GAZETEPORT.COM — Turkey
February 24, 2009

Google Translation

SALZBURGER NACHRICHREN
February 6, 2009

Matthias Horx antwortet

Als Antwort auf diese Systemkrise der Wissenschaft haben sich in den angelsächsischen Ländern, teilweise auch in Skandinavien und Frankreich, neue Wege intellektueller Produktion entwickelt. Wissenschaftler in den USA werden zunehmend zu Autoren populärer Bücher, ihre Erkenntnisse werden auch daran gemessen, ob sie sich erzählen lassen. Und Publizisten wagen den Weg in die Wissenschaft. Neue Welt-Erkenntnis blüht in den Schnittstellen von Wissenschaft und Publizistik. Autoren wie Alain de Botton und Malcolm Gladwell schreiben hochkomplexe Bestseller über Themen wie Ästhetik, Intuition oder Erfolg ("Tipping Point", "Die Überflieger"). Und das legendäre Internetportal TED versammelt die Botschafter der "Dritten Kultur", jener Wissenschaft(en), die nach neuen Synthesen des Welt-Verstehens suchen.

Dieser "Dritten Kultur" (eine Wortschöpfung von John Brockman) fühle ich mich verpflichtet. Dem interdisziplinären Ansatz hat sich auch die Zeppelin-Universität in Friedrichshafen verschrieben, eine Hochschule "zwischen Kultur, Ökonomie, und Politik", in der ungewohnte Wege des Akademischen gegangen werden, an denen ich teilhaben darf. In den Aufnahme-Audits dieser Uni werden den Studenten typische "delphische Fragen" gestellt:

- Gibt es heute einen ähnlich großen Irrtum gibt wie die Vorstellung der Welt als Scheibe?
- Wird es etwas nach dem Kapitalismus geben?
- Warum gibt es so wenig fröhliche Wissenschaftler?

Google Translation

HP/D — Germany
February 20, 2009

Sind Wissenschaft und Religion miteinander vereinbar? Nein, sagte der Evolutionsbiologe Jerry Coyne und argumentierte für diese Haltung ausführlich bei Edge.org. Daraufhin entbrannte eine Debatte zwischen amerikanischen Intellektuellen um diese Frage. Der "Neue Atheist" Sam Harris beantwortet sie im folgenden Essay und geht dabei satirisch auf seine Mitdiskutanten ein.

Einige Dinge stehen über der Vernunft
Es ist schade, dass Leute wie Jerry Coyne und Daniel Dennett nicht erkennen, wie einfach man Religion und Wissenschaft miteinander vereinbaren kann. Ich verstehe, wie sie ihre fundamentalistische Vernunft geblendet und von tieferen Wahrheiten abgehalten hat. Ich möchte diesen beiden Männern schon lange sagen: "Einige Dinge stehen über der Vernunft. Weit darüber!" Zum Glück hat George Dyson das für mich in einem genialen Essay auf dieser Website getan. Er zerstört die intellektuellen Anmaßungen von militanten Atheisten wie Coyne und Dennett auf die eleganteste Art und Weise, die man sich nur vorstellen kann: Indem er einfach den Titel einer Arbeit aus dem 17. Jahrhundert des großen Robert Boyle zitiert. Als ich ein militanter Neo-Rationalist war, hatte ich den tiefgehenden Eindruck, dass sich meine Kollegen und ich in Bezug auf das Design-Argument nicht genügend mit Boyle befasst hatten und darum öffentliche Demütigung riskierten. Nun ist es passiert...

Google Translation

OHMY NEWS — Korea
February 18, 2009

Everything Will Change
Our likely future described by 151 world-class experts

This collection of answers, which, as did its most recent predecessors, will surely find its way to printed publication in a few months, not only serves as a precise sketch of the current state-of-the-art in future studies; above all, its separate viewpoints and differing emphases converge to weave a consistent panorama of what the near future will very probably look like. ...

...Not everything needs to turn out so well. Catastrophe was another common theme in this series of essays. It may be a hurt nature taking its revenge, or a critical increase in our already unsustainable population, or an accidental nuclear detonation that sparks the next great war. The potential collapse of our industrial civilization is a real possibility we have to live with, and the authors who decided to treat this subject would prefer us not to forget it in the midst of our optimism.

Everything is changing. Or has already changed. Or won't. Or it doesn't matter. Change, as another group of authors pointed out, is in the eye of the beholder, and what "changing everything" means depends as much on our concept of "change" as on our concept of "everything." The next radical change to come may imply a redressing of the same old trends and values, or a complete reengineering of our way of life; and "everything" can mean the cultural climate of our time as well as the very fabric of existence. Change is natural, and is always occurring. And the selection made by the Edge Foundation for this year is an excellent and absorbing anthology of the best informed judgments on what is to come.

BUSINESS DAY — South Africa
February 6, 2009

PREDICTING THE FUTURE IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT
By Michel Pireu

THE future is radically unpredictable. It’s unpredictable because we can only track change. We can’t predict futures. Humans can do a little better than other species in predicting futures, but because of the rate of change of technology in human society, constantly throwing out new problems because of the complexity of the social changes that are occurring, then predicting the future becomes extremely hard.

