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Subject: EDGE 96 - THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2002
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"To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex
and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask
each other the questions they are asking themselves."
January 14, 2002
EDGE 96
-at-
47,500 words (& images) available on the EDGE Website
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIFTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE
EDGE 96 marks the 5th anniversary of EDGE. Many thanks to all of you in
the EDGE community for your continued support.
John Brockman, Publisher & Editor
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2002
"I can repeat the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?"
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2002
The 5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit of the Edge motto: "To
arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and
sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each
other the questions they are asking themselves."
The 2002 Edge Question is:
"WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FORTY FLOWERS
By Katinka Matson
New Year's Greetings from EDGE!!
New technologies=new perceptions. For the past several years Katinka
Matson (co-founder of Edge Foundation, Inc.) has experimented with
non-photographic techniques for creating images by utilizing input through
a flatbed CCD scanner.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
FAZ
Once again, a German-language edition is being simultaneously co-published
by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frank Schirrmacher, Publisher).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2002
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can repeat the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?"
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2002
The 5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit of the Edge motto: "To
arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and
sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each
other the questions they are asking themselves."
The 2002 Edge Question is:
"WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?"
I asked Edge contributors for "hard-edge" questions, derived from
empirical results or experience specific to their expertise, that render
visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefine who and what we are.
The goal was a series of interrogatives in which "thinking smart prevails
over the anaesthesiology of wisdom."
The project - which consists of 93 contributions and 48,000 words to date
- is available on the EDGE home page: http://www.edge.org.
There are two files, one which links to individual responses for reading
and printing, (see excerpts below).
A larger file - "Printer version" - which contains the complete 47,500
text - is also available.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IN THE NEWS
FAZ
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14.01.2002, Nr. 11 / Seite 38
WER NICHT FRAGT, BLEIBT DUMM
Der Schleier des Nichtwissens ist noch nicht verschwunden: Wer richtige
Antworten will, muß wissen, was er sucht - Eine Umfrage zum Jahr 2002
unter Wissenschaftlern und Künstlern
Als Kultur noch nicht numeriert wurde, lud, wenn wir Richard Wagner
glauben können, der Landgraf von Thüringen seine Edlen zum "Sängerkrieg
auf Wartburg", wo er Preisfragen stellte, deren berühmteste lautete: Könnt
ihr der Liebe Wesen mir ergründen? Der Verleger und Literaturagent John
Brockman, der Sängerkriege nun im Internet veranstaltet, knüpft zum
Jahresanfang gern an diese Tradition an (F.A.Z. vom 9. Januar 2001). Sein
Tannhäuser mag Steven Pinker heißen, sein Wolfram von Eschenbach sich als
Richard Dawkins zu erkennen geben: ihnen und ihren Mitstreitern wäre wohl
zuzutrauen, auch Spekulationen über des Landgrafen Lieblingsthema
anzustellen. Brockmans Koryphäen der "Dritten Kultur", ob sie nun, wie
Dawkins, in Oxford sich der Evolutionsbiologie widmen oder, wie Alan Alda,
am Broadway Wissenschaftler rezitieren, kennen keine Tabus. Alles ist
erlaubt, nichts bleibt ausgeklammert im intellektuellen Spiel. Am Ende
aber geht es auch in seiner Wartburg, die elektronisch unter www.edge.org
zu erreichen ist, um uns und unsere unerklärte und offenbar unerklärliche
Bestimmung. Im neuen Jahr fragt Brockman nicht, sondern läßt wieder einmal
Fragen stellen. Im Internet sind die Beiträge von heute an zu finden. Wir
drucken gleichzeitig mit dem Start des Forums eine Auswahl der
kommentierten Fragen, zum Teil in leicht gekürzter Fassung, in deutscher
Übersetzung.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It has already occurred to some of you that the questions asked are
