| |
THE
WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 2003 [1.6.03]
"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?" —GWB
I wish the above was really an email from President Bush. It is not.
It's the set-up for this year's Edge Annual Question — 2003,
and because this event receives wide attention from the scientific
community and the global press, the responses it evokes just might
have the same effect as a memo to the President....that is, if you
stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise...
I am asking members of the Edge community to take this project
seriously as a public service, to work together to create a document
that can be widely disseminated to begin a public discussion about
the important scientific issues before us. |
SEVEN
SCIENTISTS: AN EDGE OBSEQUY FOR THE ASTRONAUTS
OF SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA [2.10.03]
Nicholas Humphrey
Amidst
all the self serving rhetoric, I think Edge should
contribute its own obsequy. The people who died were
scientists. Whatever else they may have believed
in, their goal was to learn and to explore.
Contributors:
Oliver Morton, Gregory Benford, George Dyson, Nicholas
Humphey, Paul Davies, Martin Rees, Karl Sabbagh,
Piet Hut, Gerald Holton |
THEORIES
OF THE BRANE [2.10.03]
Lisa Randall
Additional
spatial dimensions may seem like a wild and
crazy idea at first, but there are powerful
reasons to believe that there really are
extra dimensions of space. One reason resides
in string theory, in which it is postulated
that the particles are not themselves fundamental
but are oscillation modes of a fundamental
string. |
REMEMBERING
DOLLY [2.14.03]
Dolly,
the first clone from a mammal, died on February
13th at the age of 6 years old.
Where were you on July 5, 1996? What did you think when you read the news
about the accomplishment of Ian Wilmut and his team at Roslyn Institute
in Edinburgh? What is Dolly's lasting historical significance? How does
Dolly's life change our view of humanity?
Contributors:
Jaron Lanier, Martin Rees, John Horgan, Robert
Sapolsky [.....] |
LOOP
QUANTUM GRAVITY: LEE SMOLIN [2.24.03]
Lee
Smolin
Science is a kind of open laboratory for a democracy.
It's a way to experiment with the ideals of our
democratic societies. For example, in science
you must accept the fact that you live in acommunity
that makes the ultimate judgment as to the worth
of your work. But at the same time, everybody's
judgment is his or her own. The ethics of the
community require that you argue for what you
believe and that you try as hard as you can to
get results to test your hunches, but you have
to be honest in reporting the results, whatever
they are. You have the freedom and independence
to do whatever you want, as long as in the end
you accept the judgment of the community. Good
science comes from the collision of contradictory
ideas, from conflict, from people trying to do
better than their teachers did, and I think here
we have a model for what a democratic society
is about. There's a great strength in our democratic
way of life, and science is at the root of it. |
FIVE
FLOWERS By Katinka
Matson
[2.24.03]
"One
of the reasons—besides sheer artistry—that
Katinka Matson's work resonates so strongly with us
is that is that the insect-like vision that results
from scanning direct-to-CCD runs so much deeper in
us than vision as processed through a lens. By removing
the lens, Matson's work bypasses an entire stack of
added layers and takes us back to when we saw more
by looking at less." — George
Dyson
ON
SCANNER PHOTOGRAPHY — Contributors:
George Dyson, William Calvin, Nicholas
Humphrey, Colin Tudge
|
THE
EDGE SCIENCE DINNER - 2003 [2.27.03]
On
February 27, 2003, Edge Foundation, Inc. celebrated
the 6th anniversary of Edge at the "Edge
Science Dinner" (formerly known as "The
Billionaires' Dinner") at Cibo's Restaurant,
in Monterey, California. Among the world-class
scientists attending the dinner (who are also
Edge contributors) were biologist Jared Diamond
(Guns, Germs, And Steel); psychologist
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate); cognitive
scientist Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous
Idea); Computer scientists Marvin Minsky
(Society Of Mind), Rodney Brooks (Flesh
And Machines), and W. Daniel Hillis (The
Pattern On The Stone) ; Physicists Freeman
Dyson (Disturbing The Universe), and
Lee Smolin (Life Of The Cosmos), and
atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider (Laboratory
Earth). |
SMART
HEURISTICS [4.2.03]
Gerd Gigerenzer
Goethe
as an artist knew that intuition was terribly
important for organizing the data that we accumulate
through sensory perception. We need a balance
between the analytical way of knowing and the
intuitive way of knowing, both of which can
be cultivated systematically. In our educational
system today, we focus on the analytical, and
we just leave the intuitive alone. In fact
we tend to deny or ignore it. Just as we've
been kicking shit out of Nature for 400 years,
we've been doing the same to that part of our
own nature that we call subjectivity or intuition. |
WHY
DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS [4.28.03]
Jared
Diamond
Lewis
Thomas Prize Lecture
The Rockefeller Institute, New York City
Thursday March 27, 2003
What I'm
going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision
making. I'll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily
delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate
a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem
arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they
perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem.
Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to
do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses
of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely,
successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understand the reasons why
groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list
to help groups make good decisions.
|
WHO
CARES ABOUT FIREFLIES?:
A TALK WITH STEVEN STROGATZ [5.12.03]
Introduction by Alan Alda
We see fantastic examples of synchrony in the natural world all around
us. To give a few examples, there were persistent reports when the first
Western travelers went to southeast Asia, back to the time of Sir Francis
Drake in the 1500s, of spectacular scenes along riverbanks, where thousands
upon thousands of fireflies in the trees would all light up and go off
simultaneously. These kinds of reports kept coming back to the West,
and were published in scientific journals, and people who hadn't seen
it couldn't believe it. Scientists said that this is a case of human
misperception, that we're seeing patterns that don't exist, or that it's
an optical illusion. How could the fireflies, which are not very intelligent
creatures, manage to coordinate their flashings in such a spectacular
and vast way? |
IN
THE MATRIX
[5.19.03]
A
Talk with Martin Rees
Now life and complexity means information-processing
power; the most complex conceivable entities may
not be organic life, but some sort of hyper-computers.
But once you accept that our universe, or even
other universes, may allow the emergence within
them of immense complexity, far beyond our human
brains, far beyond the kind of computers we can
conceive, perhaps almost at the level of the limits
that Seth Lloyd discusses for computers—then
you get a rather extraordinary conclusion. These
super or hyper-computers would have the capacity
to simulate not just a simple part of reality,
but a large fraction of an entire universe....And
then of course the question arises: if these simulations
exist in far larger numbers than the universe
themselves, could we be in one of them? Could
we ourselves not be part of what we think of as
bedrock physical reality? Could we be ideas in
the mind of some supreme being, as it were, who's
running a simulation? |
| EDGE
"BOOKS" PAGE [5.27.03]
Books
are news and Edge is inaugurating
a new, ongoing, feature to recognize, and
call attention to, third culture books
by our contributors.
Here's the Edge-like approach
(suggested by Daniel C. Dennett):
You
walk into a room full of Edge contributors—your
peers, your colleagues. You have your
new, and as yet unpublished book, in
which you have marked a page, and,
on that page, highlighted a single
paragraph which you believe best represents
the big ideas in your book. You pass
the book around...
|
A
UNITED BIOLOGY
A Talk with E.O. Wilson [5.28.03]
Introduction by Steven
Pinker
We're
beginning to get some revolutionary new
ideas about how social behavior originated,
and also how to construct a superorganism.
If we can define a set of assembly rules
for superorganisms then we have a model
system for how to construct an organism.
How do you put an ant colony together?
You start with a queen ant, which digs
a hole in the ground, starts laying eggs,
and goes through a series of operations
that raise the first brood. The first brood
then goes through a series of operations
to breed more workers, and before long
you've got soldier ants, worker ants, and
foragers, and you've got a teeming colony.
That's because they follow a series of
genetically prescribed rules of interaction,
behavior, and physical development. If
we can fully understand how a superorganism
is put together, we'll come much closer
to general principles of how an organism
is put together. There are two different
levels—the cells put together to
make an organism, organisms put together
to make a superorganism. Right now I'm
examining what we know to see if there
are rules of how superorganisms are put
together. |
A
BOZO OF A BABOON [6.4.03]
A Talk with Robert Sapolsky
For
the humans who would like to know what it
takes to be an alpha man—if I were
25 and asked that question I would certainly
say competitive prowess is important—balls,
translated into the more abstractly demanding
social realm of humans. What's clear to me
now at 45 is, screw the alpha male stuff.
Go for an alternative strategy. Go for the
social affiliation, build relationships with
females, don't waste your time trying to
figure out how to be the most adept socially
cagy male-male competitor. Amazingly enough
that's not what pays off in that system.
