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Edge Question
Neuigkeiten von morgen: Die führenden Wissenschaftler unserer Zeit über die wichtigsten Ideen, Entdeckungen und Erfindungen der Zukunft
20 Jahre "The Edge" – Mit Beiträgen u. a. von Steven Pinker, Alison Gopnik, Jared Diamond, Martin J. Rees, Carlo Rovelli, Jonathan Haid, Lisa Randall und Hans Ulrich Obrist. Seit zwei Jahrzehnten versammelt John Brockman jährlich die angesehensten Wissenschaftler und Intellektuellen unserer Zeit in einem Band.Wissenschaftliche Entwicklungen verändern unseren Blick und unser Verständnis von der Welt immer wieder radikal, egal ob es sich dabei um Fortschritte in der Technologie, um medizinische Forschung oder die neuesten Entdeckungen aus den Bereichen Neurowissenschaften, Psychologie, Physik, Wirtschaft, Genetik oder Umweltschutz und Klimawandel handelt. Da es heute schwer ist, aus der Flut aller täglichen Informationen die wichtigsten herauszufiltern, versammelt der bekannte Visionär und Herausgeber John Brockman Stimmen der führenden Wissenschaftler und Intellektuellen unserer Zeit in einem Band, um zu zeigen, was bereits morgen unser Leben bestimmen kann.
636 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2017
188 people are currently reading
1534 people want to read
About the author
John Brockman
66 books614 followersJohn Brockman is an American literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He established the Edge Foundation, an organization that brings together leading edge thinkers across a broad range of scientific and technical fields.
He is author and editor of several books, including: The Third Culture (1995); The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years (2000); The Next Fifty Years (2002) and The New Humanists (2003).
He has the distinction of being the only person to have been profiled on Page One of the "Science Times" (1997) and the "Arts & Leisure" (1966), both supplements of The New York Times.
He is author and editor of several books, including: The Third Culture (1995); The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years (2000); The Next Fifty Years (2002) and The New Humanists (2003).
He has the distinction of being the only person to have been profiled on Page One of the "Science Times" (1997) and the "Arts & Leisure" (1966), both supplements of The New York Times.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
March 22, 2019
Short stories and tiny tales from many disciplines, which can serve as starting points for own ideas and an expansion of the spectrum.
Please note that I have put the original German text to the end of this review. Just if you might be interested.
The influence that the concept of such works can have is still difficult to quantify. Previously, the Usus was rather to write a whole book and fill with various personal anecdotes and information dump to achieve the appropriate scope. The distillate of the ideas of multiple experts on a topic breaks new ground.
Instead of an author writing extensively on a topic in his department, many comment on an issue. The different approaches and above all understandable, short explanations are of added value for the readers. Not around a thesis, a common thread, a plotline,... a whole non-fiction book is spun. But the compressed content of the main idea is examined from all sides and with different mental instruments.
One gets to know other points of view that one would otherwise not have faced due to bias. About which one would not have read a book, maybe not even a longer article. Classic, probably unconscious, prejudice and cognitive dissonance. In this way, one also opens the mind to disciplines that one would have wrinkled the nose about. And one finds, no wonder, additions and extensions to own knowledge. Or, a particularly rare jewel, errors to be repaired in one's personal opinion or thesis.
Kurzgeschichten und tiny tales aus vielen Disziplinen, die als Ausgangspunkte eigener Ideen und Erweiterung des Spektrums dienen können.
Der Einfluss, den das Konzept derartiger Werke haben kann, ist noch schwer zu quantifizieren. Bisher war der Usus eher, ein ganzes Buch zu schreiben und mit diversen persönlichen Anekdoten und Infodump zu füllen, um den entsprechenden Umfang zu erreichen. Mit dem Destillat der Ideen verschiedener Experten zu einem Thema wird Neuland betreten.
Anstatt dass ein Autor ausführlich über ein Thema seines Fachbereichs schreibt, äußern sich viele zu einem Thema. Die unterschiedlichen Herangehensweisen, Erklärungsansätze und vor allem verständlichen, kurzen Erklärungen sind von Mehrwert für die Leser. Nicht um eine These, einen roten Faden, eine Plotline, wird ein ganzes Sachbuch gesponnen. Sondern der komprimierte Inhalt der Leitidee von allen Seiten und mit verschiedenen mentalen Instrumenten durchleuchtet.
Man lernt andere Standpunkte kennen, mit denen man sich sonst aufgrund von Voreingenommenheiten nicht auseinander gesetzt hätte. Über die man kein Buch gelesen, vielleicht nicht einmal einen längeren Artikel gelesen hätte. Klassische Bias und kognitive Dissonanz. So öffnet man auch Fachrichtungen, über die man hinter vorgehaltener Hand die Nase gerümpft hätte, Auge und Hirn. Und findet dabei, welch Wunder, Ergänzungen und Erweiterungen zum eigenen Wissensschatz. Oder, ein besonders seltenes Juwel, zu reparierende Fehler in der eigenen Meinung oder vertretenen These.
Please note that I have put the original German text to the end of this review. Just if you might be interested.
The influence that the concept of such works can have is still difficult to quantify. Previously, the Usus was rather to write a whole book and fill with various personal anecdotes and information dump to achieve the appropriate scope. The distillate of the ideas of multiple experts on a topic breaks new ground.
Instead of an author writing extensively on a topic in his department, many comment on an issue. The different approaches and above all understandable, short explanations are of added value for the readers. Not around a thesis, a common thread, a plotline,... a whole non-fiction book is spun. But the compressed content of the main idea is examined from all sides and with different mental instruments.
One gets to know other points of view that one would otherwise not have faced due to bias. About which one would not have read a book, maybe not even a longer article. Classic, probably unconscious, prejudice and cognitive dissonance. In this way, one also opens the mind to disciplines that one would have wrinkled the nose about. And one finds, no wonder, additions and extensions to own knowledge. Or, a particularly rare jewel, errors to be repaired in one's personal opinion or thesis.
Kurzgeschichten und tiny tales aus vielen Disziplinen, die als Ausgangspunkte eigener Ideen und Erweiterung des Spektrums dienen können.
Der Einfluss, den das Konzept derartiger Werke haben kann, ist noch schwer zu quantifizieren. Bisher war der Usus eher, ein ganzes Buch zu schreiben und mit diversen persönlichen Anekdoten und Infodump zu füllen, um den entsprechenden Umfang zu erreichen. Mit dem Destillat der Ideen verschiedener Experten zu einem Thema wird Neuland betreten.
Anstatt dass ein Autor ausführlich über ein Thema seines Fachbereichs schreibt, äußern sich viele zu einem Thema. Die unterschiedlichen Herangehensweisen, Erklärungsansätze und vor allem verständlichen, kurzen Erklärungen sind von Mehrwert für die Leser. Nicht um eine These, einen roten Faden, eine Plotline, wird ein ganzes Sachbuch gesponnen. Sondern der komprimierte Inhalt der Leitidee von allen Seiten und mit verschiedenen mentalen Instrumenten durchleuchtet.
Man lernt andere Standpunkte kennen, mit denen man sich sonst aufgrund von Voreingenommenheiten nicht auseinander gesetzt hätte. Über die man kein Buch gelesen, vielleicht nicht einmal einen längeren Artikel gelesen hätte. Klassische Bias und kognitive Dissonanz. So öffnet man auch Fachrichtungen, über die man hinter vorgehaltener Hand die Nase gerümpft hätte, Auge und Hirn. Und findet dabei, welch Wunder, Ergänzungen und Erweiterungen zum eigenen Wissensschatz. Oder, ein besonders seltenes Juwel, zu reparierende Fehler in der eigenen Meinung oder vertretenen These.
February 25, 2017
Know This: Today’s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments (Edge Question) by John Brockman
“Know This” is a thought-provoking book of essays brought to you by the by The Edge that provides readers with better tools to think about the world. The Edge is an organization that presents original ideas by today's leading thinkers from a wide spectrum of scientific fields. The 2017 Edge question is, “What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?” This interesting thorough 608-page book includes 198 essays from the brightest minds.
For my sake, I created a spreadsheet of all the essays and graded them from zero to five stars based on quality. Five star essays are those that provide a great description of the author's favorite scientific concept. On the other hand, those receiving a one or even a zero represent essays that were not worthy of this book. Of course, this is just one reviewer's personal opinion. I basically reprised the same formula I used to review, "This Explains Everything" and “This Will Make You Smarter”.
Positives:
1. This series by "The Edge" always deliver a high-quality product.
2. A great topic, “What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?”
3. A great range of scientific essays provided by subject matter experts.
4. There were a number of outstanding essays deserving of five stars for me. I will list my favorites as positives in this review. In order of appearance, the first by Steven Pinker, “Human Progress Quantified”. Makes the compelling case that the world is actually getting better. “Human intuition is a notoriously poor guide to reality.”
5. Richard Muller’s “The Greatest Environmental Disaster”. “Someday global warming may become the primary threat. But it is air pollution that is killing people now. Air pollution is the greatest environmental disaster in the world today.”
6. Donald D. Hoffman’s “The Abdication of Spacetime”. “Nathan Seiberg, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, said, “I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.”
7. Seth Lloyd’s “One Hundred Years of Failure”. “Encouragingly, the advances in quantum gravity supplied by quantum-information theory do not yet seem to be counterbalanced by backsliding elsewhere.”
8. Brian G. Keating’s “Looking Where the Light Isn’t”. Excellent essay. “The next century of general relativity promises to be as exciting as the first. “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve,” said John Archibald Wheeler. We’ve seen what the curvature is. Now we just need to find out what’s the matter. And where better to look for lost matter than where the dark is.”
9. Neil Turok’s “Simplicity”. “Such a theory won’t be concerned with kilograms, meters, or seconds, only with information and its relations. It will be a unified theory not only of all the forces and particles but also of the universe as a whole.”
10. Steve Giddings’s “New Probes of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—and Beyond?”. “The community has been abuzz about the possible discovery of a new particle at the LHC, seen by its disintegration into pairs of photons. If this is real and not just a fluctuation, there’s a slim chance it is a graviton in extra dimensions, which, if true, could well be the discovery of the century.”
11. Rudy Rucker’s “The Universe Is Infinite”. “Many cosmologists now think our spatial universe is infinite.”
12. Gregory Benford’s “Pluto Now, Then on to 550 AU”. “New Horizons is important not just for completing our first look at every major world in the solar system. It points outward, to a great theater in the sky, where the worlds of the galaxy itself are on display.”
13. “Scott Aaronson’s “How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?” “By letting us simulate quantum physics and chemistry, quantum computers might spark a renaissance in materials science, and allow (for example) the design of higher-efficiency solar panels.”
14. John Tooby’s “The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering” “Natural selection is the only physical process that pushes species’ designs uphill—against entropy, toward greater order (positive selection)—or maintains our favorable genes against the downward pull exerted by mutation pressure (purifying selection).”
15. Eric Topol’s “The 6 Billion Letters of Our Genome”. “So the biggest breakthrough in genomics—Science’s 2015 Breakthrough of the Year—is the ability to edit a genome, via so-called CRISPR technology, with remarkable precision and efficiency.”
16. Juan Eriquez’s “Life Diverging”. “Thus the biggest story of the next few centuries will be how we begin to redesign life-forms, spread new ones, develop approaches and knowledge to further push the boundaries of what lives where.”
17. Thalia Wheatley’s “Biology Versus Choice”. “the emergence of perhaps the greatest developing news story: the widespread understanding that human thought and behavior are the products of biological processes.”
18. Gino Segre’s “Diversity in Science”. “Science has become increasingly collaborative in a way that makes diversity a paramount necessity.”
19. David G. Myers’s “We Fear the Wrong Things”. “The hijacking of our rationality by fears of terrorist guns highlights an important and enduring piece of scientific news: We often fear the wrong things.”
20. Oliver Scott Curry’s “Morality Is Made of Meat”. “Morality is natural, not supernatural. We are good because we want to be, and because we are sensitive to the opinions—the praise and the punishment—of others. We can work out for ourselves how best to promote the common good, and with the help of science make the world a better place.”
21. Christian Keysers’s “Optogenetics”. “For the first time, we can selectively re-create arbitrary states in the brain—and hence the mind.”
Negatives:
1. At over 600 pages, it will require an investment of your time.
2. Some essays were not worthy of this book. That said, the series has improved and there were very few lemons.
3. Lacks visual material to complement the excellent narrative.
In summary, I’m a big fan of The Edge. I enjoy essays from great minds covering a wide variety of topics and this one doesn’t disappoint. This has close to 200 essays and it never fails to be provocative and inspirational. The search for knowledge is a fun and satisfying pursuit. Pick up this book and enjoy the ride.