excellent platform for future discussions on EDGE. I look forward to
comments.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The 2002 Edge Question:
"WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Randolph Nesse - Ray Kurzweil - J. Doyne Farmer - Rafael Núñez - Brian
Greene - James Gilligan - Stuart Pimm - Mark Hurst - Anton Zeilinger -
Simon Baron-Cohen - Brian Eno - W. Daniel Hillis - Dan Sperber - John
Allen Paulos - David Buss - Tor Nørretranders - Carlo Rovelli - Sir John
Maddox - Robert Provine - Stephen Schneider - Richard Nisbett - Keith
Devlin - Esther Dyson - Howard Gardner - Leon Lederman - Frank
Schirrmacher - Steven Pinker - Samuel Barondes - David Gelernter - Steven
R. Quartz - Jordan B. Pollack - Michael Shermer - John Markoff - Seth
Lloyd - Steve Grand - Gary F. Marcus - Eduardo Punset - Gregory Benford -
Joel Garreau - David Deutsch - Richard Dawkins - Milford H. Wolpoff - John
D. Barrow - David G. Myers - Karl Sabbagh - Rodney Brooks - Stephen
Grossberg - Antony Valentini - Julian Barbour - Piet Hut - Paul Davies -
John Skoyles - Delta Willis - Lee Smolin - Henry Warwick - Alan Alda -
Gerd Stern - Chris Anderson - Todd Siler - George Dyson - Margaret
Wertheim - Paul Bloom - Martin Rees - Judith Rich Harris - Howard Lee
Morgan - Terrence Sejnowski - Nicholas Humphrey - Todd Feinberg, MD -
Sylvia Paull - Andy Clark - Mark Stahlman - Robert Sapolsky - Lance Knobel
- Freeman Dyson - Jaron Lanier - Lawrence Krauss - Robert Aunger - James
J. O'Donnell - Roger Schank - Marc D. Hauser - Timothy Taylor - William
Calvin - Douglas Rushkoff - John McCarthy - Clifford A. Pickover - Derrick
De Kerkhove - Daniel C. Dennett - John Horgan - Alison Gopnik - Stuart A.
Kauffman - Paul Davies - Kevin Kelly
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why is life so full of suffering?"
It is a bit embarrassing to admit a preoccupation with this gigantic old
question, but it is human, I suppose.....[click here]
Randolph M. Nesse is Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology
at the University of Michigan and editor of Evolution and the Capacity for
Commitment.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who am I? What am I?
Perhaps I am this stuff here, i.e., the ordered and chaotic collection of
molecules that comprise my body and brain. ....[click here]
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical
character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the
blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, among other major inventions, and
author of The Age of Spiritual Machines.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is value?"
Oscar Wilde once said that "A fool is someone who knows the price of
everything and the value of nothing"....[click here]
J. Doyne Farmer , one of the pioneers of what has come to be called chaos
theory, is McKinsey Professor, Sante Fe, Institute, and the co-founder and
former co-president of Prediction Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Are we ever going to be humble enough to assume that we are mere animals,
like crabs, penguins, and chimpanzees, and not the chosen protégés of this
or that God?"
Recent events around the world remind us of historical phenomena observed
since the dawn of civilizations: wars, genocides, oppression, conquests,
occupations, and, of course, killings in the name of some God.....[click
here]
Rafael Núñez is professor of Cognitive Science at the University of
California at San Diego, and author of Where Mathematics Comes From (with
George Lakoff).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Are space and time fundamental concepts or are they approximations to
other, more subtle, ideas that still await our discovery?"
It is hard to conceive of a universe that does not exist in space and
persist through time: space and time seem to be the basic framework of the
cosmos. ....[more]
Brian Greene is a professor of physics and of mathematics at Columbia
University and author of The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden
Dimensions, and the Quest for an Ultimate Theory.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is it possible to know what is good and what is evil?"
For the past four centuries, the attempt to answer this question has been
the main driving force of world history - not only the history of ideas,
but also the history of politics and collective violence. This is true for
two reasons: ....[more]
James Gilligan has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at
the Harvard Medical School since 1966. He is the author of Violence:
Reflections on a National Epidemic.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
" Does life on Earth have a future?"