Go for the affiliative stuff and bypass the
male crap. I could not have said that when
I was 25. |
THE GENOME CHANGES EVERYTHING [6.18.03]
A Talk
with Matt Ridley
The substance of what I'm interested in is that it's the genes that are related
to behavior, and how they work. The big insight is that genes are the agents
of nurture as well as nature. Experience is a huge part of a developing
human brain, the human mind, and a human organism. We need to develop in
a social world and get things in from the outside. It's enormously important
to the development of human nature. You can't describe human nature without
it. But that process is itself genetic, in the sense that there are genes
in there designed to get the experience out of the world and into the organism.
In the human case you're going to have genes that set up systems for learning
that are not going to be present in other animals, language being the classic
example. Language is something that in every sense is a genetic instinct.
There's no question that human beings, unless they're unlucky and have
a genetic mutation, inherit a capacity for learning language. That capacity
is simply not inherited in anything like the same degree by a chimpanzee
or a dolphin or any other creature. But you don't inherit the language;
you inherit the capacity for learning the language from the environment.
|
EINSTEIN AND POINCARÉ [6.24.03]
A Talk with Peter Galison
After learning more about Poincaré I tried to understand how
he and Einstein could
have radically reformulated
our ideas of time and
space by looking at the
way that philosophically
abstract concerns, physics
concerns, and these technological
problems of keeping trains
from bashing into each
other and coordinating
mapmaking across the
empires might fit together
into a story. I began
with an extraordinarily
simple idea: that two
events are simultaneous
if I can make clocks
at the two events say
the same thing. How do
I coordinate these clocks?
I send a signal from
one to the other and
take into account the
time it takes for the
signal to get there.
That’s the basic
idea, but all of relativity
theory, E = mc2, and
so much of what Einstein
does follows from it.
The question is, where
did this idea come from?
Albert Einstein and Henri
Poincaré were
the two people who worked
out this practical, almost
operational idea of simultaneity,
and I want to see them
as occupying points of
intersection of technological,
philosophical, and physical
reasoning. They were
the two people who were
at those triple cross-sections.
|
THE
MAKING OF A PHYSICIST [7.2.03]
A Talk With Murray Gell-Mann
Uncharacteristically,
I discussed my application to Yale with my father, who asked, "What
were you thinking of putting down?" I said, "Whatever would
be appropriate for archaeology or linguistics, or both, because those
are the things I'm most enthusiastic about. I'm also interested in
natural history and exploration." He said, "You'll starve!" After
all, this was 1944 and his experiences with the Depression were still
quite fresh in his mind; we were still living in genteel poverty. He
could have quit his job as the vault custodian in a bank and taken
a position during the war that would have utilized his talents — his
skill in mathematics, for example — but he didn't want to take
the risk of changing jobs. He felt that after the war he would regret
it, so he stayed where he was. This meant that we really didn't have
any spare money at all.
I asked
him, "What would you suggest?" He mentioned engineering,
to which I replied, "I'd rather starve. If I designed anything
it would fall apart." And sure enough when I took an aptitude
test a year later I was advised to take up nearly anything but engineering.
Then my father suggested, "Why don't we compromise — on
physics?"
|
THE
POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY [7.17.03]
A Talk with Elaine Pagels
The
kind of Christianity that pervades the religious
right in this country divides the world between
the saved and the damned, between God's people
and Satan's people, between good and evil.
We have all seen how this is played out in
our politics. I used to think that President
Bush was using this language as a political
ploy. I still think he is, but I also think—to
my disappointment—that he also believes
it. His conviction that he is God's chosen
one to "rid the world of evildoers" blinds
him to the evil that he—and we, as Americans—are
capable of doing. The conviction that we are
on the side of good—of God—is,
however, an ancient one—enormously powerful.
Christians
invoking terms such as "evil-doers" read the
bible, as anyone does, selectively. They choose
the parts they like and they leave out the
parts they don't. In this case the parts they
like are the parts about an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth, that is—and
a life for a life. If someone's taken a life,
then their life is required. And that's certainly
a biblical tenet. Of course, it's from the
Old Testament. You don't hear much about forgiveness
and turning the other cheek from our President
and his administration. The Old Testament is
what they choose for this occasion because
it suits their purpose.
