in the sciences
who might prefer a book on what scientists think, about our future,
say, to a book on what Tina Brown thinks about Princess Diana.
Yes, The
Diana Chronicles actually made the Times' "notable" list.
... |
THE
MAIL ON SUNDAY
December 30, 2008
WHAT ARE
YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?
Review by Harry Ritchie
 "The planet's overheating, the icecaps are
melting, the population is exploding, there's a bird-flu epidemic
waiting to get us and even if we avoid a terrorist Armageddon, there's
bound to be an asteroid up there with all our names on it. We are,
to quote Private Frazer, doomed.
"Nonsense,
say the 150 leading scientists assembled by John Brockman in this
uplifting anthology.
"Asked
the title's question, the world's best brains examined our prospects
- and all of them found reasons to be very cheerful indeed. Once
again, the scientific community seems to challenge our instinctive,
common-sense assumption. First they told us the Earth isn't flat.
Then, that solid objects are made up of empty space. ...
"...This
is an enthralling book that delivers two very significant truths:
we've never had it so good and things can only get better. Global
warming — and asteroids — permitting."
|
THE INDEPENDENT
30 November 2007
Stocking-fillers: A seasonal run on the ideas bank
By Boyd Tonkin
One of the best jokes in this year's crop of upmarket stocking-filler titles is a wholly inadvertent one. In the sparky and provoking What Are You Optimistic About? (Simon & Schuster, £12.99), John Brockman — literary agent to the planet's biggest brains and guv'nor of the ever-stimulating Edge website — asks almost 150 scientists, seers and other gurus (from Steven Pinker to Brian Eno) about their reasons to be cheerful. And what subject strikes hope into the heart of Old Etonian zoologist and (now retired) amateur banker Matt Ridley, who as chairman of the board oversaw the Northern Rock train-wreck? "The future. That's what I'm optimistic about." Thank you, the Hon Matt, and I hope you enjoyed the £24bn that our little Christmas whip-round raised for you.
Ridley aside, Brockman's compilation radiates bright ideas. Let's hope that the various upbeat views on halting climate change prevail soon enough to justify Walter Isaacson's faith in the prospects of "print as a technology". If not, then we may not see many more seasons of Nordic forests felled to manufacture loo-bound volumes stuffed with short-breathed snippets. ... |
CHARLESTON CITY PAPER
November 21, 2007
Journal:
The new intellectuals
John
Stoehr Arts Editor
...Edge and the Edge Reality Club,
a kind of scientist’s salon, is doing wonders for advancing the
national conversation about science and scientific thinking. There
are more magazines devoted science than ever more, more hunger for
science and more books about science, even some that advance atheism.
... |
O THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
December 2007
READING ROOM
GIVERS
AND KEEPERS
Angels!
Kennedys! Kay Scarpetta! Steve Martin! Put these irresistible
reads under a friend's tree, by your own bedside, or both.
By Cathleen Medwick
JOHN
BROCKMAN, that most philosophical of editors and founder
of the science-oriented Edge Foundation (edge.org), asked some
150 serious thinkers what gave them reasons to smile. In his persuasively
upbeat collection, What
are You Optimistic About? (Harper Perennial), evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins predicts
a new scientific enlightenment, wiping out superstition; psychologist Steven
Pinker sees a decline in violence worldwide; and physicist Frank
Wilczek fully expects that the world will continue to surprise
us in fascinating and fundamental ways." Ask a savvy question.... |
SEED
MAGAZINE
November-December 2007
What
are You Optimistic About
Edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial)
With
today's concerns over global warming, AIDS, and terrorism, the future
can look pretty bleak. surprisingly, many of the worlds' top thinkers
see a rosy horizon and in this collection of over 150 essays, compiled
and edited by the always iconoclastic Brockman, we lean why. From
finding the genes for mental illness, to s saving the Arctic, to
ending poverty, our greatest minds provide nutshell insights on how
science will help forge a better world ahead.
|
THE
TELEGRAPH
October 13, 2007
Science
and art meet in
'Experiment Marathon'
By Roger
Highfield, Science
Editor
...Venter,
head of the J Craig Venter
Institute in Rockville, Maryland,
examines the connection between
the ratio of the elements
of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus
with life, and how this links
with the letters of the genetic
alphabet that nature used
to spell out genes.
Pinker of
Harvard University works
out the potential number
of thoughts we can have and
Prof Dawkins underlines
the power of Darwin's ideas
about evolution.