By "life on Earth" I mean the variety of life, the multitude of species,
the dazzling array of ecosystems they create from the permanent snow
fields of the Himalayas to steamy jungles, and coral reefs, and the
variety of including ourselves including and the 6000+ languages we speak
and our cultures that they largely define. ....[more]
Stuart Pimm is Professor of Conservation Biology at Columbia University in
New Yorkand author of The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the
Earth.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is the PC desktop really dead?"
Much ado has been made lately over the problems of the PC "desktop
metaphor," the system of folders and icons included in Macintosh and
Windows PCs....[more]
Mark Hurst is the founder of Creative Good, Inc., a leading user
experience consulting firm.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Will unification ever come to a stop?"
Unification of opposites is an underlying theme in the development of
humanity. ....[more]
Anton Zeilinger is a Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna
whose work in quantum teleportation has received worldwide attention.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Have the airplane and the computer changed the architecture of the mind?
And is that why autism is on the increase?"
People with autism can be affected to varying degrees, but their principal
mental characteristics are that they have difficulty in fitting in with
other people or figuring out people's feelings and perspectives (a
disability) whilst they have a natural flair for analysing the non-social
world in fine detail, and in understanding non-social systems (a talent).
....[more]
Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Co
Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University and author
of Autism: The Facts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do we decorate?"
Why do all the human cultures that we know of decorate things? Why not
just leave them alone? Why put in all that extra, and apparently
non-functional, energy? ....[more]
Brian Eno, an artist, makes and produces records. He has produced U2
("including this year's award- winning "All That You Can't Leave Behind"),
Talking Heads and Devo and collaborated with David Bowie, John Cale, and
Laurie Anderson.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do people like music?"
People from every culture like listening to some kind of music, so it
seems that it is something that is wired into us. Is there an evolutionary
advantage to liking music?....[more]
W. Daniel Hillis is Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied
Minds, Inc., a research and development company and author of The Pattern
on the Stone.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How much can we expect the social sciences to help build a just and free
society?"
Marx and Engels argued for "scientific socialism", that is, for a
political movement that would bring about a just and free society with the
help of science. ....[more]
Dan Sperber is a social and cognitive scientist at the French Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris and author, with
Deirdre Wilson, of Relevance: Communication and Cognition.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is the difference between the sigmoidoscope and the sigmundoscope?
Less cryptically, how is extensional mathematical logic different from
everyday narrative logic?"
It differs in countless ways, most of them poorly understood.....[more]
John Allen Paulos is Professor of mathematics at Temple University adjunct
professor of journalism at Columbia University, and author Once Upon a
Number.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do people kill other people?"
No offense against another human being inflicts greater costs than
killing....[[more]
David M. Buss is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas,
Austin, and author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the
Mind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why bother? Or: Why do we go further and explore new stuff?"
Many human skills enable an individual to do something with less
physiological effort....[more]
Tor Nørretranders is a science writer, consultant, lecturer and organizer
based in Copenhagen, Denmark and author of The User Illusion: Cutting
Consciousness Down to Size.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Are space, time, and all other physical quantities only relational?"
What do we actually know about the physical world after the scientific
revolution of the last century? ....[more]
Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist at the Centre de Physique
Theorique in Marseille, France.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is there, or should we expect, a fracture in the logical basis on which
people now look for a description of the nexus between particle physics
and cosmology?"
Since the 1930s, we have had to live with Godel's theorem — the apparently
unshaken proof by the logician Kurt Godel that there can be no system of
mathematical logic that is at once consistent (or free from
contradictions) and complete (in the sense of being
comprehensive)....[more]
Sir John Maddox who recently retired having served 23 years as the editor
of Nature, is a trained physicist, and author of What Remains to be
Discovered: The Agenda for Science in the Next Century.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What Is Real?"
The question of what is "real," defined here as the physical universe,
acquires special subtlety from the perspective of brain and cognitive
science....[more]
Robert R. Provine is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the
University of Maryland and author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Can democracy survive complexity?"
As any parent of adolescents has probably experienced, life has become
sufficiently complex that emotional maturity by the end of teen years is a
thing of the distant past....[more]
Stephen H. Schneider is Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at
Stanford University and author of Laboratory Earth.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How different could minds be?"