"That is why I say in many respects it’s radically unpredictable. What I do insist is that we have the freedom to make choices about it … but we don’t have infinite flexibility in making those choices …we are constrained by our evolutionary past, by our biological givens — none of us can walk on water, any more than we can grow wings." Steven Rose in The two Steves debate

"Towards the end of the 19th century, the famous physicist William Thomson, more commonly known as Lord Kelvin, proclaimed the end of physics. Despite the silliness of declaring a field moribund, particularly one that had been subject to so many important developments not so long before Thomson’s ill-fated pronouncement, you can’t really fault the poor devil for not foreseeing quantum mechanics and relativity and the revolutionary impact they would have. Seriously, how could anyone, even someone as smart as Lord Kelvin, have predicted quantum mechanics?" Lisa Randall, Physicist, Harvard University

"I used to think you could … In Profiles of the Future, Arthur C Clarke made it seem so easy. "

And so did all those other experts who confidently predicted the paperless office, the artificial intelligentsia who for decades predicted ‘human equivalence in 10 years’, the nanotechnology prophets who kept foreseeing major advances toward molecular manufacturing within 15 years, and so on.

"Mostly, the predictions of science and technology types were wonderful: space colonies, flying cars in everyone’s garage, the conquest (or even reversal) of ageing. (There were of course the doomsayers, too, such as the population-bomb theorists who said the world would run out of food by the turn of the century.)

"But at last, after watching all those forecasts not come true, and in fact become falsified in a crashing, breathtaking manner, I began to question the entire business of making predictions.

"And then I finally decided that I knew the source of this incredible mismatch between confident forecast and actual result. The universe is a complex system in which countless causal chains are acting and interacting independently and simultaneously (the ultimate nature of some of them unknown to science even today).

"There are in fact so many causal sequences and forces at work, all of them running in parallel, and each of them often affecting the course of the others, that it is hopeless to try to specify in advance what’s going to happen as they jointly work themselves out.

"Formerly, when I heard or read a prediction, I believed it. Nowadays I just roll my eyes, shake my head, and turn the page." Ed Regis, Science Writer, from an article at www.edge.org

PAGINA 12 — RADAR SUPPLEMENT — Spain
Sunday, February 15, 2009

VEO VEO

Every year, the site Edge.org has asked a question of its members and friends, the best of the forefront of science today. The year it was the following: "What Will Change Everything: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" And, as every year, Radar ran a selection of those responses — enthusiastic, hopeful, murky, skeptical, encouraging, original from more than 150 physicists, neuroscientists, philosophers, biologists, chemists and mathematicians, among others. Go ahead: you know what awaits us.

By Carlos Silber

Observe, quantify, predict, compare. Science develops and is maintained by these four pillars in balance with the deduction of the scientific method. It was Galileo 400 years ago who finally, after so much blind faith in Aristotle and validity of the argument of authority, one day left his house with these four keys to enter fully into the nature and understand it in its tracks.

If Darwin abused and wore the act of observing (and write in their journals hiperdetallistas), Einstein won his fame in 1919 when their predictions (encapsulated in the Theory of General Relativity) coincided with the facts: the comments made during a total eclipse Sun had shown that the light is diverted to pass near a massive body.

Prediction is often seen as the most valued scientific tool, able to quell that uncertainty and allow the moment to act with foresight. Many use it with restraint and other abuse it. ...

Scientists hate the hard but closely admire his vision extended. So when John Brockman, editor and head of the U.S. site of the agora Edge.org, on the forefront of science, found the question with which every year since 1998, takes the temperature to contemporary thought, biologists, physicists, chemists and all kinds of intellectuals of the "third culture" was flooded with mail box, a resounding "yes, and give you my answer."

"What Will Change Everything: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?", asked Brockman this time, who received 151 bright, optimistic, pessimistic, short, long, cryptic, theoretical as well as surprisingresponses — which in this custom-Radar, are condensed below:

[...continue]

[ED. NOTE: Feature article features the following contributors: Kevin Kelly, Steven Pinker, Freeman Dyson, Ian McEwan, George Dyson, Karl Sabbagh, Richard Dawkins, Zeilinger, Douglas Rushkoff, David Eagleman, Steve Nadis, Brian Eno, Craig Venter, Sherry Turkle, Marcel Kinsbourne] ...

[Spanish language original]

Virtual Lounge Scientists, writers, artists on Brockman's Internet site; sometimes the great minds can guess the truth before the test results are in; when the Science makes a stop at the sports bar

Piero Bianucci

BOOKS, AND REVIEWS

"What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?"

Do scientists believe or know? Perhaps you must be able to know before you believe. Faith, though not religious, would be the engine of science. The paradox of the theory is that it is true but I do not believe it (Title stolen from a comedy of Peppino De Filippo), a book that collects the views of a hundred of the most brilliant physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, biologists and psychologists, but also writers, artists, advisers and directors, who meet in the virtual living room of the agent John Brockman, publisher of the Edge website (www.edge.org).