... |
SUEDDEUTSCHE
ZEITUNG
September 3, 2007
FEUILLITON — Front
Page
Short
Answers To Big Questions
Andrian
Kreye,
Editor, The Feuilleton
...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.... |
E-FLUX
October 13, 2007
SERPENTINE
GALLERY
 |
Steven Pinker and other leading
scientists join artists at the Serpentine Gallery
for a 24-hour Experiment Marathon featuring robots,
three-way kissing booths and out-of-body experiences
13 - 14 October 2007 |
The 2006 Marathon was 'An inspiring experience' -
Time Out
Olafur
Eliasson together with Hans Ulrich
Obrist convenes
the Serpentine Gallery 24-Hour Experiment Marathon
from 13 to 14 October which blurs the boundaries of
art and science and creates a laboratory of experience.
A huge variety of experiments exploring perception,
artificial intelligence, the body and language, takes
place in and around the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
2007 designed by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen.
This
year's Pavilion has been conceived as a laboratory
for experimentation and invention with artists, architects,
academics and scientists being invited to present hand-held
or table-top experiments throughout the weekend.
... |
THE BISMARK TRIBUNE
October 1, 2007
Discovering
beliefs, core values online
Keith
Darnay
Another
great site to visit is Edge (http://www.edge.org).
The mission is to "promote inquiry into and discussion
of intellectual, philosophical, artistic and literary issues,
as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement
of society."
That,
alone, is a lot to ponder. But what the site is best known
for is its series of provocative questions posed to the
world's leading scientists and thinkers. One year, the
question was, "What do you believe to be true even
though you cannot prove it?" Another question was, "What
do you consider to be your most dangerous idea?"
In
answering these and other questions, the writers and readers
explore fundamental ideas, concepts and beliefs that everyone
has considered at one point in their lives to which they
discover there is no final answer.
For
example, French physicist Carlo Rovelli writes, "I
am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist;
that is, there is a consistent way of thinking about nature
that makes no use of the notions of time and space at the
fundamental level."
Communications
expert Howard Rheingold writes, "I believe that we
humans, who know so much about cosmology and immunology,
lack a fundamental framework for thinking about why and
how humans cooperate."
The
Edge Web site questions prompted the publication of several
books cataloging hundreds of the responses.
You
can read those short essays online as well as examine other
issues and topics put out for public discussion. This site
is a nice complement to the "This I Believe" site
and concept.
These
sites and the topics discussed are examples of how the
Internet can be used in a positive manner. It seems we
hear so much about what's wrong with the Internet that,
on those rare occasions when something positive can be
found in the digital world, that news needs to be loudly
and widely recognized. ...
|
THE
GLOBE AND MAIL
September 22, 2007
Don't
be afraid of dangerous ideas;
Every era has its
taboos. Let's champion free inquiry and
debate
Margaret Wente
Who's
the most odious man in the world today? Some people might
name Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the
Holocaust ever happened and seems quite happy at the thought
of unleashing nukes against the Jews. These unsavoury views
didn't deter Columbia University from issuing him an invitation
to speak on campus. The university's president, Lee Bollinger,
described the event as part of "Columbia's long-standing
tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate."
Or perhaps it's Larry Summers, the man who created such a storm
with his remarks about women and science that he had to step
down as president of Harvard. This week, he was disinvited
from a regents' dinner at the University of California, where
he was going to speak, after a bunch of faculty members protested
that his views were too repellent. "I was appalled and
stunned that someone like Summers would even be invited to
speak to the regents," said biology professor Maureen
Stanton, who helped put together a petition drive. "I
think many of us who were involved in the protest believed
that it wouldn't reflect well on the university that he even
received the invitation."
So much for the notion that our universities are supposed to
champion fearless free inquiry and debate. Obviously some ideas
- such as the idea that innate differences between men and
women might affect their aptitudes and career preferences -
are too dangerous to even have.
The
renowned psychologist Steven
Pinker (whose new book is reviewed in today's Books section)
recently got to thinking about some of the other ideas that
are too dangerous to discuss. In an essay first posted at Edge (www.Edge.org),
he wrote: "By 'dangerous ideas' I don't have in mind
harmful technologies, like those behind weapons of mass destruction,
or evil ideologies, like those of racist, fascist or other
fanatical cults. I have in mind statements of fact or policy
that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists
and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective
decency of an age." ...
|
THE NEW YORK SUNDAY TIMES
September 16, 2007
THE
WEEK IN REVIEW
PARROT
POWER
Alex Wanted a Cracker, but Did He Want One?
By George Johnson
In an talk on Edge.org, Dr.
Pepperberg told of an effort
to teach the parrot about phonemes using colored tokens marked
with letter combinations like sh and ch.
“What
sound is green?”
“Ssshh,” Alex
answered correctly, and then demanded a nut. Instead he
got another question.
“What
sound is orange?”
“Ch.”
“Good
bird!”
“Want a nut!” Alex demanded. The interview was
over. “Want a nut!” he repeated. “Nnn ...
uh ... tuh.”
Dr.