Plato believed that human knowledge was inborn. Kant and Peirce agreed
that much of knowledge had to exist prior to birth or it would be
impossible to understand or learn anything....[more]
Richard Nisbett is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Culture
and Cognition Program at the University and author numerous books.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The hows and whys of what led to us"
There are, it seems to me, just two fundamental scientific questions that,
for very different reasons, we may have no possibility of answering with
any certainty.....[more]
Keith Devlin, mathematician, is a Senior Researcher at Stanford
University, and author ot The Math Gene.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards, and just go ahead
and do what you know is right?"
In the world we live in, mathematicians and investors have become ever
better at calculating risks, assessing outcomes, laying out possible
scenarios.....[more]
Esther Dyson is president of EDventure Holdings and editor of the computer
industry newsletter, Release 1.0, and author of the book, Release 2.1: A
Design for Living in the Digital Age.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In view of globalization, which is here to stay, and the events of
September 11and its aftermath, which were a shock to most of us, do we
need to make fundamental changes in our educational goals and methods?"
Precollegiate education has been remarkably consistent over the decades:
literacy in the primary years, initial mastery of a few major subject
areas (math, science, history, language, perhaps in the arts) in middle
and secondary school....[more]
Howard Gardner is Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard
University at the co-author (with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William
Damon) of Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is it conceivable that the standard curriculum in science and math,
crafted in 1893, will still be maintained in the 26,000 high schools of
this great nation?"
The world is caught up in a paroxysm of change.....[more]
Leon M. Lederman, the director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory, has received the Wolf Prize in Physics, and the Nobel Prize in
Physics. He is the author (with Dick Teresi) of The God Particle.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When will our souls be upgraded?"
If, as Harold Bloom puts it, Shakespeare invented the modern soul, if we
are the way we are because Shakespeare existed as a writer, the question
arises, whether this historic progression has come to an end and will soon
be replaced by a new version of 21st century souls. ....[more]
Frank Schirrmacher is Publisher, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and author
of Die Darwin AG.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is the missing ingredient — not genes, not upbringing — that shapes
the mind?"
We know that genes play an important role in the shaping of our
personality and intellects....[more]
Steven Pinker, research psychologist, is professor in the Department of
Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and author of Words and Rules.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What, me worry?"
This question, which has been asked by many, is now usually attributed to
Alfred E. Newman, the poster boy of Mad Magazine....[more]
Samuel Barondes is a professor and director of the Center for Neurobiology
and Psychiatry at the UC-San Francisco and author of Mood Genes: Hunting
for Origins of Mania and Depression.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why is religion so important to most Americans and so trivial to most
intellectuals?"
Is it just a matter of IQ? (Though I thought intellectuals no longer
believed in IQ)....[more]
David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale, chief
scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies and author of Drawiing a Life:
Surviving the Unabomber.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Can there be a science of human potential and the good life?"
Despite monumental advances in brain and behavioral sciences, nothing like
a science of human potential and the good life has yet emerged....[more]
Steven R. Quartz is Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is there Progress?"
I work on the question of evolution, not as it exists in Nature, but as a
formal system which enables open-ended learning....[more]
Jordan B. Pollack is a computer science and complex systems professor at
Brandeis University who works on AI, Artificial Life, Neural Networks,
Evolution, Dynamical Systems, Games, Robotics, Machine Learning, and
Educational Technology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is God nothing more than a sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial
intelligence?"
This question is based on what I call, tongue in cheek, "Shermer's Last
Law," that any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is
indistinguishable from God....[more]
Michael Shermer is the founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and the
author of The Borderlands of Science.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Can wealth be distributed?"
Even with productivity showing startling increases as a consequence of new
information technologies everything suggests that the gap between rich and
poor is growing dramatically globally and even beginning to increase again
in the U.S. So much for trickle down economics.....[more]
John Markoff covers the computer industry and technology for The New York
Times and is co-author of Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's
Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is the universe a quantum computer?"