Further recommendations: “This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works" and “This Will Make You Smarter” by John Brockman, "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss, "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins, "The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements" by Sam Kean, "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human" by V.S. Ramachandran, "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies" by Michael Shermer, "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed" by Ray Kurzwell, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker, "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared Diamond, "Why Evolution Is True" by Jerry A. Coyne, and "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior" by Leonard Mlodinow.
“Know This” is a thought-provoking book of essays brought to you by the by The Edge that provides readers with better tools to think about the world. The Edge is an organization that presents original ideas by today's leading thinkers from a wide spectrum of scientific fields. The 2017 Edge question is, “What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?” This interesting thorough 608-page book includes 198 essays from the brightest minds.
For my sake, I created a spreadsheet of all the essays and graded them from zero to five stars based on quality. Five star essays are those that provide a great description of the author's favorite scientific concept. On the other hand, those receiving a one or even a zero represent essays that were not worthy of this book. Of course, this is just one reviewer's personal opinion. I basically reprised the same formula I used to review, "This Explains Everything" and “This Will Make You Smarter”.
Positives:
1. This series by "The Edge" always deliver a high-quality product.
2. A great topic, “What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?”
3. A great range of scientific essays provided by subject matter experts.
4. There were a number of outstanding essays deserving of five stars for me. I will list my favorites as positives in this review. In order of appearance, the first by Steven Pinker, “Human Progress Quantified”. Makes the compelling case that the world is actually getting better. “Human intuition is a notoriously poor guide to reality.”
5. Richard Muller’s “The Greatest Environmental Disaster”. “Someday global warming may become the primary threat. But it is air pollution that is killing people now. Air pollution is the greatest environmental disaster in the world today.”
6. Donald D. Hoffman’s “The Abdication of Spacetime”. “Nathan Seiberg, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, said, “I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.”
7. Seth Lloyd’s “One Hundred Years of Failure”. “Encouragingly, the advances in quantum gravity supplied by quantum-information theory do not yet seem to be counterbalanced by backsliding elsewhere.”
8. Brian G. Keating’s “Looking Where the Light Isn’t”. Excellent essay. “The next century of general relativity promises to be as exciting as the first. “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve,” said John Archibald Wheeler. We’ve seen what the curvature is. Now we just need to find out what’s the matter. And where better to look for lost matter than where the dark is.”
9. Neil Turok’s “Simplicity”. “Such a theory won’t be concerned with kilograms, meters, or seconds, only with information and its relations. It will be a unified theory not only of all the forces and particles but also of the universe as a whole.”
10. Steve Giddings’s “New Probes of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—and Beyond?”. “The community has been abuzz about the possible discovery of a new particle at the LHC, seen by its disintegration into pairs of photons. If this is real and not just a fluctuation, there’s a slim chance it is a graviton in extra dimensions, which, if true, could well be the discovery of the century.”
11. Rudy Rucker’s “The Universe Is Infinite”. “Many cosmologists now think our spatial universe is infinite.”
12. Gregory Benford’s “Pluto Now, Then on to 550 AU”. “New Horizons is important not just for completing our first look at every major world in the solar system. It points outward, to a great theater in the sky, where the worlds of the galaxy itself are on display.”
13. “Scott Aaronson’s “How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?” “By letting us simulate quantum physics and chemistry, quantum computers might spark a renaissance in materials science, and allow (for example) the design of higher-efficiency solar panels.”
14. John Tooby’s “The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering” “Natural selection is the only physical process that pushes species’ designs uphill—against entropy, toward greater order (positive selection)—or maintains our favorable genes against the downward pull exerted by mutation pressure (purifying selection).”
15. Eric Topol’s “The 6 Billion Letters of Our Genome”. “So the biggest breakthrough in genomics—Science’s 2015 Breakthrough of the Year—is the ability to edit a genome, via so-called CRISPR technology, with remarkable precision and efficiency.”
16. Juan Eriquez’s “Life Diverging”. “Thus the biggest story of the next few centuries will be how we begin to redesign life-forms, spread new ones, develop approaches and knowledge to further push the boundaries of what lives where.”
17. Thalia Wheatley’s “Biology Versus Choice”. “the emergence of perhaps the greatest developing news story: the widespread understanding that human thought and behavior are the products of biological processes.”
18. Gino Segre’s “Diversity in Science”. “Science has become increasingly collaborative in a way that makes diversity a paramount necessity.”
19. David G. Myers’s “We Fear the Wrong Things”. “The hijacking of our rationality by fears of terrorist guns highlights an important and enduring piece of scientific news: We often fear the wrong things.”
20. Oliver Scott Curry’s “Morality Is Made of Meat”. “Morality is natural, not supernatural. We are good because we want to be, and because we are sensitive to the opinions—the praise and the punishment—of others. We can work out for ourselves how best to promote the common good, and with the help of science make the world a better place.”
21. Christian Keysers’s “Optogenetics”. “For the first time, we can selectively re-create arbitrary states in the brain—and hence the mind.”
Negatives:
1. At over 600 pages, it will require an investment of your time.
2. Some essays were not worthy of this book. That said, the series has improved and there were very few lemons.
3. Lacks visual material to complement the excellent narrative.
In summary, I’m a big fan of The Edge. I enjoy essays from great minds covering a wide variety of topics and this one doesn’t disappoint. This has close to 200 essays and it never fails to be provocative and inspirational. The search for knowledge is a fun and satisfying pursuit. Pick up this book and enjoy the ride.
Further recommendations: “This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works" and “This Will Make You Smarter” by John Brockman, "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss, "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins, "The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements" by Sam Kean, "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human" by V.S. Ramachandran, "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies" by Michael Shermer, "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed" by Ray Kurzwell, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker, "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared Diamond, "Why Evolution Is True" by Jerry A. Coyne, and "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior" by Leonard Mlodinow.
May 11, 2020
A cocktail of essays, sketches, flashes of insight from the cutting edges of most varied fields of science. Naturally, some more interesting than others, depending on the reader. But that's the very reason everybody should be able to find fascinating revelations among its pages. More than few of them worth bookmarking and rereading time and again.
May 14, 2019
Superficial, shallow, low-effort.
June 10, 2018
لم يكن هذا الكتاب على مستوى كتب "بروكمان" الأخرى. لم تعجبني غالب مقالاته.
إما لأنها لم تحمل أفكاراً مهمة أو لإغراقها في التخصصية وإما لتكرار بعض الأفكار في أكثر من مقال متتالٍ.
إما لأنها لم تحمل أفكاراً مهمة أو لإغراقها في التخصصية وإما لتكرار بعض الأفكار في أكثر من مقال متتالٍ.
March 14, 2018
I was really disappointed by this book - I expected some enlightenment, some excitement about the direct of the future. Instead there were sourceless essays by various professors mostly fearmongering about the state of the world. I imagine there was probably a word limit given but still, no numbers, no references, no nothing (also, to the author who wrote only one paragraph, consisting basically just of "enjoy 3+ additional meters of water you gas-guzzlers" - screw you. What a waste of a platform.)
Not worth reading.
Not worth reading.
May 31, 2018
preachy, more political than scientific
April 3, 2020
2017.11.16–2017.11.20
Contents
Brockman J (ed.) (2017) (14:40) Know This - Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments
Dedication
Preface: The Edge Question
001. Steven Pinker :: Human Progress Quantified
002. Freeman Dyson :: Doing More with Less
003. Kurt Gray :: The “Specialness” of Humanity
004. Stuart Pimm :: J. M. Bergoglio’s 2015 Review of Global Ecology
005. Laurence C. Smith :: Leaking, Thinning, Sliding Ice
006. Robert Trivers :: Glaciers
007. Jennifer Jacquet :: Our Collective Blind Spot
008. Bill Joy :: Three De-carbonizing Scientific Breakthroughs
009. James Croak :: Juice
010. Hans Ulrich Obrist :: A Call to Action
011. Koo Jeong-A :: A Bridge Between the 21st and 22nd Century
012. Richard Muller :: The Greatest Environmental Disaster
013. Scott Sampson :: Technobiophilic Cities
014. Carl Page :: LENR Could Supplant Fossil Fuels
015. June Gruber :: Emotions Influence Environmental Well-Being
016. Milford H. Wolpoff :: Global Warming Redux: A Serious Challenge to Our Species
017. Giulio Boccaletti :: Blue Marble 2.0
018. Tor Nørretranders :: High-Tech Stone Age
019. Rory Sutherland :: The Dematerialization of Consumption
020. Bruce Parker :: Science Made This Possible
021. Dustin Yellin :: The Brain Is a Strange Planet
022. Donald D. Hoffman :: The Abdication of Spacetime
023. Antony Garrett Lisi :: The News That Wasn’t There
024. Lee Smolin :: No News Is Astounding News
025. Seth Lloyd :: One Hundred Years of Failure
026. Sarah Demers :: Hope Beyond the Higgs Boson
027. Gerald Holton :: An Unexpected, Haunting Signal
028. Leonard Susskind :: News About How the Physical World Operates
029. Frank Tipler :: Unpublicized Implications of Hawking Black-Hole Evaporation
030. Andrei Linde :: The Energy of Nothing
031. Paul J. Steinhardt :: The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was
032. Stephon H. Alexander :: Anomalies
033. Brian G. Keating :: Looking Where the Light Isn’t
034. Neil Turok :: Simplicity
035. Gordon Kane :: The LHC Is Working at Full Energy
036. Steve Giddings :: New Probes of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—and Beyond?
037. Jeremy Bernstein :: Supermassive Black Holes
038. Carlo Rovelli :: Gigantic Black Holes at the Center of Galaxies
039. Rudy Rucker :: The Universe Is Infinite
040. Paul Davies :: Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
041. Frank Wilczek :: The News Is Not the News
042. Sean Carroll :: We Know All the Particles and Forces We’re Made Of
043. Amanda Gefter :: Computational Complexity and the Nature of Reality
044. Hans Halvorson :: Einstein Was Wrong
045. Ross Anderson :: Replacing Magic with Mechanism?
046. Anton Zeilinger :: Quantum Entanglement Is Independent of Space and Time
047. Lisa Randall :: Breakthroughs Become Part of the Culture
048. Robert Provine :: Space Exploration, New and Old
049. Nicholas A. Christakis :: Pluto Is a Bump in the Road
050. Gregory Benford :: Pluto Now, Then on to 550 AU
051. Lawrence M. Krauss :: The Universe Surprised Us, Close to Home
052. George Dyson :: Progress in Rocketry
053. Peter Schwartz :: The Space Age Takes Off . . . and Returns to Earth Again
054. Scott Aaronson :: How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?
055. John Naughton :: A New Algorithm Showing What Computers Can and Cannot Do
056. Mark Pagel :: Designer Humans
057. Roger Highfield :: Cellular Alchemy
058. Randolph Nesse :: A Terrible Beauty Has Been Born
059. Paul Dolan :: DNA Programming
060. David Haig :: Human Chimeras
061. John Tooby :: The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering
062. Robert Kurzban :: The Ongoing Battles with Pathogens
063. Aubrey de Grey :: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics!
064. Eric Topol :: The 6 Billion Letters of Our Genome
065. Stuart A. Kauffman :: Systems Medicine
066. Simon Baron-Cohen :: Growing a Brain in a Dish
067. Stewart Brand :: Self-Driving Genes Are Coming
068. Juan Enriquez :: Life Diverging
069. Stuart Firestein :: Fundamentally Newsworthy
070. W. Tecumseh Fitch :: Paleo-DNA and De-Extinction
071. Max Tegmark :: The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up
072. Yuri Milner :: Tabby’s Star
073. David Christian :: Extraterrestrials Don’t Land on Earth!
074. Andrian Kreye :: We Are Not Unique, but We Are Very Much Alone
075. Martin J. Rees :: Breakthrough Listen
076. Mario Livio :: Life in the Milky Way
077. Michael I. Norton :: There Is (Already) Life on Mars
078. Chris J. Anderson :: The Breathtaking Future of a Connected World
079. Joscha Bach :: Everything Is Computation
080. Pamela McCorduck :: Identifying the Principles, Perhaps the Laws, of Intelligence
081. Noga Arikha :: Neuro-News
082. Pamela Rosenkranz :: Microbial Attractions
083. Matt Ridley :: The Epidemic of Absence
084. Nina Jablonski :: Bugs R Us
085. Joichi Ito :: Fecal Microbiota Transplants
086. Alan Alda :: Hi, Guys
087. Dirk Helbing :: The Anti-democratic Trend
088. Quentin Hardy :: The Age of Awareness
089. Nathalie Nahai :: A Large-Scale Personality Research Method
090. Charles Seife :: The Conquest of Human Scale
091. Margaret Levi :: Big Data and Better Government
092. Marti Hearst :: This Is the Science-News Essay You Want to Read
093. Roger Schank :: Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger of Good Things to Come
094. Thalia Wheatley :: Biology Versus Choice
095. Gloria Origgi :: How to Be Bad Together
096. Ellen Winner :: Psychology’s Crisis
097. Judith Rich Harris :: The Truthiness of Scientific Research
098. Gary Klein :: Blinded by Data
099. Philip Tetlock :: The Epistemic Trainwreck of Soft-Side Psychology
100. Paul Bloom :: Science Itself
101. Leo M. Chalupa :: A Compelling Explanation for Scientific Misconduct
102. Nicholas Humphrey :: Sub-Prime Science
103. Jonathan Schooler :: The Infancy of Meta-Science
104. Richard Nisbett :: The Disillusion and the Disaffection of Poor White Americans
105. S. Abbas Raza :: Inequality of Wealth and Income: A Runaway Process
106. Peter Gabriel :: The Age of Visible Thought
107. Howard Gardner :: Our Changing Conceptions of What It Means to Be Human
108. Kai Krause :: Complete Head Transplants
109. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein :: The En-Gendering of Genius
110. Gino Segre :: Diversity in Science
111. Michael Shermer :: The Democratization of Science
112. Sheizaf Rafaeli :: News About Science News
113. Tania Lombrozo :: The Broadening Scope of Science
114. Nigel Goldenfeld :: Q-Bio
115. Clifford Pickover :: Mathematics and Reality
116. Kevin Kelly :: Synthetic Learning
117. Keith Devlin :: A Genuine Science of Learning
118. John C. Mather :: Bayesian Program Learning
119. Jaeweon Cho :: FSM (Feces-Standard Money)
120. Jim Holt :: The Ironies of Higher Arithmetic
121. Michael Vassar :: Broke People Ignoring $20 Bills on the Sidewalk
122. David G. Myers :: We Fear the Wrong Things
123. Gerd Gigerenzer :: Living in Terror of Terrorism
124. Steven R. Quartz :: The State of the World Isn’t As Bad As You Think
125. Ed Regis :: The Healthy Diet U-Turn
126. Peter Turchin :: Fatty Foods Are Good for Your Health
127. Jonathan Haidt :: Partisan Hostility
128. Stephen P. Stich :: Cognitive Science Transforms Moral Philosophy
129. Oliver Scott Curry :: Morality Is Made of Meat
130. James J. O’Donnell :: People Kill Because It’s the Right Thing to Do
131. Ziyad Marar :: Interdisciplinary Social Research
132. Adam Alter :: Intellectual Convergence
133. Timothy Taylor :: Weapons Technology Powered Human Evolution
134. Buddhini Samarasinghe :: The Immune System: A Grand Unifying Theory for Biomedical Research
135. Michael E. Hochberg :: Harnessing Our Natural Defenses Against Cancer
136. Todd C. Sacktor :: Cancer Drugs for Brain Diseases
137. George Johnson :: The Most Powerful Carcinogen May Be Entropy
138. A. C. Grayling :: The Decline of Cancer
139. David M. Buss :: The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women
140. Jared Diamond :: The Most Important X . . . Y . . . Z . . .
141. Helen Fisher :: The Mother of All Addictions
142. John Gottman :: The Trust Metric
143. Christian Keysers :: Optogenetics
144. Terrence J. Sejnowski :: The State of Brain Science
145. George Church :: Nootropic Neural News
146. Kate Jeffery :: Memory Is a Labile Fabrication
147. Stephen M. Kosslyn :: The Continually New You
148. Alison Gopnik :: Toddlers Can Master Computers
149. Lisa Feldman Barrett :: The Predictive Brain
150. Alun Anderson :: A New Imaging Tool
151. Paul Saffo :: Sensors: Accelerating the Pace of Scientific Discovery
152. Syed Tasnim Raza :: 3D Printing in the Medical Field
153. Brian Knutson :: Deep Science
154. Alex (Sandy) Pentland :: A World That Counts
155. Neil Gershenfeld :: Programming Reality
156. N. J. Enfield :: Pointing Is a Prerequisite for Language
157. Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán :: Macro-Criminal Networks
158. Thomas Metzinger :: Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream
159. Timo Hannay :: The Twin Tides of Change
160. Andy Clark :: Imaging Deep Learning
161. Jamshed Bharucha :: The Neural Net Reloaded
162. David Dalrymple :: Differentiable Programming
163. Steve Omohundro :: Deep Learning, Semantics, and Society
164. Thomas A. Bass :: Seeing Our Cyborg Selves
165. Douglas Rushkoff :: The Rejection of Science Itself
166. Rodney A. Brooks :: Re-thinking Artificial Intelligence
167. Joshua Bongard :: I, for One
168. Alexander Wissner-Gross :: Data Sets over Algorithms
169. Bruce Hood :: Biological Models of Mental Illness Reflect Essentialist Biases
170. Abigail Marsh :: Neuroprediction
171. Joel Gold :: The Thin Line Between Mental Illness and Mental Health
172. Ara Norenzayan :: Theodiversity
173. Gregory Paul :: Modernity Is Winning
174. Michael McCullough :: Religious Morality Is Mostly Below the Belt
175. Luca De Biase :: A Science of the Consequences
176. David Berreby :: Creation of a “No Ethnic Majority” Society
177. Irene Pepperberg :: Interconnectedness
178. Linda Wilbrecht :: Early Life Adversity and Collective Outcomes
179. Mary Catherine Bateson :: We’re Still Behind
180. Daniel Goleman :: Neural Hacking, Handprints, and the Empathy Deficit
181. Diana Reiss :: Send in the Drones
182. Susan Blackmore :: That Dress
183. Eric R. Weinstein :: Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy
184. Gregory Cochran :: The Origin of Europeans
185. Hazel Rose Markus :: The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, but Worth It
186. John McWhorter :: Adjusting to Feathered Dinosaurs
187. Laura Betzig :: People Are Animals
188. Diana Deutsch :: The Longevity of News
189. Samuel Arbesman :: Weather Prediction Has Quietly Gotten Better
190. Brian Christian :: The Word: First As Art, Then As Science
191. Victoria Wyatt :: The Convergence of Images and Technology
192. Christine Finn :: The Mindful Meeting of Minds
193. Ernst Pöppel :: Carpe Diem
194. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field :: Linking the Levels of Human Variation
195. Steve Fuller :: Challenging the Value of a University Education
196. Maximilian Schich :: The Hermeneutic Hypercycle
197. Melanie Swan :: Rethinking Authority with the Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment
198. Robert Sapolsky :: Envoi: We May All Die Horribly
Contents
Brockman J (ed.) (2017) (14:40) Know This - Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments
Dedication
Preface: The Edge Question
001. Steven Pinker :: Human Progress Quantified
002. Freeman Dyson :: Doing More with Less
003. Kurt Gray :: The “Specialness” of Humanity
004. Stuart Pimm :: J. M. Bergoglio’s 2015 Review of Global Ecology
005. Laurence C. Smith :: Leaking, Thinning, Sliding Ice
006. Robert Trivers :: Glaciers
007. Jennifer Jacquet :: Our Collective Blind Spot
008. Bill Joy :: Three De-carbonizing Scientific Breakthroughs
009. James Croak :: Juice
010. Hans Ulrich Obrist :: A Call to Action
011. Koo Jeong-A :: A Bridge Between the 21st and 22nd Century
012. Richard Muller :: The Greatest Environmental Disaster
013. Scott Sampson :: Technobiophilic Cities
014. Carl Page :: LENR Could Supplant Fossil Fuels
015. June Gruber :: Emotions Influence Environmental Well-Being
016. Milford H. Wolpoff :: Global Warming Redux: A Serious Challenge to Our Species
017. Giulio Boccaletti :: Blue Marble 2.0
018. Tor Nørretranders :: High-Tech Stone Age
019. Rory Sutherland :: The Dematerialization of Consumption
020. Bruce Parker :: Science Made This Possible
021. Dustin Yellin :: The Brain Is a Strange Planet
022. Donald D. Hoffman :: The Abdication of Spacetime
023. Antony Garrett Lisi :: The News That Wasn’t There
024. Lee Smolin :: No News Is Astounding News
025. Seth Lloyd :: One Hundred Years of Failure
026. Sarah Demers :: Hope Beyond the Higgs Boson
027. Gerald Holton :: An Unexpected, Haunting Signal
028. Leonard Susskind :: News About How the Physical World Operates
029. Frank Tipler :: Unpublicized Implications of Hawking Black-Hole Evaporation
030. Andrei Linde :: The Energy of Nothing
031. Paul J. Steinhardt :: The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was
032. Stephon H. Alexander :: Anomalies
033. Brian G. Keating :: Looking Where the Light Isn’t
034. Neil Turok :: Simplicity
035. Gordon Kane :: The LHC Is Working at Full Energy
036. Steve Giddings :: New Probes of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—and Beyond?
037. Jeremy Bernstein :: Supermassive Black Holes
038. Carlo Rovelli :: Gigantic Black Holes at the Center of Galaxies
039. Rudy Rucker :: The Universe Is Infinite
040. Paul Davies :: Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
041. Frank Wilczek :: The News Is Not the News
042. Sean Carroll :: We Know All the Particles and Forces We’re Made Of
043. Amanda Gefter :: Computational Complexity and the Nature of Reality
044. Hans Halvorson :: Einstein Was Wrong
045. Ross Anderson :: Replacing Magic with Mechanism?
046. Anton Zeilinger :: Quantum Entanglement Is Independent of Space and Time
047. Lisa Randall :: Breakthroughs Become Part of the Culture
048. Robert Provine :: Space Exploration, New and Old
049. Nicholas A. Christakis :: Pluto Is a Bump in the Road
050. Gregory Benford :: Pluto Now, Then on to 550 AU
051. Lawrence M. Krauss :: The Universe Surprised Us, Close to Home
052. George Dyson :: Progress in Rocketry
053. Peter Schwartz :: The Space Age Takes Off . . . and Returns to Earth Again
054. Scott Aaronson :: How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?
055. John Naughton :: A New Algorithm Showing What Computers Can and Cannot Do
056. Mark Pagel :: Designer Humans
057. Roger Highfield :: Cellular Alchemy
058. Randolph Nesse :: A Terrible Beauty Has Been Born
059. Paul Dolan :: DNA Programming
060. David Haig :: Human Chimeras
061. John Tooby :: The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering
062. Robert Kurzban :: The Ongoing Battles with Pathogens
063. Aubrey de Grey :: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics!
064. Eric Topol :: The 6 Billion Letters of Our Genome
065. Stuart A. Kauffman :: Systems Medicine
066. Simon Baron-Cohen :: Growing a Brain in a Dish
067. Stewart Brand :: Self-Driving Genes Are Coming
068. Juan Enriquez :: Life Diverging
069. Stuart Firestein :: Fundamentally Newsworthy
070. W. Tecumseh Fitch :: Paleo-DNA and De-Extinction
071. Max Tegmark :: The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up
072. Yuri Milner :: Tabby’s Star
073. David Christian :: Extraterrestrials Don’t Land on Earth!
074. Andrian Kreye :: We Are Not Unique, but We Are Very Much Alone
075. Martin J. Rees :: Breakthrough Listen
076. Mario Livio :: Life in the Milky Way
077. Michael I. Norton :: There Is (Already) Life on Mars
078. Chris J. Anderson :: The Breathtaking Future of a Connected World
079. Joscha Bach :: Everything Is Computation
080. Pamela McCorduck :: Identifying the Principles, Perhaps the Laws, of Intelligence
081. Noga Arikha :: Neuro-News
082. Pamela Rosenkranz :: Microbial Attractions
083. Matt Ridley :: The Epidemic of Absence
084. Nina Jablonski :: Bugs R Us
085. Joichi Ito :: Fecal Microbiota Transplants
086. Alan Alda :: Hi, Guys
087. Dirk Helbing :: The Anti-democratic Trend
088. Quentin Hardy :: The Age of Awareness
089. Nathalie Nahai :: A Large-Scale Personality Research Method
090. Charles Seife :: The Conquest of Human Scale
091. Margaret Levi :: Big Data and Better Government
092. Marti Hearst :: This Is the Science-News Essay You Want to Read
093. Roger Schank :: Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger of Good Things to Come
094. Thalia Wheatley :: Biology Versus Choice
095. Gloria Origgi :: How to Be Bad Together
096. Ellen Winner :: Psychology’s Crisis
097. Judith Rich Harris :: The Truthiness of Scientific Research
098. Gary Klein :: Blinded by Data
099. Philip Tetlock :: The Epistemic Trainwreck of Soft-Side Psychology
100. Paul Bloom :: Science Itself
101. Leo M. Chalupa :: A Compelling Explanation for Scientific Misconduct
102. Nicholas Humphrey :: Sub-Prime Science
103. Jonathan Schooler :: The Infancy of Meta-Science
104. Richard Nisbett :: The Disillusion and the Disaffection of Poor White Americans
105. S. Abbas Raza :: Inequality of Wealth and Income: A Runaway Process
106. Peter Gabriel :: The Age of Visible Thought
107. Howard Gardner :: Our Changing Conceptions of What It Means to Be Human
108. Kai Krause :: Complete Head Transplants
109. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein :: The En-Gendering of Genius
110. Gino Segre :: Diversity in Science
111. Michael Shermer :: The Democratization of Science
112. Sheizaf Rafaeli :: News About Science News
113. Tania Lombrozo :: The Broadening Scope of Science
114. Nigel Goldenfeld :: Q-Bio
115. Clifford Pickover :: Mathematics and Reality
116. Kevin Kelly :: Synthetic Learning
117. Keith Devlin :: A Genuine Science of Learning
118. John C. Mather :: Bayesian Program Learning
119. Jaeweon Cho :: FSM (Feces-Standard Money)
120. Jim Holt :: The Ironies of Higher Arithmetic
121. Michael Vassar :: Broke People Ignoring $20 Bills on the Sidewalk
122. David G. Myers :: We Fear the Wrong Things
123. Gerd Gigerenzer :: Living in Terror of Terrorism
124. Steven R. Quartz :: The State of the World Isn’t As Bad As You Think
125. Ed Regis :: The Healthy Diet U-Turn
126. Peter Turchin :: Fatty Foods Are Good for Your Health
127. Jonathan Haidt :: Partisan Hostility
128. Stephen P. Stich :: Cognitive Science Transforms Moral Philosophy
129. Oliver Scott Curry :: Morality Is Made of Meat
130. James J. O’Donnell :: People Kill Because It’s the Right Thing to Do
131. Ziyad Marar :: Interdisciplinary Social Research
132. Adam Alter :: Intellectual Convergence
133. Timothy Taylor :: Weapons Technology Powered Human Evolution
134. Buddhini Samarasinghe :: The Immune System: A Grand Unifying Theory for Biomedical Research
135. Michael E. Hochberg :: Harnessing Our Natural Defenses Against Cancer
136. Todd C. Sacktor :: Cancer Drugs for Brain Diseases
137. George Johnson :: The Most Powerful Carcinogen May Be Entropy
138. A. C. Grayling :: The Decline of Cancer
139. David M. Buss :: The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women
140. Jared Diamond :: The Most Important X . . . Y . . . Z . . .
141. Helen Fisher :: The Mother of All Addictions
142. John Gottman :: The Trust Metric
143. Christian Keysers :: Optogenetics
144. Terrence J. Sejnowski :: The State of Brain Science
145. George Church :: Nootropic Neural News
146. Kate Jeffery :: Memory Is a Labile Fabrication
147. Stephen M. Kosslyn :: The Continually New You
148. Alison Gopnik :: Toddlers Can Master Computers
149. Lisa Feldman Barrett :: The Predictive Brain
150. Alun Anderson :: A New Imaging Tool
151. Paul Saffo :: Sensors: Accelerating the Pace of Scientific Discovery
152. Syed Tasnim Raza :: 3D Printing in the Medical Field
153. Brian Knutson :: Deep Science
154. Alex (Sandy) Pentland :: A World That Counts
155. Neil Gershenfeld :: Programming Reality
156. N. J. Enfield :: Pointing Is a Prerequisite for Language
157. Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán :: Macro-Criminal Networks
158. Thomas Metzinger :: Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream
159. Timo Hannay :: The Twin Tides of Change
160. Andy Clark :: Imaging Deep Learning
161. Jamshed Bharucha :: The Neural Net Reloaded
162. David Dalrymple :: Differentiable Programming
163. Steve Omohundro :: Deep Learning, Semantics, and Society
164. Thomas A. Bass :: Seeing Our Cyborg Selves
165. Douglas Rushkoff :: The Rejection of Science Itself
166. Rodney A. Brooks :: Re-thinking Artificial Intelligence
167. Joshua Bongard :: I, for One
168. Alexander Wissner-Gross :: Data Sets over Algorithms
169. Bruce Hood :: Biological Models of Mental Illness Reflect Essentialist Biases
170. Abigail Marsh :: Neuroprediction
171. Joel Gold :: The Thin Line Between Mental Illness and Mental Health
172. Ara Norenzayan :: Theodiversity
173. Gregory Paul :: Modernity Is Winning
174. Michael McCullough :: Religious Morality Is Mostly Below the Belt
175. Luca De Biase :: A Science of the Consequences
176. David Berreby :: Creation of a “No Ethnic Majority” Society
177. Irene Pepperberg :: Interconnectedness
178. Linda Wilbrecht :: Early Life Adversity and Collective Outcomes
179. Mary Catherine Bateson :: We’re Still Behind
180. Daniel Goleman :: Neural Hacking, Handprints, and the Empathy Deficit
181. Diana Reiss :: Send in the Drones
182. Susan Blackmore :: That Dress
183. Eric R. Weinstein :: Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy
184. Gregory Cochran :: The Origin of Europeans
185. Hazel Rose Markus :: The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, but Worth It
186. John McWhorter :: Adjusting to Feathered Dinosaurs
187. Laura Betzig :: People Are Animals
188. Diana Deutsch :: The Longevity of News
189. Samuel Arbesman :: Weather Prediction Has Quietly Gotten Better
190. Brian Christian :: The Word: First As Art, Then As Science
191. Victoria Wyatt :: The Convergence of Images and Technology
192. Christine Finn :: The Mindful Meeting of Minds
193. Ernst Pöppel :: Carpe Diem
194. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field :: Linking the Levels of Human Variation
195. Steve Fuller :: Challenging the Value of a University Education
196. Maximilian Schich :: The Hermeneutic Hypercycle
197. Melanie Swan :: Rethinking Authority with the Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment
198. Robert Sapolsky :: Envoi: We May All Die Horribly
February 15, 2017
Know This is a collection of short essays that answer the 2016 question from Edge, “What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important.” The question is different every year. For 2017, the question is “What scientific term or concept out to be more widely known?” What makes the Edge annual questions so interesting is they are answered by leaders in many fields, mostly in science, but also artists, mathematicians, historians, software developers, musicians, and philosophers. Who is not answering? Anonymous blowhards and conspiracy theorists are mercifully absent.
So what do people consider the most interesting recent news? A lot of people are rightly concerned about rising sea levels, global warming, and other environmental issues. Around 4,400 people die from air pollution every single day in China. As the author wrote, “Every time I hear of some tragedy that makes headlines, such as a landslide in Shenzhen that killed 200 people, I think to myself, “Yes — and today 4,400 people died of air pollution and it didn’t make the news.” He also pointed out that China posts environmental data updates hourly. This struck me as particularly poignant with this week’s silencing of several federal agencies for unknown reasons, on the environment at least, China is now a more open and transparent country that the U.S.
There were a number who focused on the rejection of science while others mentioned the declining standards of scientific research publications. One of my favorite essays is “We Fear the Wrong Things,” something that drives me nuts. This is because of the availability heuristic, we fear what we remember, what’s available to our thoughts. So, because it is not news when someone dies of something ordinary but common, we don’t worry about it. Instead we worry about unlikely disasters that make the news precisely because they are unlikely. Which is why “we spend an estimated $500 million per U.S. terrorist death but only $10,000 per cancer death.”
There are answers that talk about math, physics, amazing new technology, psychology and health. The variety is as broad as the 198 respondents who participated last year.
I loved Know This and know I will read it again. It is one of those books that insist on being read more than once and read slowly. Doctor’s offices should have copies in their waiting rooms. People should think of it as a coffee table book for readers. The short essays are the perfect length for someone to read while you make a cup of tea or do the last minute assembly before dinner. It’s better to read just one or two or, at most, three answers at a time so you have a chance to synthesize them, to consider each answer distinctly from other answers. Just reading straight through will never do the book justice because it will all run together.
This book deserves the justice of being read so that each answer can be a separate, considered reading. Topics are so disparate and varied that they only work if you don’t try to absorb them all at once. I rate this book so highly because it both fascinating and important. These are things we should know, things that deserve our attention. I am glad Edge makes a point of trying to get us to do so.
Know This will be released on February 7, 2017. I was provided an advance e-galley by the publisher through Edelweiss.
★★★★★
http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpres...
So what do people consider the most interesting recent news? A lot of people are rightly concerned about rising sea levels, global warming, and other environmental issues. Around 4,400 people die from air pollution every single day in China. As the author wrote, “Every time I hear of some tragedy that makes headlines, such as a landslide in Shenzhen that killed 200 people, I think to myself, “Yes — and today 4,400 people died of air pollution and it didn’t make the news.” He also pointed out that China posts environmental data updates hourly. This struck me as particularly poignant with this week’s silencing of several federal agencies for unknown reasons, on the environment at least, China is now a more open and transparent country that the U.S.
There were a number who focused on the rejection of science while others mentioned the declining standards of scientific research publications. One of my favorite essays is “We Fear the Wrong Things,” something that drives me nuts. This is because of the availability heuristic, we fear what we remember, what’s available to our thoughts. So, because it is not news when someone dies of something ordinary but common, we don’t worry about it. Instead we worry about unlikely disasters that make the news precisely because they are unlikely. Which is why “we spend an estimated $500 million per U.S. terrorist death but only $10,000 per cancer death.”
There are answers that talk about math, physics, amazing new technology, psychology and health. The variety is as broad as the 198 respondents who participated last year.
I loved Know This and know I will read it again. It is one of those books that insist on being read more than once and read slowly. Doctor’s offices should have copies in their waiting rooms. People should think of it as a coffee table book for readers. The short essays are the perfect length for someone to read while you make a cup of tea or do the last minute assembly before dinner. It’s better to read just one or two or, at most, three answers at a time so you have a chance to synthesize them, to consider each answer distinctly from other answers. Just reading straight through will never do the book justice because it will all run together.
This book deserves the justice of being read so that each answer can be a separate, considered reading. Topics are so disparate and varied that they only work if you don’t try to absorb them all at once. I rate this book so highly because it both fascinating and important. These are things we should know, things that deserve our attention. I am glad Edge makes a point of trying to get us to do so.
Know This will be released on February 7, 2017. I was provided an advance e-galley by the publisher through Edelweiss.
★★★★★
http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpres...
July 22, 2018
This book is a large collection of very short pieces by leading thinkers, designers, doctors, etc. Basically it is like listening to a youtube channel of TED talks. There is a lot about space, physics, nutrition, and society. Like TED talks, each is presented tidy and high thinking, but is also exaggerated and simplistic. It gets kind of repetitive and boring pretty quick. Skip it.
December 20, 2023
no citations??
July 25, 2017
Life without problems make more idiots, here's how it will be in the future in the vision of Idiocracy.
“This isn't tolerable for the democracy in the increasing technological world. The most significant example is climate change, it turns out, for instance, that many basic terms are unintelligible for newspaper readers.
Or as this quote from the book:
"Recently I encountered a statement that theory is just a guess, and that includes evolution, not mentioning what was reconstructed by cosmologists about formation of the universe
When new data is published that includes the correction or expansion of the previous work this is taken to indicate weakness rather than great strength of scientific work as an open system, always subject to correction by the new information.
When the winter temperature dips below freezing, you hear - this proves that the Earth is not warming. Most Americans are not clear on the difference between weather and climate."
This was really good book, why not 5? Just because I like one subject per book more. This book is in no way related to what I've just wrote, it actually covers many recent developments in science.
“This isn't tolerable for the democracy in the increasing technological world. The most significant example is climate change, it turns out, for instance, that many basic terms are unintelligible for newspaper readers.
Or as this quote from the book:
"Recently I encountered a statement that theory is just a guess, and that includes evolution, not mentioning what was reconstructed by cosmologists about formation of the universe
When new data is published that includes the correction or expansion of the previous work this is taken to indicate weakness rather than great strength of scientific work as an open system, always subject to correction by the new information.
When the winter temperature dips below freezing, you hear - this proves that the Earth is not warming. Most Americans are not clear on the difference between weather and climate."
This was really good book, why not 5? Just because I like one subject per book more. This book is in no way related to what I've just wrote, it actually covers many recent developments in science.
August 24, 2019
While I found this book interesting much of the content seemed redundant though from a different scientist’s perspective. I would have loved to see more writing on LIDO than was written here. I feel it would really be great if someone could write about how lasers are utilized to interpret gravitational anomalies occurrences in space.
November 7, 2017
It really wasn't I was expecting. The essays are extremely subjective and do not really teach or address anything relevant. I was really disappointed.
June 16, 2018
Interesting concept and fascinating information. This would be a four except it is dated already -- and, seriously, Alan Alda?