Pepperberg was flabbergasted. “Not only could
you imagine him thinking, ‘Hey, stupid, do I have to
spell it for you?’ ” she said. “This was
in a sense his way of saying to us, ‘I know where you’re
headed! Let’s get on with it.’ ”
She
is quick to concede the impossibility of proving that the
bird was actually verbalizing its internal deliberations.
Only Alex knew for sure. ...
|
SCIENTIFIC
AMERICAN
September 2007
ANTIGRAVITY
What's
the Big Idea?
When
the lightbulb above your head is truly incendiary
By Steve Mirsky
...The
book includes 108 contributions, some of which go egghead-to-egghead.
For example, physicist and computer scientist W.
Daniel Hillis's dangerous idea is "the idea that we
should all share our most dangerous ideas." Whereas psychologist Daniel
Gilbert's dangerous idea is "the idea that ideas can
be dangerous." I both agree and disagree with both.
Nature's
chief news and features editor Oliver
Morton has the dangerous idea that "our planet is
not in peril,"
although he quite rightly points out that many inhabitants of
the planet are in great jeopardy because of environmental crises.
Actually, George Carlin covered this territory years ago when
he said, "The planet is fine. The people are f*^#ed ...
the planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas."
My
personal favorite entry is that of philosopher and psychologist Nicholas
Humphrey, who knows a dangerous idea when he sees one and
so simply quotes Bertrand Russell's truly treacherous notion: "I
wish to propose ... a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly
paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this:
that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there
is no ground whatsoever for supposing it true." The danger
of ignoring this doctrine can almost certainly be found in
the politics or world events stories on the front page of today's
New York Times. On whatever day you read this. |
THE
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
August 12,
2007
OPINION:Points
Rod
Dreher: Playing the anti-science card
Liberals don't
have a clean history when it comes to science
vs. ethics
"People
have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing
certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition
and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally
depraved," writes Harvard scientist Steven
Pinker, in an edge.org essay about dangerous ideas.
"Debates
between members of the coalitions can make things even worse," he
continues, "because when the other side fails to capitulate
to one's devastating arguments, it only proves they are immune
to reason." ...
|
THE
HINDU
August 7, 2007
Dangerous
idea is ‘the idea that ideas can be dangerous’
D.Murali
..."I don’t share my most dangerous ideas," protests W.
Daniel Hillis, chairman of Applied Minds, Inc. "I
have often seen otherwise thoughtful people so caught up in
such an idea that they seem unable to resist sharing it. To
me, the idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas
is itself a very dangerous idea. I hope it never catches on."
On
the contrary, to Daniel
Gilbert of Harvard University, the only dangerous idea
is, ‘the idea that ideas can be dangerous’. We
live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned,
demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their
mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air, he rues. "Hateful,
blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks
are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter
of idiots is how we know we’re in one."...
Recommended
read to detox a tired mind.
|
THE GUARDIAN REVIEW
August 4, 2007
What
Is Your Dangerous Idea? Today's Leading Thinkers on the
Unthinkable
By P.D. Smith
The "traditional
intellectual" is out of a job; scientists now tell us
who and what we are, argues John
Brockman, the literary agent and founder of the website Edge.
Each year Edge poses a question to the leading "thinkers
in the empirical world". In 2006 Steven
Pinker suggested "What is your dangerous idea?" -
not the secret of a doomsday device, or some fiendish theory,
but an idea that is dangerous "because it might be true".
There are more than 100 responses in this volume and they
make fascinating and provocative reading. ...
|
SIGNANDSIGHT.COM
July 24, 2007
Magazine Roundup
Die Weltwoche | The New York Review of Books | The New Yorker | Der Spiegel | The New York Times | The Economist | Nepszabadsag | Edge.org | Asharq al-Awsat | Magyar Hirlap | Figyelö | Gazeta Wyborcza
Edge.org 18.07.2007 (USA)
Kevin Kelly, one of the heralds of the "third culture" explains the term that he coined: "technium" (more on Kelly's homepage). He understands it as all the converging and networked technological and scientific revolutions, particularly in genetics and the natural sciences, which could have frightening consequences and must be controlled. ...
...
|
PERLENTAUCHER.DE
Vom 24. Juli 2007
Die Magazinrundschau
Im Spiegel verteidigt Alexander Solschenizyn den KGB-Mann Wladimir Putin. In der New York Times porträtiert Bernhard-Henri Levy Nicolas Sarkozy als Freibeuter nationaler Identitäten. Magyar Hirlap versteht die Wut der Kaczynskis auf Europa. Nepszabadsag spürt es in Ungarns Tiefe gären. In Edge bereitet uns Kevin Kelly darauf vor, ein halberwachsenes Technium gehen zu lassen. Der New Yorker porträtiert Abraham Burg, den Herold des Zionismus und seines Endes. Der Spectator feuert Boris Johnson an, der jetzt Bürgermeister von London werden will. Für die New York Review of Books gibt Timothy Garton Ash Günter Grass einen halben Punkt. Und der Economist vermisst Reiche in Berlin.