We are on the jagged edge of research separates the known dall'ignoto, where it is permissible to make wild assumptions and outrageous scientific claims. To attract the big brains of his club on such a slippery slope Brockman launched the following Edge provocation: "Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?." A widespread unproven belief about the existence of other life forms in the universe. With different nuances. Martin Rees, cosmologist at Trinity College in Cambridge, thinks that even if our civilization is the only one, we will expand to colonize the universe and make it "intelligent". To the point that our distant descendants will even "give rise to new universes" obedient to physical laws which they laid, ie universes genetically modified. Paul Davies believes instead that life is already ubiquitous, in full agreement with Craig Venter, the geneticist-entrepreneur who has mapped the human genome. The biologist Richard Dawkins is convinced that Darwinian selection is acting also on alien species: tesi not harmless because it assumes that the evolution before the Project, and not vice versa. It would be interesting to have Pope Ratzinger comment on this. More modestly, the physicist Kenneth Ford thinks that "wherever in our galaxy there is microbial life "(the paradise for the multinationals of antibiotics). There are the obvious: "I believe that nothing is true until is not shown "(Maria Spiropulu, experimentala physicist at CERN in Geneva). The sectarian: Philip Anderson, Nobel Laureate in physics, believes that string theory is empty and creative intelligence to evade research more important. The Sophists: "I believe" (Tor Norretranders, writer). The Romantics: "I believe in true love ", David Buss, a psychologist, University of Texas. Aesthetes: Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate in physics, believes in the beauty of symmetry, and if the symmetry is violated, it opens the way for a higher order beauty. The obvious: the environmentalist Schneider (Stanford University) believes in global warming. The minimalist: Freeman Dyson, renowned theoretical physicist, is convinced, but can not prove it, than ever the opposite of a power of 2 is a power of 5.

There are also dreamers. The biologist Stuart Kaufman hopes that a "fourth law of thermodynamics" is responsible for the creation of our universe like so many biospheres, the information technologust Ray Kurzweil is confident that we will overcome the limit of transmitting information at speed light, many do not give up the idea that there is some form of existence beyond death. The neuroscientists, as is right, are obsessed by relationship between the physical brain and the intangible mind. But then comes Alun Anderson, formerly Director of New Scientist to demystify: "I believe that cockroaches have a conscience." In short, take a step beyond the "edge", and we find ourselves at the sports bar. But the book put together by Brockman, although it the runs the risk of gossip, has the great merit of making us reflect n very concrete ways on the dialectic between intuition, theory and experiment. It reminds us that science is made ofimaginative questions and answers, rather than arid rationality.

The author John Brockman (photo above) is the founder of www.edge.org, a site that compares the assumptions research scientists and intellectuals. Hence the book (left. Illustration of Doriano Solinas, on the cover).

[Italian language original]

VRIJ NEDERLAND — Netherlands
February 14, 2009

The 50 best blogs and sites;
Web / VN Favorites

edited Forest and Kim Maurits Martijn

Edge

Fantastic online the biggest breeding ground where the spirits of the U.S. on anything discussed. Editor, society and intellectual impresario John Brockman beast Each year a question to a variety of scientists and thinkers—the Edge annual question '- and their answers are also published in book form, as warm rolls over the fly.

EL PERIODICO DE CATALUNYA — Spain
January 29, 2009

¿THIRD CULTURE?
Roden Domingo De Moya

Two Victorian gentleman, back in 1875, engaged in an entertaining polemic about the superiority of science or the humanities. TH Huxley disregard the study of the classics as Matthew Arnold was mofaba of evolutionary theory, both with similar intellectual occlusion. The rifirrafe was repeated in the late fifties when CP Snow, a physicist and novelist, denounced the chasm separating the "two cultures", the scientific and literary, and ran a way of understanding something of an unequal alliance of civilizations among scientists that are moving steadily towards the future and some intellectuals that carry the weight of the past. That alliance was hot air and Snow is to step out of an angry guardian letters FR Leavis who encouraged the cotarro.

Now things are clearer and Leavis draws the wrath of nostalgic sympathy for the old junk. The narrow plume of people with scientific knowledge has been hard to crack, so that even in the nineties, John Brockman returned to the burden by advocating a "third culture", resulting from the reconciliation of science and letters. But this third culture, such as the Edge of Brockman have slipped on the thick skin of the writers alone, and has been echoed in the scientific community, increasingly concerned by spreading its activities.

All this brings me to remember the neuroscientist R. Douglas Hofstadter, who became famous in 1980 when he won with a fascinating book, Godel, Escher, Bach, the Pulitzer and the American Book Award. Hofstadter proposed that arises from our individual self-functioning of the mind. Although this sounds thick, the scientist who plays the piano and has translated the novel in verse Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, it has a stunning clarity that leads to deception of the reader feel smarter. Intellectual joy that can be tested in his latest book, I am a strange loop. Nostalgia with the return of the third culture in which a scientist pampers his writings as would a poet (Hofstadter does) and a passionate writer metabolize fabulous trompicones of science.

¿TERCERA CULTURA? [Spanish original]