June 22, 2017
Know This: Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments (Paperback)
by John Brockman
trying to get the audio edition
Contents:
Preface: The Edge question / John Brockman --
Human progress quantified / Steven Pinker --
Doing more with less / Freeman Dyson --
The "specialness" of humanity / Kurt Gray --
J.M. Bergoglio's 2015 review of global ecology / Stuart Pimm --
Leaking, thinning, sliding ice / Laurence C. Smith -- Glaciers / Robert Trivers --
Our collective blind spot / Jennifer Jacquet --
Three de-carbonizing scientific breakthroughs / Bill Joy --
Juice / James Croak -- A call to action / Hans Ulrich Obrist --
A bridge between the 21st and 22nd century / Koo Jeong-A --
The greatest environmental disaster / Richard Muller --
Technobiophilic cities / Scott Sampson -- LENR could supplant fossil fuels / Carl Page -- Emotions influence environmental well-being / June Gruber -- Global warming redux: a serious challenge to our species / Milford H. Wolpoff -- Blue marble 2.0 / Giulio Boccaletti -- High-tech stone age / Tor Nørretranders -- The dematerialization of consumption / Rory Sutherland -- Science made this possible / Bruce Parker -- The brain is a strange planet / Dustin Yellin --
The abdication of spacetime / Donald D. Hoffman --
The news that wasn't there / Antony Garrett Lisi --
No news is astounding news / Lee Smolin --
One hundred years of failure / Seth Lloyd -- Hope beyond the Higgs Boson / Sarah Demers -- An unexpected, haunting signal / Gerald Holton -- News about how the physical world operates / Leonard Susskind -- Unpublicized implications of Hawking black-hole evaporation / Frank Tipler -- The energy of nothing / Andrei Linde -- The big bang cannot be what we thought it was / Paul J. Steinhardt -- Anomalies / Stephon H. Alexander --
Looking where the light isn't / Brian G. Keating --
Simplicity / Neil Turok --
The LHC is working at full energy / Gordon Kane -- New probes of Einstein's curved spacetime--and beyond / Steve Giddings -- Supermassive black holes / Jeremy Bernstein -- Gigantic black holes at the center of galaxies / Carlo Rovelli -- The universe is infinite / Rudy Rucker -- Advance LIGO and advanced Virgo / Paul Davies -- The news is not the news / Frank Wilczek -- We know all the particles and forces we're made of / Sean Carroll -- Computational complexity and the nature of reality / Amanda Gefter -- Einstein was wrong / Hans Halvorson -- Replacing magic with mechanism? / Ross Anderson -- Quantum entanglement is independent of space and time / Anton Zeilinger -- Breakthroughs become part of the culture / Lisa Randall -- Space exploration, new and old / Robert Provine -- Pluto is a bump in the road / Nicholas A. Christakis -- Pluto now, then on to 550 AU / Gregory Benford -- The universe surprised us, close to home / Lawrence M. Krauss -- Progress in rocketry / George Dyson -- The space age takes off...and returns to Earth again / Peter Schwartz -- How widely should we draw the circle? / Scott Aaronson -- A new algorithm showing what computers can and cannot do / John Naughton -- Designer humans / Mark Pagel -- Cellular alchemy / Roger Highfield -- A terrible beauty has been born / Randolph Nesse -- DNA programming / Paul Dolan --
Human chimeras / David Haig -- The race between genetic meltdown and germline engineering / John Tooby -- The ongoing battles with pathogens / Robert Kurzban -- Antibiotics are dead; long live antibiotics! / Aubrey De Grey -- The 6 billion letters of our genome / Eric Topol, M.D. -- Systems medicine / Stuart A. Kauffman -- Growing a brain in a dish / Simon Baron-Cohen -- Self-driving genes are coming / Stewart Brand -- Life diverging / Juan Enriquez -- Fundamentally newsworthy / Stuart Firestein -- Paleo-DNA and de-extinction / W. Tecumseh Fitch -- The wisdom race is heating up / Max Tegmark -- Tabby's star / Yuri Milner -- Extraterrestrials don't land on Earth! / David Christian -- We are not unique, but we are very much alone / Andrian Kreye -- Breakthrough listen / Martin J. Rees -- Life in the Milky Way / Mario Livio -- There is (already) life on Mars / Michael I. Norton -- The breathtaking future of a connected world / Chris J. Anderson -- Everything is computation / Joscha Bach -- Identifying the principles, perhaps the laws, of intelligence / Pamela McCorduck -- Neuro-news / Noga Arikha -- Microbial attractions / Pamela Rosenkranz -- The epidemic of absence / Matt Ridley -- Bugs R Us / Nina Jablonski -- Fecal microbiota transplants / Joichi Ito -- Hi, guys / Alan Alda -- The anti-democratic trend / Dirk Helbing -- The age of awareness / Quentin Hardy -- A large-scale personality research method / Nathalie Nahai -- The conquest of human scale / Charles Seife -- Big data and better government / Margaret Levi -- This is the science-news essay you want to read / Marti Hearst -- Those annoying ads? The harbinger of good things to come / Roger Schank -- Biology versus choice / Thalia Wheatley -- How to be bad together / Gloria Origgi -- Psychology's crisis / Ellen Winner -- The truthiness of scientific research / Judith Rich Harris --
Blinded by data / Gary Klein -- The epistemic trainwreck of soft-side psychology / Philip Tetlock -- Science itself / Paul Bloom -- a compelling explanation for scientific misconduct / Leo M. Chalupa -- Sub-prime science / Nicholas Humphrey -- The infancy of meta-science / Jonathan Schooler -- The disillusion and the disaffection of poor white Americans / Richard Nisbett -- Inequality of wealth and income: a runaway process / S. Abbas Raza -- The age of visible thought / Peter Gabriel -- Our changing conceptions of what it means to be human / Howard Gardner -- Complete head transplants / Kai Krause -- The en-gendering of genius / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein -- Diversity in science / Gino Segre -- The democratization of science / Michale Shermer -- News about science news / Sheizaf Rafaeli -- The broadening scope of science / Tania Lombrozo -- Q-bio / Nigel Goldenfeld -- Mathematics and reality / Clifford Pickover -- Synthetic learning / Kevin Kelly -- A genuine science of learning / Keith Devlin -- Bayesian program learning / John C. Mather -- FSM (feces-standard money) / Jaeweon Cho -- The ironies of higher arithmetic / Jim Holt -- Broke people ignoring $20 bills on the sidewalk / Michael Vassar -- We fear the wrong things / David G. Myers -- Living in terror of terrorism / Gerd Gigerenzer -- The state of the world isn't as bad as you think / Steven R. Quartz -- The healthy diet u-turn / Ed Regis -- Fatty foods are good for your health / Peter Turchin -- Partisan hostility / Jonathan Haidt -- Cognitive science transforms moral philosophy / Stephen P. Stich -- Morality is made of meat / Oliver Scott Curry -- People kill because it's the right thing to do / James J. O'Donnell -- Interdisciplinary social research / Ziyad Marar -- Intellectual convergence / Adam Alter -- Weapons technology powered human evolution / Timothy Taylor -- The immune system: a grand unifying theory for biomedical research / Buddhini Samarasinghe -- Harnessing our natural defenses against cancer / Michael E. Hochberg --
Cancer drugs for brain diseases / Todd C. Sacktor -- The most powerful carcinogen may be entropy / George John-- The decline of cancer / A.C. Grayling -- The mating crisis among educated women / David M. Buss -- The most important x...y...z... / Jared Diamond --
The mother of all addictions / Helen Fisher -- The trust metric / John Gottman --
Optogenetics / Christian Keysers --
Nootropic neural news / George Church -- Memory is a labile fabrication / Kate Jeffery --
The continually new you / Stephen M. Kosslyn -- Toddlers can master computers / Alison Gopnik -- The predictive brain / Lisa Feldman Barrett -- A new imaging tool / Alun Anderson -- Sensors: accelerating the pace of scientific discovery / Paul Saffo -- 3D printing in the medical field / Syed Tasnim Raza --
Deep science / Brian Knutson -- A world that counts / Alex (Sandy) Pentland -- Programming reality / Neil Gershenfeld -- Pointing is a prerequisite for language / N.J. Enfield -- Macro-criminal networks / Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán -- Virtual reality goes mainstream / Thomas Metzinger -- The twin tides of change / Timo Hannay -- Imaging deep learning / Andy Clark -- The neural net reloaded / Jamshed Bharucha -- Differentiable programming / David Dalrymple -- Deep learning, semantics, and society / Steve Omohundro -- Seeing our cyborg selves / Thomas A. Bass -- The rejection of science itself / Douglas Rushkoff -- Re-thinking artificial intelligence / Rodney A. Brooks -- I, for one / Joshua Bongard -- Data sets over algorithms / Alexander Wissner-Gross -- Biological methods of mental illness reflect essentialist biases / Bruce Hood -- Neuroprediction / Abigail Marsh -- The thin line between mental illness and mental health / Joel Gold -- Theodiversity / Ara Norenzayan -- Modernity is winning / Gregory Paul -- Religious morality is mostly below the belt / Michael McCullough --
A science of the consequences / Luca De Biase -- Creation of a "no ethnic majority" society / David Berreby -- Interconnectedness / Irene Pepperberg -- Early life adversity and collective outcomes / Linda Wilbrecht -- We're still behind / Mary Catherine Bateson -- Neural hacking, handprints, and the empathy deficit / Daniel Goleman -- Send in the drones / Diana Reiss --
That dress / Susan Blackmore -- Anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy / Eric R. Weinstein --
The origin of Europeans / Gregory Cochran -- The platinum rule: dense, heavy, but worth it / Hazel Rose Markus --
Adjusting to feathered dinosaurs / John McWhorter --
People are animals / Laura Betzig --
The longevity of news / Diana Deutsch --
Weather prediction has quietly gotten better / Samuel Arbesman -- The word: first as art, then as science / Brian Christian --
The convergence of images and technology / Victoria Wyatt -- The mindful meeting of minds / Christine Finn --
Carpe diem / Ernst Pöppel -- Linking the levels of human variation / Elizabeth Wrigley-Field --
Challenging the value of a university education / Steve Fuller --
The hermeneutic hypercycle / Maximilian Schich -- Rethinking authority with the blockchain crypto enlightenment / Melanie Swan --
Envoi: we may all die horribly / Robert Sapolsky.