The universe is quantum mechanical, and its dynamics can be simulated
precisely and efficiently using quantum information processing....[more]
Seth Lloyd is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and
a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do we continue to act as if the universe were constructed from nouns
linked by verbs, when we know it is really constructed from verbs linked
by nouns?"
My question is to do with materialism, reductionism and the inertia of
intellectual progress....[more]
Steve Grand is an aritifical life researcher and creator of Lucy, a robot
babay orangutan. He is the author of Creation: Life and How to Make It.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How can a small number of genes build a complex mental machine?"
John McCarthy and I are from different generations (in the semester before
McCarthy invented Lisp, he taught my dad FORTRAN, using punch cards on an
old IBM) but our questions are nearly the same. McCarthy asks "how are
behaviors encoded in DNA"?...[more]
Response to Paul Davies' reply to John McCarthy
It is hard indeed to imagine that nature would endow an organism with
anything as detailed as The Cambridge Star Atlas.....[more]
Gary F. Marcus is a cognitive scientist at New York University and author
of The Algebraic Mind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is the pertinent question?"
Surely, the right question it is not what was wrong before Sept.11th.
....[more]
Eduardo Punset is Director and Producer of "Networks," a weekly programme
of Spanish public television on Science and author of A Field Guide to
Survive in the XXI st Century.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do wormholes exist?"
Two startling ideas about wholly different classes of objects emerged from
general relativity: black holes and wormholes. ....[more]
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University
of California, Irvine. His most recent nonfiction is Deep Time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why is beauty making a comeback now?"
My hypothesis is that the modernist/post-modernist idea that beauty is a
social construct (with no deep bedrock in reality) is dead.....[more]
Joel Garreau is the cultural revolution correspondent of The Washington
Post and author of Edge City.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How are moral assertions connected with the world of facts?"
Unlike many ancient philosophical problems, this one has, paradoxically,
been made both more urgent and less tractable by the gradual triumph of
scientific rationality. ....[more]
David Deutsch, a physicist, is a member of the Centre for Quantum
Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University, and author of
The Fabric of Reality.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How different could life have been?"
Physicists, including several in this group, are fond of asking, “What if
the universe had been different?” ....[more]
Reply to Paul Davies’s response to John McCarthy
Paul Davies notes that some night-migrating birds navigate by the stars,
and asks whether avian DNA contains a map of the sky.....[more]
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi
Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University. He is the
author of Unweaving the Rainbow.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Can we ever escape our past, or are we doomed to a future of biobabble?"
In mid-November 1999, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead published a
commentary on the candidacy of Al Gore, and in it she gave us a new word.
....[more]
Milford H. Wolpoff is Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Michigan and author (with Rachel Caspari) of Race and Human Evolution: A
Fatal Attraction.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Are the laws of nature a form of computer code that needs and uses error
correction?"
...[more]
John D. Barrow is Research Professor of Mathematical Sciences, University
of Cambridge and author of Between Inner Space and Outer Space.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do we fear the wrong things?"
A mountain of research shows that our fears modestly correlate with
reality. ....[more]
David G. Myers is a social psychologist David G. Myers at Hope College
(Michigan) and author of The Pursuit of Happiness.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Would an extra-terrestrial civilization develop the same mathematics as
ours? If not, how could theirs possibly be different?"
In writing my next book, about maths, I have been led to ponder this
question by the fact that there are philosophers, and a few
mathematicians, who believe that it is conceivable that there could be
intelligences with a fully developed mathematics that does not, for
example, recognize the integers or the primes, let alone Fermat's Last
Theorem or the Riemann Hypothesis.....[more]
Karl Sabbagh is a writer and television producer and author of A Rum
Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How will computation and communication change our everyday lives, again?"
The actual day to day things that we do have been changed drastically for
many people in the world over the last twenty years by the arrival of
personal computers. ....[more]
Rodney Brooks is Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
and Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief
Technical Officer of IS Robotics,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How does being able to learn about a changing world endow our minds with
expectations, imagination, creativity, and the ability to perceive
illusions?"
