THE REALITY CLUB
Comments on Edge

Stanislas Dehaene, Murray Gell-Mann, Bruce Sterling, Lawrence Wilkinson, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Marney Morris, Hans-Joachim Metzger, Carl Djerassi, Alun Anderson, Karl Sabbagh, Douglas Rushkoff, John Catalano, John Baez, Stephen Miller, Sandra Blakeslee, and Peter Tallack on Edge

From: Stanislas Dehaene
To: John Brockman
Date: 10-13-97

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Richard Dawkins's essay on your new website. Not only did it give me an 'appetite for wonder', but also a craving thirst for more such exquisitely accessible presentations of scientific matters - I believe I'll be making frequent visits to your URL! It is a great honor to see my name mentioned amidst the prestigious figures of science that you are gathering at this site. I don't know if my own research would 'thrill Aristotle to the core of his being', but I do appreciate the opportunity of giving it a try - do you plan to have him send comments from elysium.com?

From: Murray Gell-Mann
To: John Brockman
Date: 10-13-97

I enjoyed reading on my email the piece by Richard Dawkins on the present state of siege in which science finds itself, under attack by all sorts of silly people with different silly agendas. It's interesting though that we are not alone. It is not only science that is under attack, in fact any sort of expertise is resented, such as the expertise of the historian.

Murray Gell-Mann, theoretical physicist; winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics; a cofounder of the Santa Fe Institute; and author of The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.

From: Bruce Sterling
To: John Brockman
Date: 10-13-97

This is truly a remarkably interesting mailing list; despite its recherche topics it seduces me into reading it almost every time.

I've been a grateful lurker since your founding of EDGE, reading each installment (usually in arrears) with fascination and great pleasure. This quick note of long overdue thanks is both for including me, and more specifically, for the pieces in 19 on and by James Lee Byars. Your memories and the work you did together were moving, in the truest sense of that word, and in many ways. Thank you.

Lawrence Wilkinson, cofounder, president, and CEO of Global Business Network.

From: Stewart Brand
To: John Brockman
Date: 10-13-97

John, congratulations on how this service is developing. I particularly appreciated the recent Simonyi and Smolin material. Reality Club lives, better than ever.

A note to Brockman: you've finally got your Reality Club. Thanks.

the more 'edges' i receive, the more i like getting to know you.

What I like and value the most about being on the EDGE is the incredibly dense dialogical conjuncture of intense scientific, technological and cultural conjecture. It is that exchange of ideas that is required if you really want to be here, in real time, if you want to be (a) contemporary, that is.

Hans-Joachim Metzger

There are some sociological aspects of the EDGE that interest me in my current intellectual life: First the idea of dialogue. That is precisely what has moved me rather late in life to a special form of fiction writing which I call 'science-in-fiction.' All of our written communication as scientists is monologuist. Furthermore, virtually none is conducted in the first person singular.I don't recall having used I even once in the over 1000 scientific articles bearing my name.

John, I hope all is well with you - and thanks for confusing me with Philip Anderson (electronically at least). I've always wanted to be a grumpy genius. Anyway, I've been meaning to drop you a line for quite a while to say that I really like what your doing with The EDGE and your website. The piece with Brian Goodwin was particularly fun for me.

From: Karl Sabbagh
To: John Brockman
Date: 10-13-97

EDGE is moving from good to great.

From: Douglas Rushkoff
To: John Brockman
Date: 10-13-97

I just went through the archive. Congratulations! So much great thought from so many deeply thinking people and some real facts, too!

Richard Dawkins appears on the EDGE website - an amazing site based on John Brockman's two books: Digerati and The Third Culture. It features ongoing participation with, and interaction by, many, if not most, of the individuals included in the books, along with many new guests.

Right now you can also read this paper on John Brockman's website called EDGE. This website features all sorts of fun interviews and discussions. For example, if you look now you'll find an intelligent interview with my favorite living musician, Brian Eno. More to the point, a discussion of Kauffman and Smolin's paper is happening there now. As a long-time fan of USENET newsgroups and other electronic forms of chitchat, I'm really pleased to see how Brockman has set up a kind of modern-day version of the French salon.

Friends! If you haven't already by now, do bookmark EDGE, (www.edge.org) from which these portraits are taken, and in which most of the referenced documents reside. EDGE is, in this writer's opinion, the single most intellectually stimulating site on the Web, gathering with vivid clarity the work of many of the most exciting thinkers of our time.

Stephen Miller, ZenPlanet http://www.nirvanet.fr/zenplanet/

Just want to thank you for the wonderful EDGE discussions. I am doing a piece on mental organs (a la Pinker and his new opus) and found the discussion from last spring to be wonderful and most helpful. So, thank you again!

From: Peter Tallack
To: John Brockman
Date: 10-13-97

I've been meaning to thank you for sending me EDGE - it's always an enjoyable and provocative read.