by John Brockman
trying to get the audio edition
Contents:
Preface: The Edge question / John Brockman --
Human progress quantified / Steven Pinker --
Doing more with less / Freeman Dyson --
The "specialness" of humanity / Kurt Gray --
J.M. Bergoglio's 2015 review of global ecology / Stuart Pimm --
Leaking, thinning, sliding ice / Laurence C. Smith -- Glaciers / Robert Trivers --
Our collective blind spot / Jennifer Jacquet --
Three de-carbonizing scientific breakthroughs / Bill Joy --
Juice / James Croak -- A call to action / Hans Ulrich Obrist --
A bridge between the 21st and 22nd century / Koo Jeong-A --
The greatest environmental disaster / Richard Muller --
Technobiophilic cities / Scott Sampson -- LENR could supplant fossil fuels / Carl Page -- Emotions influence environmental well-being / June Gruber -- Global warming redux: a serious challenge to our species / Milford H. Wolpoff -- Blue marble 2.0 / Giulio Boccaletti -- High-tech stone age / Tor Nørretranders -- The dematerialization of consumption / Rory Sutherland -- Science made this possible / Bruce Parker -- The brain is a strange planet / Dustin Yellin --
The abdication of spacetime / Donald D. Hoffman --
The news that wasn't there / Antony Garrett Lisi --
No news is astounding news / Lee Smolin --
One hundred years of failure / Seth Lloyd -- Hope beyond the Higgs Boson / Sarah Demers -- An unexpected, haunting signal / Gerald Holton -- News about how the physical world operates / Leonard Susskind -- Unpublicized implications of Hawking black-hole evaporation / Frank Tipler -- The energy of nothing / Andrei Linde -- The big bang cannot be what we thought it was / Paul J. Steinhardt -- Anomalies / Stephon H. Alexander --
Looking where the light isn't / Brian G. Keating --
Simplicity / Neil Turok --
The LHC is working at full energy / Gordon Kane -- New probes of Einstein's curved spacetime--and beyond / Steve Giddings -- Supermassive black holes / Jeremy Bernstein -- Gigantic black holes at the center of galaxies / Carlo Rovelli -- The universe is infinite / Rudy Rucker -- Advance LIGO and advanced Virgo / Paul Davies -- The news is not the news / Frank Wilczek -- We know all the particles and forces we're made of / Sean Carroll -- Computational complexity and the nature of reality / Amanda Gefter -- Einstein was wrong / Hans Halvorson -- Replacing magic with mechanism? / Ross Anderson -- Quantum entanglement is independent of space and time / Anton Zeilinger -- Breakthroughs become part of the culture / Lisa Randall -- Space exploration, new and old / Robert Provine -- Pluto is a bump in the road / Nicholas A. Christakis -- Pluto now, then on to 550 AU / Gregory Benford -- The universe surprised us, close to home / Lawrence M. Krauss -- Progress in rocketry / George Dyson -- The space age takes off...and returns to Earth again / Peter Schwartz -- How widely should we draw the circle? / Scott Aaronson -- A new algorithm showing what computers can and cannot do / John Naughton -- Designer humans / Mark Pagel -- Cellular alchemy / Roger Highfield -- A terrible beauty has been born / Randolph Nesse -- DNA programming / Paul Dolan --
Human chimeras / David Haig -- The race between genetic meltdown and germline engineering / John Tooby -- The ongoing battles with pathogens / Robert Kurzban -- Antibiotics are dead; long live antibiotics! / Aubrey De Grey -- The 6 billion letters of our genome / Eric Topol, M.D. -- Systems medicine / Stuart A. Kauffman -- Growing a brain in a dish / Simon Baron-Cohen -- Self-driving genes are coming / Stewart Brand -- Life diverging / Juan Enriquez -- Fundamentally newsworthy / Stuart Firestein -- Paleo-DNA and de-extinction / W. Tecumseh Fitch -- The wisdom race is heating up / Max Tegmark -- Tabby's star / Yuri Milner -- Extraterrestrials don't land on Earth! / David Christian -- We are not unique, but we are very much alone / Andrian Kreye -- Breakthrough listen / Martin J. Rees -- Life in the Milky Way / Mario Livio -- There is (already) life on Mars / Michael I. Norton -- The breathtaking future of a connected world / Chris J. Anderson -- Everything is computation / Joscha Bach -- Identifying the principles, perhaps the laws, of intelligence / Pamela McCorduck -- Neuro-news / Noga Arikha -- Microbial attractions / Pamela Rosenkranz -- The epidemic of absence / Matt Ridley -- Bugs R Us / Nina Jablonski -- Fecal microbiota transplants / Joichi Ito -- Hi, guys / Alan Alda -- The anti-democratic trend / Dirk Helbing -- The age of awareness / Quentin Hardy -- A large-scale personality research method / Nathalie Nahai -- The conquest of human scale / Charles Seife -- Big data and better government / Margaret Levi -- This is the science-news essay you want to read / Marti Hearst -- Those annoying ads? The harbinger of good things to come / Roger Schank -- Biology versus choice / Thalia Wheatley -- How to be bad together / Gloria Origgi -- Psychology's crisis / Ellen Winner -- The truthiness of scientific research / Judith Rich Harris --
Blinded by data / Gary Klein -- The epistemic trainwreck of soft-side psychology / Philip Tetlock -- Science itself / Paul Bloom -- a compelling explanation for scientific misconduct / Leo M. Chalupa -- Sub-prime science / Nicholas Humphrey -- The infancy of meta-science / Jonathan Schooler -- The disillusion and the disaffection of poor white Americans / Richard Nisbett -- Inequality of wealth and income: a runaway process / S. Abbas Raza -- The age of visible thought / Peter Gabriel -- Our changing conceptions of what it means to be human / Howard Gardner -- Complete head transplants / Kai Krause -- The en-gendering of genius / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein -- Diversity in science / Gino Segre -- The democratization of science / Michale Shermer -- News about science news / Sheizaf Rafaeli -- The broadening scope of science / Tania Lombrozo -- Q-bio / Nigel Goldenfeld -- Mathematics and reality / Clifford Pickover -- Synthetic learning / Kevin Kelly -- A genuine science of learning / Keith Devlin -- Bayesian program learning / John C. Mather -- FSM (feces-standard money) / Jaeweon Cho -- The ironies of higher arithmetic / Jim Holt -- Broke people ignoring $20 bills on the sidewalk / Michael Vassar -- We fear the wrong things / David G. Myers -- Living in terror of terrorism / Gerd Gigerenzer -- The state of the world isn't as bad as you think / Steven R. Quartz -- The healthy diet u-turn / Ed Regis -- Fatty foods are good for your health / Peter Turchin -- Partisan hostility / Jonathan Haidt -- Cognitive science transforms moral philosophy / Stephen P. Stich -- Morality is made of meat / Oliver Scott Curry -- People kill because it's the right thing to do / James J. O'Donnell -- Interdisciplinary social research / Ziyad Marar -- Intellectual convergence / Adam Alter -- Weapons technology powered human evolution / Timothy Taylor -- The immune system: a grand unifying theory for biomedical research / Buddhini Samarasinghe -- Harnessing our natural defenses against cancer / Michael E. Hochberg --
Cancer drugs for brain diseases / Todd C. Sacktor -- The most powerful carcinogen may be entropy / George John-- The decline of cancer / A.C. Grayling -- The mating crisis among educated women / David M. Buss -- The most important x...y...z... / Jared Diamond --
The mother of all addictions / Helen Fisher -- The trust metric / John Gottman --
Optogenetics / Christian Keysers --
Nootropic neural news / George Church -- Memory is a labile fabrication / Kate Jeffery --
The continually new you / Stephen M. Kosslyn -- Toddlers can master computers / Alison Gopnik -- The predictive brain / Lisa Feldman Barrett -- A new imaging tool / Alun Anderson -- Sensors: accelerating the pace of scientific discovery / Paul Saffo -- 3D printing in the medical field / Syed Tasnim Raza --
Deep science / Brian Knutson -- A world that counts / Alex (Sandy) Pentland -- Programming reality / Neil Gershenfeld -- Pointing is a prerequisite for language / N.J. Enfield -- Macro-criminal networks / Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán -- Virtual reality goes mainstream / Thomas Metzinger -- The twin tides of change / Timo Hannay -- Imaging deep learning / Andy Clark -- The neural net reloaded / Jamshed Bharucha -- Differentiable programming / David Dalrymple -- Deep learning, semantics, and society / Steve Omohundro -- Seeing our cyborg selves / Thomas A. Bass -- The rejection of science itself / Douglas Rushkoff -- Re-thinking artificial intelligence / Rodney A. Brooks -- I, for one / Joshua Bongard -- Data sets over algorithms / Alexander Wissner-Gross -- Biological methods of mental illness reflect essentialist biases / Bruce Hood -- Neuroprediction / Abigail Marsh -- The thin line between mental illness and mental health / Joel Gold -- Theodiversity / Ara Norenzayan -- Modernity is winning / Gregory Paul -- Religious morality is mostly below the belt / Michael McCullough --
A science of the consequences / Luca De Biase -- Creation of a "no ethnic majority" society / David Berreby -- Interconnectedness / Irene Pepperberg -- Early life adversity and collective outcomes / Linda Wilbrecht -- We're still behind / Mary Catherine Bateson -- Neural hacking, handprints, and the empathy deficit / Daniel Goleman -- Send in the drones / Diana Reiss --
That dress / Susan Blackmore -- Anthropic capitalism and the new gimmick economy / Eric R. Weinstein --
The origin of Europeans / Gregory Cochran -- The platinum rule: dense, heavy, but worth it / Hazel Rose Markus --
Adjusting to feathered dinosaurs / John McWhorter --
People are animals / Laura Betzig --
The longevity of news / Diana Deutsch --
Weather prediction has quietly gotten better / Samuel Arbesman -- The word: first as art, then as science / Brian Christian --
The convergence of images and technology / Victoria Wyatt -- The mindful meeting of minds / Christine Finn --
Carpe diem / Ernst Pöppel -- Linking the levels of human variation / Elizabeth Wrigley-Field --
Challenging the value of a university education / Steve Fuller --
The hermeneutic hypercycle / Maximilian Schich -- Rethinking authority with the blockchain crypto enlightenment / Melanie Swan --
Envoi: we may all die horribly / Robert Sapolsky.
December 1, 2025
"Know This" is the 2017 edition of Edge.org's annual question, where John Brockman asks leading scientists, thinkers, and intellectuals to respond to a single prompt.
This year's question: "What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important?" The result is nearly 200 short essays from Nobel laureates, physicists, psychologists, biologists, technologists, and philosophers, each sharing what excited them about recent scientific developments.
The format is both the book's strength and weakness. You get bite-sized pieces (typically 2-4 pages each) from brilliant minds like Steven Pinker, Freeman Dyson, Carlo Rovelli, Frank Wilczek, Alison Gopnik, Martin Rees, and Jonathan Haidt. . It's like attending the world's most interesting cocktail party where every guest is a leading expert in something fascinating.
The book opens strong with Steven Pinker's essay on "Human Progress Quantified." . This sets a hopeful tone and introduces the book's core premise: that data and scientific method can correct our mistaken intuitions.
The climate and environment section hits hard. This brevity is either powerful or frustrating depending on your expectations. .
The physics and cosmology section showcases genuine wonder. . . These pieces capture the excitement of working scientists grappling with nature's mysteries.
Where the book becomes genuinely valuable is the genetics and biotechnology section. . . . These essays feel genuinely futuristic and important.
The psychology section is fascinating but uncomfortable. . . This is science turning its lens on itself, and it's both worrying and ultimately hopeful.
The artificial intelligence section captures a pivotal moment. . . Reading this in 2025, knowing how AI has since developed, gives these 2015-2016 predictions an eerie quality.
One genuinely surprising essay comes from Stuart Pimm reviewing "J.M. Bergoglio's 2015 Review of Global Ecology" which turns out to be Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment. . The essay makes the point that science and religion can collaborate on environmental issues.
However, the anthology format creates real problems. The essays vary wildly in quality, depth, and accessibility. Some contributors write clearly for general audiences; others assume specialized knowledge that most readers won't have. .
The brevity is often frustrating. When Kai Krause writes about complete head transplants the essay raises enormous questions but provides few answers. The format prevents deep exploration. Similarly, .
Some essays feel like self-promotion rather than genuine science communication. Contributors occasionally use their platform to discuss their own research or promote their books rather than sharing broadly interesting discoveries. The "what I find interesting" framing gives permission for this, but it dilutes the collection's value.
The 2015-2016 timestamp creates an odd reading experience now. . The book functions partly as a time capsule of scientific concerns from a decade ago, interesting historically but not current.
What works best is when contributors connect their specialized knowledge to broader human concerns. . . These essays translate specialist knowledge into practical wisdom.
The book includes some genuinely weird and wonderful contributions. . . . These oddball entries add flavor but also raise questions about editorial selection criteria.
Best for: curious generalists, science enthusiasts who enjoy variety, readers seeking intellectual stimulation in short bursts, anyone wanting to understand what scientists consider important.
My Rating 3.5/5 Star
This year's question: "What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important?" The result is nearly 200 short essays from Nobel laureates, physicists, psychologists, biologists, technologists, and philosophers, each sharing what excited them about recent scientific developments.
The format is both the book's strength and weakness. You get bite-sized pieces (typically 2-4 pages each) from brilliant minds like Steven Pinker, Freeman Dyson, Carlo Rovelli, Frank Wilczek, Alison Gopnik, Martin Rees, and Jonathan Haidt. . It's like attending the world's most interesting cocktail party where every guest is a leading expert in something fascinating.
The book opens strong with Steven Pinker's essay on "Human Progress Quantified." . This sets a hopeful tone and introduces the book's core premise: that data and scientific method can correct our mistaken intuitions.
The climate and environment section hits hard. This brevity is either powerful or frustrating depending on your expectations. .
The physics and cosmology section showcases genuine wonder. . . These pieces capture the excitement of working scientists grappling with nature's mysteries.
Where the book becomes genuinely valuable is the genetics and biotechnology section. . . . These essays feel genuinely futuristic and important.
The psychology section is fascinating but uncomfortable. . . This is science turning its lens on itself, and it's both worrying and ultimately hopeful.
The artificial intelligence section captures a pivotal moment. . . Reading this in 2025, knowing how AI has since developed, gives these 2015-2016 predictions an eerie quality.
One genuinely surprising essay comes from Stuart Pimm reviewing "J.M. Bergoglio's 2015 Review of Global Ecology" which turns out to be Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment. . The essay makes the point that science and religion can collaborate on environmental issues.
However, the anthology format creates real problems. The essays vary wildly in quality, depth, and accessibility. Some contributors write clearly for general audiences; others assume specialized knowledge that most readers won't have. .
The brevity is often frustrating. When Kai Krause writes about complete head transplants the essay raises enormous questions but provides few answers. The format prevents deep exploration. Similarly, .
Some essays feel like self-promotion rather than genuine science communication. Contributors occasionally use their platform to discuss their own research or promote their books rather than sharing broadly interesting discoveries. The "what I find interesting" framing gives permission for this, but it dilutes the collection's value.
The 2015-2016 timestamp creates an odd reading experience now. . The book functions partly as a time capsule of scientific concerns from a decade ago, interesting historically but not current.
What works best is when contributors connect their specialized knowledge to broader human concerns. . . These essays translate specialist knowledge into practical wisdom.
The book includes some genuinely weird and wonderful contributions. . . . These oddball entries add flavor but also raise questions about editorial selection criteria.
Best for: curious generalists, science enthusiasts who enjoy variety, readers seeking intellectual stimulation in short bursts, anyone wanting to understand what scientists consider important.
