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FORTY
FLOWERS By Katinka
Matson [1.14.02]
New technologies=new perceptions. For the past several years she has
experimented with non-photographic techniques for creating images by
utilizing input through a flatbed CCD scanner. (No photographs are employed
in the process.) This presentation on Edge is the first public
showing of this work. |
THE
WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 2002 [1.14.02]
"I can repeat the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?"
"WHAT IS YOUR
QUESTION? ... WHY?"
The
5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit
of the Edge motto: "To arrive at the
edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the
most complex and sophisticated minds, put
them in a room together, and have them ask
each other the questions they are asking
themselves." The 2002 Edge Question
is: "WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?" I
have asked Edge contributors for "hard-edge" questions,
derived from empirical results or experience
specific to their expertise, that render
visible the deeper meanings of our lives,
redefine who and what we are. The goal is
a series of interrogatives in which "thinking
smart prevails over the anaesthesiology of
wisdom." |
REFLECTIONS
ON MODERN TERRORISM [2.4.02]
By Gerald Holton
There has been an historic transition in which Type I terrorism and Type
II terrorism are being combined. Type I terrorism consists of acts by individuals or small
groups that aim to impose terror on other individuals and groups, and through
them indirectly on their governments. Type
II terrorism is the imposition by a government on groups of local or foreign
populations. The new type of terrorism — Type III — is carried
out by a substantially larger group of individuals, is aimed directly at
a national population, and has all the components for success. The article deals with how this new terrorism,
at very little psychic cost on the perpetrators, disrupts personal and
historic memory through large-scale catastrophe organized for that purpose.
Type III terrorism is made easier by the ready availability of high-level
technology. Target nations will not have open to
them the conventional responses, and will have to devise new, preventive
measures. |
THE
EVOLUTION OF COOKING
[2.28.01]
A Talk with Richard Wrangham
One of the great thrusts of behavioral biology for the last three
or four decades has been that if you change the conditions
that an animal is in, then you change the kind of behavior
that is elicited. What the genetic control of behavior means
is not that instincts inevitably pop out regardless of circumstances;
instead, it is that we are created with a series of emotions
that are appropriate for a range of circumstances. The particular
set of emotions that pop out will vary within species, but
they will also vary with context, and once you know them
better, then you can arrange the context... It's much better
to anticipate these things, recognize the problem, and design
in advance to protect.
|
THE
INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE [3.25.02]
Ray Kurzweil
The universe has been set up in an exquisitely
specific way so that evolution could produce the
people that are sitting here today and we could
use our intelligence to talk about the universe.
We see a formidable power in the ability to use
our minds and the tools we've created to gather
evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop
theories, to test the theories, and to understand
the universe at increasingly precise levels. |
THE
NEW HUMANISTS [4.22.02]
By John Brockman
Something
radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding
physical systems, new ways of thinking about
thinking that call into question many of our
basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the
mind, advances in physics, electricity, genetics,
neurobiology, engineering, the chemistry of
materials—all are challenging basic assumptions
of who and what we are, of what it means to
be human. The arts and the sciences are again
joining together as one culture, the third
culture. Those involved in this effort—scientists,
science-based humanities scholars, writers—are
at the center of today's intellectual action....They
are the new humanists.