What
I've learned through studying the Gospel of
Thomas and the context of the politics of early
Christianity, is that anyone who participates
in Christian tradition without having learned
anything about it—and that's most people
who participate in it, because it's not taught
in public or private schools for the most part—often
think of their traditions as immutable, as
if they've just come down from God.
|
THE
BRIGHT STUFF [7.23.03]
Daniel
C. Dennett
The
time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What
is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed
to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe
in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny— or God. We
disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about
morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share
a disbelief in black magic—and life after death. |
THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT [7.23.03]
Richard Dawkins
A
triumph of consciousness-raising has
been the homosexual hijacking of the
word "gay". I used to mourn the loss
of gay in (what I still think of as)
its true sense. But on the bright side
(wait for it) gay has inspired a new
imitator, which is the climax of this
article. Gay is succinct, uplifting,
positive: an "up" word, where homosexual
is a down word, and queer, faggot and
pooftah are insults. Those of us who
subscribe to no religion; those of us
whose view of the universe is natural
rather than supernatural; those of us
who rejoice in the real and scorn the
false comfort of the unreal, we need
a word of our own, a word like "gay".
You can say "I am an atheist" but at
best it sounds stuffy (like "I am a homosexual")
and at worst it inflames prejudice (like "I
am a homosexual"). |
PERSONAL
FABRICATION [7.23.03]
A Talk with Neil Gershenfeld
We've already had a digital revolution;
we don't need to keep having it. The
next big thing in computers will be literally
outside the box, as we
bring the programmability of the digital world to the rest of the world.
With the benefit of hindsight, there's a tremendous historical parallel
between the transition from mainframes to PCs and now from machine tools
to personal fabrication. By personal fabrication I mean not just making
mechanical structures, but fully functioning systems including sensing,
logic, actuation, and displays. |
BLACKOUT! "We're
All On The Grid Together" [8.22.03]
By Albert-László Barabási
Once power is fully restored, it will take little time to find the culprit:
most likely, it will be a malfunctioning switch or fuse, a snapped power
line or some other local failure. Somebody will be fired, promotions and
raises denied, and lawmakers will draw up legislation guaranteeing that
this problem will not occur again.....Something will be inevitably missed,
however, during all this finger-pointing: this week's blackout has little
to do with faulty equipment, negligence or bad design. President Bush's
call to upgrade the power grid will do little to eliminate power failures.
The magnitude of the blackout is rooted in an often ignored aspect of our
globalized world: vulnerability due to interconnectivity. |
THE
MORAL SENSE TEST [8.22.03]
Marc
D. Hauser
"Our
new web site is up and running," writes Marc D. Hauser of
Harvard's Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. "We
are interested in understanding people's moral intuitions. The
web site, includes background information and importantly, The
Moral Sense Test. I would very much appreciate it if you would
not only take the test, but also spread the word to your friends
and colleagues, of all ages. We are particularly interested in
getting cross-cultural data as well as developmental information,
so even young children who can read would be terrifically helpful.
The more the word spreads, the better for us. Thanks a lot for
your help. — Marc" |
THE
ADJACENT POSSIBLE [11.3.03]
A Talk with Stuart Kauffman
An autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do
at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is
true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They
all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum
as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy
doing work cycles all the time. |
WHY
GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED
ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY
OF CATS AND APPLES [11.19.03]
A Talk with Jaron Lanier
I've
had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success
of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon,
Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few
important starting points quite right, and some things in the
foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew.
|
NEW
PILLS FOR THE MIND [12.4.03]
A Talk with Samuel Barondes, M.D.
Most
of the psychiatric drugs we use today
are refinements of drugs whose value
for mental disorders was discovered
by accident decades ago. Now we can
look forward to a more rational way
to design psychiatric drugs. It will
be guided by the identification of
the gene variants that predispose
certain people to particular mental
disorders such as schizophrenia or
severe depression. |
THE
LANDSCAPE [12.4.03]
A Talk with Leonard Susskind
What we've discovered in the
last several years is that
string theory has an incredible
diversity—a tremendous
number of solutions—and
allows different kinds
of environments. A lot
of the practitioners of
this kind of mathematical
theory have been in a state
of denial about it. They
didn't want to recognize
it. They want to believe
the universe is an elegant
universe—and it's
not so elegant. It's different
over here. It's that over
here. It's a Rube Goldberg
machine over here. And
this has created a sort
of sense of denial about
the facts about the theory.
The theory is going to
win, and physicists who
are trying to deny what's
going on are going to lose. |
|
What
the data suggest to me is that if one starts with a brain of a certain
complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that
brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication
system. Of course, chimpanzees don't proceed to develop full-blown
language the way you and I have. Grey parrots, such as Alex and Griffin,
are never going to sit here and give an interview the way you and
I are conducting an interview and having a chat. But they are going
to produce meaningful, complex communicative combinations. It is
incredibly fascinating to have creatures so evolutionarily separate
from humans performing simple forms of the same types of complex
cognitive tasks as do young children.