When you open your eyes in the morning, you usually see what you expect to
see. ....[more]
Stephen Grossberg is a Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems,
Mathematics, Psychology, and Engineering at Boston University.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When will we emerge from the quantum tunnel of obscurity?"
Can contradictory things happen at the same time?....[more]
Antony Valentini is a theoretical physicist at Imperial College in London.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is the universe really expanding? Or: Did Einstein get it exactly right?"
As I prepare to head for Cambridge (the Brits' one) for the conference to
mark Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday, I know that the suggestion I am just
about to make will strike the great and the good who are assembling for
the event as my scientific suicide note. ....[more]
Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist and author of The
End of Time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Could our lack of theoretical insight in some of the most basic questions
in biology in general, and consciousness in particular, be related to us
having missed a third aspect of reality, which upon discovery will be seen
to always have been there, equally ordinary as space and time, but so far
somehow overlooked in scientific descriptions?
Is the arena of physics, constructed out of space and time with
matter/energy tightly interwoven with space and time, sufficient to fully
describe all of our material world? ....[more]
Piet Hut, professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study,
in Princeton, is involved in the project of building GRAPEs, the world's
fastest special-purpose computers,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Davies Responds
Response to John McCarthy:
John McCarthy asks how animal behavior is encoded in DNA. ....[more]
Response to Martin Rees's response to my question:
Sir Martin Rees has eloquently outlined the key issues concerning the
status of multiverse theories.....[more]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why is it only amongst adults in the Western world that has tradition been
so insistently and constantly challenged by the raising of Edge questions?
Why do we ask Edge questions?....[more]
John R. Skoyles is a researcher in the evolution of human intelligence in
the light of recent discoveries about the brain, who, while a first-year
student at LSE, published a theory of the origins of Western Civilization
in Nature.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why doesn't conservation click?"
Three decades ago I began my first career working on a British television
series called "Survival". ....[more]
Delta Willis has searched for fossils alongside Meave and Richard Leakey,
profiled physicists and paleontologists who draw inspiration from nature,
and serves as chief contributor to the Fodor's Guide to Kenya & Tanzania.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is time, and what is the right language to describe change, in a
closed system like the universe, which contains all of its observers?"
This is, I believe, the key question on which the quantum theory of
gravity and our understanding of cosmology, depends. ....[more]
Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist, is a founding member and research
physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo Canada author of Three
Roads to Quantum Gravity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What comes after Science? When?"
Questions? I don't ask questions. ....[more]
Henry Warwick is an artist, composer, and scientist.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is the nature of fads, fashions, crazes, and financial manias? Do
they share a structure that can in turn be found at the core of more
substantial changes in a culture? In other words, is there an engine of
change to be found in the simple fad that can explain and possibly predict
or accelerate broader changes that we regard as less trivial than "mere"
fads? And more importantly, can we quantify the workings of this engine if
we decide that it exists?"
I have shelves of books and papers by smart people who have brushed up
against the edge of this question but who have seldom attacked it head
on.....[more]
Alan Alda, an actor, writer and director, is currently playing Richard
Feynman in the stage play QED at Lincoln Center in New York.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If the medium is indeed the message, does (or can) the message define the
medium?"
(As a poet, I don't think I need to explicate the question.) .....[more]
Gerd Stern is a poet, media artist and cheese maven and the author of an
oral history From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist
1948-1978.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Will humankind be able to use its growing self-knowledge to overcome the
biologically programmed instincts that could otherwise destroy it?"
I am intrigued by the interplay between the following: 1) People always
want a little bit more than they have.....[more]
Chris Anderson is the incoming Chairman and Host of the TED Conference
(Technology, Education, Design) held each February in Monterey, California
and formerly a magazine publisher (Future Publishing).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is the nature of learning?"
That question strikes me as being as infinitely perplexing and personal
as, What's the meaning of life?....[more]
Todd Siler is the founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications and
author of Think Like A Genius.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Where Are They?"