|
|
Stephen
Jay Gould
1942 - 2002
Stephen
Jay Gould died
on May 20 at his home in New
York City. To
remember and honor Steve, to
think about his ideas, I present "The
Pattern of Life's History",
Chapter 2 in The
Third Culture (Simon & Schuster,
1995). Included in the
chapter are commentaries on Steve
and his work by many other participants
in the book such as Stewart
Kauffman, Marvin Minsky, Niles
Eldredge, Murray Gell-Mann, Francisco
Varela, J. Doyne Farmer, Steven
Pinker, Nicholas Humphrey, Brian
Goodwin, Steve Jones, George
C. Williams, and Daniel C. Dennett.
|
TWELVE
FLOWERS By
Katinka Matson
Introduction By
Kevin Kelly
When I saw Matson's images I was blown
away. Erase from your mind any notion
of pixels or any grainy artifact of previous
digitalization gear. Instead imagine a
painter who could, like Vermeer, capture
the quality of light that a camera can,
but with the color of paints. That is
what a scanner gives you. Now imagine
a gifted artist like Matson exploring
what the world looks like when it can
only see two inches in front of its eye,
but with infinite detail! In her flowers
one can see every microscopic dew drop,
leaf vein, and particle of pollen—in
satisfying rich pigmented color. (From
the Introduction By Kevin Kelly.)
|
A
MUTUAL, JOINT-STOCK WORLD IN ALL MERIDIANS
[6.5.02]
By James J. O'Donnell
It
was on the 24th of August, in the
year 410 of the common era, that
the unthinkable came to pass. A
guerrilla army, led by a renegade
Roman general named Alaric, who
had been brought up in a German-speaking
community outside the actual boundaries
of the Roman empire, ended years
of threats and intimidation by
invading the city of Rome itself.
For three days they remained, destroying,
looting, and killing. The exact
loss of life was never known and
may have been less than fears of
the moment said it was, but the
experience was a shattering one
nonetheless. It had been 800 years
since the last such defeat of the
city, 800 years in which Rome had
grown to be the greatest city in
the world, the envy of the nations,
the model for what a great city
was like.
|
BEYOND
COMPUTATION [6.5.02]
A
Talk with Rodney Brooks
Maybe
there's something beyond computation
in the sense that we don't understand
and we can't describe what's going
on inside living systems using computation
only. When we build computational models
of living systems—such as a self-evolving
system or an artificial immunology
system—they're not as robust or
rich as real living systems. Maybe
we're missing something, but what could
that something be?
|
SMART
MOBS [6.5.02]
Howard Rheingold
The
big battle coming over the future of smart
mobs concerns media cartels and government
agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime
of the broadcast era in which the customers
of technology will be deprived of the power
to create and left only with the power to consume.
That power struggle is what the battles over
file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of
the radio spectrum are about. Are
the populations of tomorrow going to be users,
like the PC owners and website creators who
turned technology to widespread innovation?
Or will they be consumers, constrained from
innovation and locked into the technology and
business models of the most powerful entrenched
interests? |
WHAT
SHAPE ARE A GERMAN SHEPHERD'S EARS? [[7.15.02]
A Talk with Stephen M. Kosslyn
There is a gigantic project yet to be done
that will have the effect of rooting psychology
in natural science. Once this is accomplished,
you'll be able to go from phenomenology. . . to
information processing. . . to the brain. . . down
through the workings of the neurons, including
the biochemistry, all the way to the biophysics
and the way that genes are up-regulated and down-regulated...This
is going to happen; I have no doubt at all. When
it does we’re going to have a much better
understanding of human nature than is otherwise
going to be possible. |
REBOOTING
CIVILIZATION II
A Edge Event
On July 21, Edge held an event at
Eastover Farm which included the physicists Seth
Lloyd, Paul Steinhardt, and Alan Guth, computer
scientist Marvin Minsky, and technologist Ray Kurzweil.
This year, I noted there are a lot of "universes" floating
around. Seth Lloyd: the computational universe
(or, if you prefer, the it and bit-itty bitty-universe);
Paul Steinhardt: the cyclic universe; Alan Guth:
the inflationary universe; Marvin Minsky: the emotion
universe; Ray Kurzweil: the intelligent universe. |
A
BIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN
NATURE [9.9.02]
A Talk with Steven Pinker
The main question is: "Why are empirical
questions about how the mind works so weighted
down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Why do people believe that there are dangerous
implications to the idea that the mind is a product
of the brain, that the brain is organized in part
by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by
natural selection?" This idea has been met
with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings,
and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right
and from the left. And these reactions affect both
the day-to-day conduct of science and the public
appreciation of the science. By exploring the political
and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes
us tick, we can have a more honest science and
a less fearful intellectual milieu. |
10
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SECURITY, PRIVACY AND
ENCRYPTION [10.24.02]
A Talk with Richard M. Smith
Until the '60s, governments were not
really involved in car design. Then people like
Ralph Nader started noticing that a lot of people
were being killed in cars and made it clear why
this was happening. We have spent the last 35
years or so designing safety into cars, and it's
had a pretty dramatic effect. . . We're in that
same era now with security on computer systems.