My Rating 3.5/5 Star
December 29, 2019
KNOW THIS – Edited by John Brockman, published by Harper Perennial
A book filled with juicy speculations, scientific ideas, conjecture and controversy.
Overall, this book is a must-read for any thinking person. I found the Astronomy articles particularly mind-blowing. Others informed and raised many questions.
The first article, Human Progress Quantified, by Steven Pinker, is a contentious one and perhaps an ambitious task given all the variables. I am of a different opinion to Steven Pinker, who believes Objective Data shows measurable progress. Really? With the planets wild animal population reduced by half since 1970 and the human population doubled, fed by a conveyer belt of suffering livestock, with our bodies and our oceans chocking on plastic, Steven Pinker concludes, altruism, health and intelligence increasing and setbacks and wars mainly localised. (Intuitively, he agrees, it seems the opposite is true.)
Has he fully taken into account the fact that any perceived progress has come at the expense of the planet and its environment, is currently unsustainable, and with 8 billion people soon to be on board, the stakes are higher than ever? (According to another article in this book, 4000 people die of air population everyday in China – and they are the official Chinese figures).
Maybe the question I am alluding to is what is the net amount of suffering? and is it higher today than ever? I think so, because of the numbers – It’s a good argument that any diabolically grim life in the middle ages, beset with hunger, disease and religiously-driven psychological torture is, mercifully, less severe because there were only a few million people on the entire earth (as opposed to several Billion today) and life was short.
I suggest the, depressing but hard to counter, ‘Edwardson Formula’ applies, certainly given the history of human expansion and settlement –
LIFE = Suffering. More Life = More Suffering.
Given man’s well-documented destructive and cruel nature, if we include the higher animals, suffering goes thru the stratosphere.
And if suffering has increased, then no amount of ‘quantifiable’ human progress can offset this terrible propagation of misery, given that good only offsets bad if it undoes the bad.
To counter fatalism and the dangers of negative self-fulfilling prophesies, perhaps we need highly educated, creative thinkers and optimists like Steven Pinker and I look forward to reading his ‘Enlightenment’ book, just as, he agrees, we need to guard against complacency. However, I suspect, some of those dedicated and fortunate to have time for visionary analysis, propagate an optimistic illusion from their bubble of academia – connected, as they are, with nearly every incredible mind on the planet – but of course, somewhat removed from the mindless. This was also one of many impressions, good and bad, I had when a similar question put in another fine book related to Steven Pinker, What are you Optimistic About? (Perhaps those of us who have chosen to propagate the species – Unwisely I feel – may be more susceptible to confirmation bias when it comes to the future of our offspring, given humankind’s documented psychological need to justify our decisions).
A book filled with juicy speculations, scientific ideas, conjecture and controversy.
Overall, this book is a must-read for any thinking person. I found the Astronomy articles particularly mind-blowing. Others informed and raised many questions.
The first article, Human Progress Quantified, by Steven Pinker, is a contentious one and perhaps an ambitious task given all the variables. I am of a different opinion to Steven Pinker, who believes Objective Data shows measurable progress. Really? With the planets wild animal population reduced by half since 1970 and the human population doubled, fed by a conveyer belt of suffering livestock, with our bodies and our oceans chocking on plastic, Steven Pinker concludes, altruism, health and intelligence increasing and setbacks and wars mainly localised. (Intuitively, he agrees, it seems the opposite is true.)
Has he fully taken into account the fact that any perceived progress has come at the expense of the planet and its environment, is currently unsustainable, and with 8 billion people soon to be on board, the stakes are higher than ever? (According to another article in this book, 4000 people die of air population everyday in China – and they are the official Chinese figures).
Maybe the question I am alluding to is what is the net amount of suffering? and is it higher today than ever? I think so, because of the numbers – It’s a good argument that any diabolically grim life in the middle ages, beset with hunger, disease and religiously-driven psychological torture is, mercifully, less severe because there were only a few million people on the entire earth (as opposed to several Billion today) and life was short.
I suggest the, depressing but hard to counter, ‘Edwardson Formula’ applies, certainly given the history of human expansion and settlement –
LIFE = Suffering. More Life = More Suffering.
Given man’s well-documented destructive and cruel nature, if we include the higher animals, suffering goes thru the stratosphere.
And if suffering has increased, then no amount of ‘quantifiable’ human progress can offset this terrible propagation of misery, given that good only offsets bad if it undoes the bad.
To counter fatalism and the dangers of negative self-fulfilling prophesies, perhaps we need highly educated, creative thinkers and optimists like Steven Pinker and I look forward to reading his ‘Enlightenment’ book, just as, he agrees, we need to guard against complacency. However, I suspect, some of those dedicated and fortunate to have time for visionary analysis, propagate an optimistic illusion from their bubble of academia – connected, as they are, with nearly every incredible mind on the planet – but of course, somewhat removed from the mindless. This was also one of many impressions, good and bad, I had when a similar question put in another fine book related to Steven Pinker, What are you Optimistic About? (Perhaps those of us who have chosen to propagate the species – Unwisely I feel – may be more susceptible to confirmation bias when it comes to the future of our offspring, given humankind’s documented psychological need to justify our decisions).
October 6, 2021
3.6
A lot of fascinating insights from exceptional scientists but just as much unintelligible rambling about computer learning and particle physics. Took me 4 months to listen to the whole 14.5 hours.
I passionately support the idea of better science news and the thesis of this book is unassailable and so important. That Science is the only news and that the human stories that fill our news pages (even politics and economics) are just the same sorry cyclic dramas, “Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly”. Additionally asking a large number of smart people the same question is a fun format that produces a remarkable snapshot of scientific stories and opinions, all very raw and unedited.
However, half of the resulting essays are either subjectively boring for me or objectively bad (unintelligibly filled with jargon; or from sounding unconvincing and unqualified, like when they go outside their fields. I’m looking at you Jared diamond). I have to agree with all the other criticisms of this book too: Already outdated, often flamboyant without references, many just promoting and overselling their research areas (those ones were pretty obvious, I’m looking at you mathematics people).
I strongly disagree with all the readers criticizing how the answers overlapped. I think that was the biggest strength of this book, the fact that many give similar answers (like the end of string theory or break throughs in Deep learning) really shows their importance and helps you to remember them. I also didn’t think anyone was fear mongering about climate change (calm down conservatives).
I agree with the positive reviews: thought provoking, glittering variety, concise, good for your brain. Half of them were very interesting and perhaps 20 out of the 198 essays legitimately captivated me. I would recommend this to only those with a science background, and I think its important to skip the essays that don’t grab you. I hope that future versions of this do more editing to remove the weaker contributions and also render many of them more reader friendly by removing some jargon The next and latest book in the series was released in 2018 so will check that one out, it has a better rating but a less interesting theme “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?”.
The most memorable 6 essays for me were….
019. Rory Sutherland: The Dematerialization of Consumption. We have reached peak stuff, materialism and status seeking is decreasing and changing. Car and Car purchasing is decreasing. Half of US young people don’t have licenses. People are buying more intangibles like streaming music and film. Living in tiny flats in the middle of the city is more fashionable than mansions. Online social media makes experiences more powerful status signaling than possessions. In my words, he is saying that the human qualities of status rivalry and novelty-seeking have been so destructive for hundreds of years but are now being unintentionally redirected into far more benign Instagramable forms. Let the masses have their fake social media lives, fake means sustainable, and it's better than the traditional consumption of giant properties and big cars and ornaments made out of ivory or whatever.
026. Sarah Demers: Hope Beyond the Higgs Boson. A decade of work lead to the discovery of the last particles of the standard model, but they worry they will never learn more about dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity, or explain the 96% of matter/energy of the universe that doesn’t fit in the standard model. But every year brings new clues and the promise of a big breakthrough.
071. Max Tegmark: The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up. The race is between our technology and our wisdom to use it. Previous wisdom has lagged behind and comes from learning from our mistakes. E.g. Safety features of cars. But we need to change strategy from reactive to proactive as we move closer to nuclear technology, synthetic biology, and strong AI. If we lose the race we go extinct in the next century. Need stronger incentives for controlling technology, like well-funded conferences on AI regulation.
082. Pamela Rosenkranz: Microbial Attractions. This was the most shocking thing I learnt. There is a parasite Toxoplasma gondii that operates by infecting rats and altering their brains to produce an arousal for cat pheromones that drowns out their fear of them so that the rat will be eaten and the parasite can reproduce in the cat's stomach. But then you learn that 35% of humans carry it, and it changes our behaviour too, the parasite is linked to risk-taking behaviour, car accidents, and schizophrenia. And in women to buying designer clothes. One-third of humans are cat microbe zombies. Mind blown. This author is just an artist but I checked the research and its real and compelling.
084. Nina Jablonski: Bugs R Us. The human microbiomes are increasingly important for health and disease and mood and gene expression. We are an ecosystem. Probiotics to treat serious disease, Faecal transplants work great for obesity. Oligosaccharides in breast milk are inert to us but selectively feed good bacteria. Modern allergies and acne are a result of modern hygiene and the absence of parasites that would otherwise occupy our immune systems more. No one in pre-hygiene societies has pimples, and if you open up the windows in a hospital ward to let microbes in the patients are healthier. The future will have better probiotics for disease and mood and targeted antibiotics because our precious bugs are valuable.
091. Margaret Levi: Big Data and Better Government- Really important topic and seemed an authoritative summary of the topic, how there are two main groups pushing for this, those that want a bigger voice for citizens and those that want more scientific government policies. Big data lets you evaluate policy using observational analysis when experiments randomizing people and communities is impractical and unethical. And people can communicate with the government using phones and apps, often through NGOs, to photograph broken roads and report corruption.
093. Roger Schank: Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger of Good Things to Come: Points out that targeted ads are not actually scientific, just related to keywords you search, but in the future, there will be and it won’t be bad. AI tech will understand your motivations, character, and what you are doing and give advice like a close friend, replace doctors, etc. Those annoying targeted ads are the forerunners of actually useful AI, they are like dumb friends but soon we will have many smart friends.
A lot of fascinating insights from exceptional scientists but just as much unintelligible rambling about computer learning and particle physics. Took me 4 months to listen to the whole 14.5 hours.
I passionately support the idea of better science news and the thesis of this book is unassailable and so important. That Science is the only news and that the human stories that fill our news pages (even politics and economics) are just the same sorry cyclic dramas, “Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly”. Additionally asking a large number of smart people the same question is a fun format that produces a remarkable snapshot of scientific stories and opinions, all very raw and unedited.
However, half of the resulting essays are either subjectively boring for me or objectively bad (unintelligibly filled with jargon; or from sounding unconvincing and unqualified, like when they go outside their fields. I’m looking at you Jared diamond). I have to agree with all the other criticisms of this book too: Already outdated, often flamboyant without references, many just promoting and overselling their research areas (those ones were pretty obvious, I’m looking at you mathematics people).
I strongly disagree with all the readers criticizing how the answers overlapped. I think that was the biggest strength of this book, the fact that many give similar answers (like the end of string theory or break throughs in Deep learning) really shows their importance and helps you to remember them. I also didn’t think anyone was fear mongering about climate change (calm down conservatives).
I agree with the positive reviews: thought provoking, glittering variety, concise, good for your brain. Half of them were very interesting and perhaps 20 out of the 198 essays legitimately captivated me. I would recommend this to only those with a science background, and I think its important to skip the essays that don’t grab you. I hope that future versions of this do more editing to remove the weaker contributions and also render many of them more reader friendly by removing some jargon The next and latest book in the series was released in 2018 so will check that one out, it has a better rating but a less interesting theme “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?”.
The most memorable 6 essays for me were….
019. Rory Sutherland: The Dematerialization of Consumption. We have reached peak stuff, materialism and status seeking is decreasing and changing. Car and Car purchasing is decreasing. Half of US young people don’t have licenses. People are buying more intangibles like streaming music and film. Living in tiny flats in the middle of the city is more fashionable than mansions. Online social media makes experiences more powerful status signaling than possessions. In my words, he is saying that the human qualities of status rivalry and novelty-seeking have been so destructive for hundreds of years but are now being unintentionally redirected into far more benign Instagramable forms. Let the masses have their fake social media lives, fake means sustainable, and it's better than the traditional consumption of giant properties and big cars and ornaments made out of ivory or whatever.
026. Sarah Demers: Hope Beyond the Higgs Boson. A decade of work lead to the discovery of the last particles of the standard model, but they worry they will never learn more about dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity, or explain the 96% of matter/energy of the universe that doesn’t fit in the standard model. But every year brings new clues and the promise of a big breakthrough.
071. Max Tegmark: The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up. The race is between our technology and our wisdom to use it. Previous wisdom has lagged behind and comes from learning from our mistakes. E.g. Safety features of cars. But we need to change strategy from reactive to proactive as we move closer to nuclear technology, synthetic biology, and strong AI. If we lose the race we go extinct in the next century. Need stronger incentives for controlling technology, like well-funded conferences on AI regulation.