When Enrico Fermi asked his famous question (now known as the Fermi
Paradox) more than fifty years ago — if there is advanced extraterrestrial
life, intelligence, and technology, why don't we see unmistakable evidence
of it? — it was the era of 60-megaton atmospheric bomb tests and broadcast
television, with unlimited fusion power in plain sight. ....[more]
George Dyson is a historian among futurists and the author of Darwin Among
the Machines.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How can we understand the fact that such complex and precise mathematical
relations inhere in nature?"
Of course this is one of the oldest philosophical questions in science but
still one of the most mysterious.....[more]
Margaret Wertheim is a science writer and commentator and the author of
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the
Internet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How will people think about the soul?"
Cognitive scientists believe that emotions, memories, and consciousness
are the result of physical processes. ....[more]
Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at Yale and author of How Children
Learn the Meanings of Words (Learning, Development, and Conceptual
Change).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many Universes?"
We do not know whether there are other universes. ....[more]
Sir Martin Rees, a cosmologist, is Royal Society Professor at Kings
College, Cambridge. He directs a research program at Cambridge's Institute
of Astronomy. His most recent book is Our Cosmic Habitat.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do people — even identical twins — differ from one another in
personality?"
This question needs to be asked because of the widely held conviction that
we already know the answer to it. ....[more]
Judith Rich Harris is a developmental psychologist and author of The
Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What makes a genius, and how can we have more of them?"
As any software developer will tell you, one great programmer is easily
worth ten average ones....[more]
Howard Morgan is Vice-Chairman, Idealab.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why Sleep?"
We need to sleep every day. Why do we spend a third of our lives in a
dormant state? ....[more]
Terrence Sejnowski, a computational neurobiologist and Professor at the
Salk Institute for Biological Studies, is a coauthor of Thalamocortical
Assemblies: How Ion Channels, Single Neurons and Large-Scale Networks
Organize Sleep Oscillations.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"To be or not to be?"
Old questions don't go away (at least while they remain unanswered).
....[more]
Nicholas Humhprey is a theoretical psychologist at the London School of
Economics, and author of Leaps of Faith.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is the relationship between being alive and having a mind?"
Last year, Steven Spielberg directed a film, based upon a Stanley Kubrick
project, entitled "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". ....[more]
Todd E. Feinberg, MD is Chief, Yarmon Neurobehavior and Alzheimer's
Disease Center, Beth Israel Medical Center.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At what age should women say, 'No,' to first-time pregnancy?"
Scientific advances now make it possible for a woman past normal
child-bearing years to bear a child. ....[more]
Sylvia Paull is the founder of Gracenet (www.gracenet.net).
------------------------------------------------------------------------"Wha
t
are minds, that they are both essentially mental yet inextricably
intertwined with body (and world)?"
We thought we had this one nailed. Believing (rightly) that the physical
world is all there is, the sciences of the mind re-invented thought and
reason (and feeling) as information-processing events in the human brain.
....[more]
Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the
University of Sussex, UK and the author of Being There: Putting Brain,
Body and World Together Again.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is humanity in the midst of a cognitive 'Fourth-Transition?' Or, why
doesn't the Encyclopedia Brittanica matter any more?"
It feels to me like something very important is going on. ....[more]
Mark Stahlman, a venture capitalist who has been focused on next
generation computer/networking platforms, is co-founder the Newmedia
Laboratory, NYNMA.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What's the neurobiology of doing good and being good?"
I've spent most of my career as a neurobiologist working on an area of the
brain called the hippocampus. ....[more]
Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford
University and author of A Primate's Memoir.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do we want to live in one world, or two?"
One of the great achievements of recent history has been a dramatic
reduction in absolute poverty in the world. ....[more]
Lance Knobel is Adviser, Prime Minister's Forward Strategy Unit, London,
and the former head of the program of the World Economic Forums' Annual
meeting in Davos.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why am I me?"
This question was asked by my eight-year-old grandson George. In eight
letters it summarizes the conundrum of personal existence in an impersonal
universe.....[more]
Freeman Dyson is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study
and author of The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How much can we handle?"