We know we have a problem and now we need to
focus on design. |
GENOMIC
IMPRINTING [10.24.02]
A Talk with David Haig
The area to which I've given the greatest attention
is a new phenomenon in molecular biology called genomic
imprinting, which is a situation in which a DNA sequence
can have conditional behavior depending on whether
it is maternally inherited—coming from an egg—or
paternally inherited—coming through a sperm. The
phenomenon is called imprinting because the basic idea
is that there is some imprint that is put on the DNA
in the mother's ovary or in the father's testes which
marks that DNA as being maternal or paternal, and influences
its pattern of expression—what the gene does in
the next generation in both male and female offspring. |
GOOD
BOOKS [10.24.02]
Toby Mundy
Doomsayers
persist in the belief that the book world has
been overrun by philistinism. They are wrong.
Publishers can rejoice in unprecedented levels
of both quality and quantity. We are living in
a golden age of the book. |
THE
COMPUTATIONAL UNIVERSE [10.24.02]
Seth Lloyd
Every physical system registers information,
and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing,
it changes that information, transforms that information,
or, if you like, processes that information. Since
I've been building quantum computers I've come
around to thinking about the world in terms of
how it processes information. |
THE
EMOTION UNIVERSE: MARVIN MINSKY [11.7.02]
A Talk with Marvin Minsky
My goal is making machines that can think-by understanding how people
think. One reason why we find this hard to do is because our old ideas
about psychology are mostly wrong. |
THE
INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE [11.7.02]
Ray Kurzweil
The universe has been set up in an exquisitely
specific way so that evolution could produce the
people that are sitting here today and we could
use our intelligence to talk about the universe.
We see a formidable power in the ability to use
our minds and the tools we've created to gather
evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop
theories, to test the theories, and to understand
the universe at increasingly precise levels. |
PER
BAK 1948–2002 [11.13.02]
A Rememberance By Lee Smolin
Per Bak died on October 16, 2002, at the age
of 54. Per was one of the founders and most influential
contributors to the study of complex systems. Per made
many contributions to science, but the best known was
a general theory of self-organization, which he called, "self-organized
criticality". |
THE
CYCLIC UNIVERSE [11.21.02]
Paul Steinhardt
I...in the last year I've been involved
in the development of an alternative theory that
turns the cosmic history topsy-turvy. All the
events that created the important /archive/archive_ of
our universe occur in a different order, by different
physics, at different times, over different time
scales—and yet this model seems capable
of reproducing all of the successful predictions
of the consensus picture with the same exquisite
detail. |
THE
INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE
[11.21.02]
Alan Guth
Inflationary theory itself is a twist on
the conventional Big Bang theory. The shortcoming
that inflation is intended to overcome is the basic
fact that, although the Big Bang theory is called
the Big Bang it is in fact not really a theory of
a bang at all; it never was. |
THE
ULTRA EARLY UNIVERSE [12.15.02]
Martin Rees
The
boisterous variety of ideas being discussed—branes,
inflation, etc.—makes clear that the issues are
fascinating, but also we’re still a long way from
the right answer. We’re at the stage where all possibilities
should be explored. It’s worthwhile to consider
the consequences of even the most flaky ideas, although
the chance of any of them actually panning out in the
long run is not very high. |
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