...
|
ARTS & LETTERS DAILY
J
uly
23, 2007
Essays
and Opinion
Dangerous ideas: science has a habit
of turning them up, and the internet has a habit
of blowing their cover. Let's face them squarely
in open debate, says Steven Pinker...
more
|
THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY
July 20, 2007
The new age of ignorance: How much do we really know about the basic questions of science that control our lives?
By Tim Adams (Observer)
"...He [Brockman] also runs a kind of global online Royal Society called Edge. Edge promotes what he calls the Third Culture, a marriage of physics and philosophy, astronomy and art."
|
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
July 15, 2007
In Defense of Dangerous Ideas
In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.
By Steven Pinker
...By "dangerous ideas" I don't have in mind harmful technologies, like those behind weapons of mass destruction, or evil ideologies, like those of racist, fascist or other fanatical cults. I have in mind statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age. The ideas listed above, and the moral panic that each one of them has incited during the past quarter century, are examples. Writers who have raised ideas like these have been vilified, censored, fired, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted.
...
[This essay was first posted at Edge (www.edge.org) and is reprinted with permission. It is the Preface to the book 'What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable,' published by HarperCollins.]
|
THE
SCOTSMAN
July 14, 2007
WEBSITE
OF THE WEEK — www.edge.org
"There's
a thought" By
Lee Randall
Praised
by everyone from the Guardian, Prospect magazine, Wired,
the New York Times and BBC Radio 4, Edge is
an online collective of deep thinkers. ... |
THE
OBSERVER REVIEW
Sunday, July 1, 2007
COVER
STORY
 The
new age of ignorance
We
take our young children to science museums, then as they get older
we stop. In spite of threats like global warming and avian flu, most
adults have very little understanding of how the world works. So,
50 years on from CP Snow's famous 'Two Cultures' essay, is the old
divide between arts and sciences deeper than ever?
Here we
ask a celebrity panel to answer some basic scientific questions
By Tim
Adams
...Brockman's cross-fertilising
club, the most rarefied of chatrooms, has its premises on his website
www.edge.org. Eavesdropping is fun. Ian
McEwan, one of the few novelists who has contributed to Edge's ongoing
debates, suggests that the project is not so far removed from the 'old
Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge, when biologists
and economists draw on each other's concepts and molecular biologists
stray into the poorly defended territory of chemists and physicists'.
Brockman
is at the hub of this conversation. When I phone him, he is waiting
for a call from maverick geneticist Craig
Venter about an invention that will put new operating mechanisms
into genes' and radically change our idea of life; earlier, he has
been speaking to George Smoot,
the Nobel-winning astrophysicist who first identified the background
radiation of the Big Bang and thereby invented cosmology.
From where
he is sitting, the Two Cultures no longer applies, the Third Culture
has long-since prevailed.
'Basically,
in terms of whatever war has been going on, I think it has finished,'
he says. 'I don't characterise it by saying we've won. I think everybody
has won. We are living in a profound science culture and the big events
that are affecting people's lives are scientific ones.'
What about Natalie
Angier's anxiety that these ideas have not trickled down, that,
if anything, scientific thought seems to be on the retreat?
'Since when
have the masses of people had any ideas anyway?' Brockman asks. 'It
is always a certain percentage of people who do the thinking for everybody
else. What is changing,' he argues, contrary to Angier's perception,
'is that the media people, who used to have no thoughts of science,
now sit up. Science makes the news.' ...
... |
BOING
BOING
July 2, 2007
The
Guardian on the "new age of ignorance"
Posted By David
Pescovitz
Fifty
years ago, CP Snow posited that there are two cultures in modern
society, the sciences and the humanities, and that the difference
between the two worldviews acted like a wall blocking not only collaboration,
but even conversation. Eventually, Snow talked about a "third
culture" that bridged the two. Literary agent provocateur John
Brockman drew out this idea in his groundbreaking 1995 book The
Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. Yesterday's
issue of the
Guardian has a long article and panel discussion asking "is
the old divide between arts and sciences deeper than ever?" The
article profiles Brockman, whose online publication and community Edge embodies
this third culture through essays, interviews, and books by some
of the world's greatest thinkers living at the intersection of science,
art, and philosophy.
|
THE TIMES
June 11, 2007
The Click
If you think the web is full of trivial rubbish, you will find the intellectual badinage of edge.org to be a blessed counterpoint. This online magazine from the eponymous foundation links to the latest articles by the likes of scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker: heralds the new "third culture" who are "rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives".
...
|
Chicago Tribune
June 24, 2007
What You Ought to Be Reading
By Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic
| |