082. Pamela Rosenkranz: Microbial Attractions. This was the most shocking thing I learnt. There is a parasite Toxoplasma gondii that operates by infecting rats and altering their brains to produce an arousal for cat pheromones that drowns out their fear of them so that the rat will be eaten and the parasite can reproduce in the cat's stomach. But then you learn that 35% of humans carry it, and it changes our behaviour too, the parasite is linked to risk-taking behaviour, car accidents, and schizophrenia. And in women to buying designer clothes. One-third of humans are cat microbe zombies. Mind blown. This author is just an artist but I checked the research and its real and compelling.
084. Nina Jablonski: Bugs R Us. The human microbiomes are increasingly important for health and disease and mood and gene expression. We are an ecosystem. Probiotics to treat serious disease, Faecal transplants work great for obesity. Oligosaccharides in breast milk are inert to us but selectively feed good bacteria. Modern allergies and acne are a result of modern hygiene and the absence of parasites that would otherwise occupy our immune systems more. No one in pre-hygiene societies has pimples, and if you open up the windows in a hospital ward to let microbes in the patients are healthier. The future will have better probiotics for disease and mood and targeted antibiotics because our precious bugs are valuable.
091. Margaret Levi: Big Data and Better Government- Really important topic and seemed an authoritative summary of the topic, how there are two main groups pushing for this, those that want a bigger voice for citizens and those that want more scientific government policies. Big data lets you evaluate policy using observational analysis when experiments randomizing people and communities is impractical and unethical. And people can communicate with the government using phones and apps, often through NGOs, to photograph broken roads and report corruption.
093. Roger Schank: Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger of Good Things to Come: Points out that targeted ads are not actually scientific, just related to keywords you search, but in the future, there will be and it won’t be bad. AI tech will understand your motivations, character, and what you are doing and give advice like a close friend, replace doctors, etc. Those annoying targeted ads are the forerunners of actually useful AI, they are like dumb friends but soon we will have many smart friends.
March 1, 2017
It would be pretty helpful to have a photographic memory while reading a book made up of about 200 excellent chapters from some of the leading thinkers on the planet on the most important scientific ideas in existence right now. If that isn't enough, add to it predictions for the future where presently available table-top, 3d-printer-like, gene modification equipment (CRISPR/Cas9) would allow anyone to design new kinds of species or make designer humans among other feats of genetic alchemy from the comfort of their bedrooms. That head transplant I have been looking for will finally become a reality this year. Faeces has a good chance of becoming the new international currency and if all THAT doesn't make you want to pick this book up, here's a paragraph smack dab in the middle of the book -
'The disillusionment hypothesis explains why the support for Donald Trump's candidacy is greatest among ill educated whites in the poorer, less cosmopolitan regions of the country. Trumps bombast, braggadocio, xenophobia, aggressiveness, and willingness to tell baldface lies is unnerving to anyone having a nodding acquaintance with the circumstances of the rise of fascism. Both Italian fascism and German fascism achieved their greatest success with the proletariat. In the case of Nazism, the greatest early gains were made among the rural Protestant peasants.'
There is so much information in this book that it needs to be savoured, marked, underlined and then read again just to be sure.
'The disillusionment hypothesis explains why the support for Donald Trump's candidacy is greatest among ill educated whites in the poorer, less cosmopolitan regions of the country. Trumps bombast, braggadocio, xenophobia, aggressiveness, and willingness to tell baldface lies is unnerving to anyone having a nodding acquaintance with the circumstances of the rise of fascism. Both Italian fascism and German fascism achieved their greatest success with the proletariat. In the case of Nazism, the greatest early gains were made among the rural Protestant peasants.'
There is so much information in this book that it needs to be savoured, marked, underlined and then read again just to be sure.
January 23, 2018
This book was a bad idea. I read another of these Edge books, and I really liked it, I liked how it was getting opinions and ideas from all over the place, without filtering anything out. The premise of these books is that every year the editor asks a question to leading scientists and thinkers, and they answer in a few pages. This book’s question was “what is the biggest recent news in science” and the problem with this is:
1) you get a lot of redundant answers. When you ask an opinion on something controversial, lots of answers are great, because everyone sees things differently. Like this, you get the same ideas rehashed over and over.
2) the question was asked at the end of 2015, but this book was published in 2017. That means I read this and already a lot of it was outdated! For example, one author briefly mentioned that there might be something interesting coming out of the LIGO experiment, and I know very well that they did find something.
3) big science news is NEWS, so we the general public already know most of these things. And it really doesn’t matter that it’s famous people telling us
4) some fields have more breaking news than others, and so it’s quite frustrating to read about news that is actually just a trend
Other problems include:
-the editor really did no editing, even when contributors were completely off topic or not really in the field.
Merits:
-I still really like the premise of these books
-nothing is deeply wrong with the book
I mainly resist giving it 2 stars because I was so looking forward to reading it...
1) you get a lot of redundant answers. When you ask an opinion on something controversial, lots of answers are great, because everyone sees things differently. Like this, you get the same ideas rehashed over and over.
2) the question was asked at the end of 2015, but this book was published in 2017. That means I read this and already a lot of it was outdated! For example, one author briefly mentioned that there might be something interesting coming out of the LIGO experiment, and I know very well that they did find something.
3) big science news is NEWS, so we the general public already know most of these things. And it really doesn’t matter that it’s famous people telling us
4) some fields have more breaking news than others, and so it’s quite frustrating to read about news that is actually just a trend
Other problems include:
-the editor really did no editing, even when contributors were completely off topic or not really in the field.
Merits:
-I still really like the premise of these books
-nothing is deeply wrong with the book
I mainly resist giving it 2 stars because I was so looking forward to reading it...
July 26, 2022
This book should be titled: The Giant Book of Opinions from People Who Think They Are Smart. When smart people write/state their opinions and wish to convince those reading/listening, they state their corroborating details as if they are facts. Studies are not facts (at least not statistically/repeatably factual). Prototypes are not working engineering models or products. Stating availability of a new thing without it being available or economical or otherwise successful for any reason is not factual. This book has a lot of opinion -- mostly about ecology and manmade climate change -- which is just opinions. And the opinions in this book are Not what you've not heard repeated Everywhere in media today. If they (the author who collected, and those who wrote the essays) want to reach the people who do not Just Believe what they're told... then they need to write papers with facts and argue with the people who Disagree with the conclusion these papers draw from the facts... but they don't/won't because many opinions here are not facts and can be refuted. BTW, many people agree that burning hydrocarbons has Greened the Planet Earth (more plants & trees now). People who collect a book of opinions (like this one) should be clear to the readers that the book is full of opinions... Not Important Interesting Scientific Ideas! Just Opinion!
December 23, 2018
Another entry in his Edge series where brilliant people answer a question. In 2015, the question was "What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news?" Physicists, neuroscientists, economists, environmentalists and others responded. Answers from some respondents grouped naturally - the Large Hadron Collider, CRISPr technology (gene manipulation), cancer treatments, the use of Big Data - but some stood alone. My favorite was the essay by Max Tegman, who discussed the race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we manage it. Another essay discussed why Trump's support from non-college-educated voters is so strong. Still another evaluated the way we choose our online news sources. The Platinum Rule - do unto others as they would have us do unto them - was interesting. It's a book to be dipped in and out of, rather than read straight through. It's also interesting to see how some essays have dated. The essays were written before Trump was elected
June 13, 2018
If you like to keep up to date with scientific thought, if you like to dip in and out of a book, and if you like to think that one day you'll totally read Science, Nature and all the other sciencey journals out there (but really know you won't) then this is the perfect book for you.
John Brockton asked 100s of scientists the question: "What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news? What makes it important?"
The result is a 600+ page tome with each scientist having 1-3 pages to answer the question. I read most of them and skipped the ones that just didn't float my boat. Overall it was a great book to dip into and I read some fabulous things that have caused me to do a lot of googling.
Of course a question like this ages the book so read it soon before it all becomes history, rather than a prediction of the future.
John Brockton asked 100s of scientists the question: "What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news? What makes it important?"
The result is a 600+ page tome with each scientist having 1-3 pages to answer the question. I read most of them and skipped the ones that just didn't float my boat. Overall it was a great book to dip into and I read some fabulous things that have caused me to do a lot of googling.
Of course a question like this ages the book so read it soon before it all becomes history, rather than a prediction of the future.
November 3, 2018
Know this is only a couple of years old and yet, in some areas, it's outdated. This small fact shows the importance of reading books like Know this in an attempt to keep up with a world moving at the speed of stupidity. A collection of more than 200 short essays from scientists, artists and the like, Know this tries to illuminate important issues like the environment, AI, Big Data and so on. Some of the essays are hard, some are very easy, some are poignant, some are flamboyant but the constant change in voices left me with a sensation of things being connected. What we glimpse in Know this is the future coming at us with a 100 mph, and we better embrace ourselves for the impact. A very good read.
July 23, 2019
A book which is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s highly diverse and disjointed, with lot of technical jargon that may get lot of us disillusioned to read further. However, once you persist and continue to read, you will come across some high quality essays, insights, ideas, discoveries and inventions that personally got me intrigued. This book opened my mind to so many new ideas, perspectives and insights that I would certainly give a second read to this to keep in mind the few good essays that I loved.
Read this book with the clear idea that if a topic seems out of place or you are not keen to read, skip it. Pick up the topic that you find interesting and you will be amazed with a small intellectually orgasmic feeling that you will experience.
Read this book with the clear idea that if a topic seems out of place or you are not keen to read, skip it. Pick up the topic that you find interesting and you will be amazed with a small intellectually orgasmic feeling that you will experience.
August 10, 2017
This is a compilation of short essays by experts about what they consider the most important thing to occur in their field of specialty. On a whole it was quite interesting, if a bit repetitive. Some of the fields under discussion I am not that conversant in and found the essays more challenging to extract the message. It sometimes bordered on "techno-babble double speak"! None the less I did find it interesting to read about the advances in a multitude of areas of scientific inquiry. Due to the more technical language, I feel this book's target audience would be those with a definite scientific bent.
August 12, 2017
This book was like an 18 hour long TED conference. I was initially skeptical about Edge.org but now I realize that my ignorance was massive, and will forever be threatened (my ignorance that is) by the curiosities books like this will lead me towards.
Not every single essay was perspective altering, but there were many that were. Which is saying something.
If you like Radiolab, if you like TED, you'll love these anthologies of thought written by some of the most inquisitive among us.
In a rush right now so I won't go into specifics... let's just say that there were many quotes that I will take with me into my next phase. Whatever that is.
Not every single essay was perspective altering, but there were many that were. Which is saying something.
If you like Radiolab, if you like TED, you'll love these anthologies of thought written by some of the most inquisitive among us.
In a rush right now so I won't go into specifics... let's just say that there were many quotes that I will take with me into my next phase. Whatever that is.
August 23, 2019
Importance (how important is the subject matter? How important is the thesis? How grave are the consequences if the thesis is wrong?): 2
Interestingness (How interesting is the subject matter? Does the book make an uninteresting subject interesting? Does the book provide a fresh perspective?): 4
Credibility (How well does the book defend its thesis? How well-researched are evidence and anecdotes?): 4
Clarity (How good is the disposition? Is information presented in a way that makes it easy to absorb and facilitates remembering it?): 2
Prose: 4
Page turner factor: 4
Mind blown factor: 3
Final (weighted) score: 3.6
Interestingness (How interesting is the subject matter? Does the book make an uninteresting subject interesting? Does the book provide a fresh perspective?): 4
Credibility (How well does the book defend its thesis? How well-researched are evidence and anecdotes?): 4
Clarity (How good is the disposition? Is information presented in a way that makes it easy to absorb and facilitates remembering it?): 2
Prose: 4
Page turner factor: 4
Mind blown factor: 3
Final (weighted) score: 3.6
September 3, 2019
"We believed the humans were fundamentally different from other animals and possessed intelligence that could never be duplicated. Those ideas made us feel comfortable and safe, and so were easy to believe - but they were wrong..."
New things learned from this book:
Longue durée (History)
Satusfice - accept an available option as satisfactory. (Herbert Simon)
Hubble / Planck lengths, largest and smallest scale in Physics.
The Electron, discovered by. J.J. Thomson (1897)
Konrad Zuse, first programmable computer. (Germany, 1938)
Spooky interaction (Action at a distance) - Einstein
De-Extinction.
Gene Knockout (KO)
The Streetlight Effect
New things learned from this book:
Longue durée (History)
Satusfice - accept an available option as satisfactory. (Herbert Simon)
Hubble / Planck lengths, largest and smallest scale in Physics.
The Electron, discovered by. J.J. Thomson (1897)
Konrad Zuse, first programmable computer. (Germany, 1938)
Spooky interaction (Action at a distance) - Einstein
De-Extinction.
Gene Knockout (KO)
The Streetlight Effect
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