We've got fundamental scientific theories (such as quantum theory and
relativity) that test out superbly, even if we don't quite know how they
all fit into a whole, but we're hung up trying to understand complicated
phenomena, like living things. How much complexity can we
handle?....[more]
Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and musician, is currently the lead
scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Was there any choice in the creation of the Universe?"
Here I paraphrase Einstein's famous question: "Did God have any choice in
the creation of the Universe". ....[more]
Lawrence Krauss is Professor of Physics at Case Western Reserve University
and the author of Atom.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is technology going to 'wake up' or 'come alive' anytime in the future?"
Bill Joy, the prominent computer scientist, argued in a Wired article last
year that "the future doesn't need us" because other creatures, artificial
or just post-human, are going to take over the world in the 21st century.
....[more]
Robert Aunger is an evolutionary theorist and editor of Darwinizing
Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do the benefits accruing to humankind (leaving aside questions of
afterlife) from the belief and practice of organized religions outweigh
the costs?"
Given the political sensitivities of the topic, it is hard to imagine that
a suitably rigorous attempt to answer this question could be organized or
its results published and discussed soberly, but it is striking that there
is no serious basis on which to conduct such a conversation.....[more]
James J. O'Donnell is Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost at
UPenn and author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What does it mean to have an educated mind in the 21st century?"
While education is on every politician's agenda as an item of serious
importance, it is astonishing that the notion of what it means to be
educated never seems to come up.....[more]
Roger Schank is Distinguished Career Professor, School of Computer
Science, Carnegie-Mellon University and author of Virtual Learning: A
Revolutionary Approach to Building a Highly Skilled Workforce.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How will the sciences of the mind constrain our theories and policies of
education?"
In several recent meetings that I have attended, I have been overwhelmed
by the rift between what the sciences of mind, brain and behavior have
uncovered over the past decade, and both how and what science educators
teach.....[more]
Marc D. Hauser is an evolutionary psychologist, a professor at Harvard
University and author of Wild Minds: What AnimalsThink.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Is morality relative or absolute?"
Humans spread out from a common origin into many different global
environments....[more]
Timothy Taylor is an archaeologist at University of Bradford, UK, and
author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual
Culture.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Eureka: What makes coherence so important to us?"
When something is missing, it bothers us that things don't hang
together.....[more]
William Calvin is a theoretical neurobiologist at the University of
Washington and author of How Brains Think.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do we tell stories?"
Why a story?....[more]
Douglas Rushkoff is a Professor of Media Culture at New York University's
Interactive Telecommu-nications Program and author of Coercion: Why We
Listen to What "They" Say.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How are behaviors encoded in DNA?"
Many animals have quite substantial hereditary behavior. Moreover, these
behaviors are subject to evolution on fairly short time scales, so they
probably have straightforward DNA encodings on which mutations can act.
Mostly the behaviors seem to be sequences of actions, but perhaps there
are some of the form "do X until Y is true".....[more]
John McCarthy is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Would you choose universe Omega or Upsilon?"
Consider two universes.....[more]
Clifford A. Pickover is a researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center
and author of The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'To be or not to be' remains the question"
The fact is that is "To be or not to be" is both a simple, perhaps the
simplest, and a complex question, the hardest to sustain, let alone to
ask.....[more]
Derrick de Kerckhove is Director of the McLuhan Program at the University
of Toronto and author of Connected Intelligence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What kind of system of 'coding' of semantic information does the brain
use?"
My question now is actually a version of the question I was asking myself
in the first year, and I must confess that I've had very little time to
address it properly in the intervening years, since I've been preoccupied
with other, more tractable issues. ....[more]
Daniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts
University and author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Do we want the God machine?"
The God machine is the name that journalists have given to a device
invented by the Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger.....[more]
John Horgan is a freelance writer and author of The Undiscovered Mind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why do we ask questions?"
We all take for granted the fact that human beings ask questions and seek
explanations, and that the questions they ask go far beyond their
immediate practical concerns. ....[more]
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at the University of California
at Berkeley and coauthor of The Scientist In The Crib.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What must a physical system be to be able to act on its own behalf?"
In or ordinary life, we ascribe action and doing to other humans, and
lower organisms, even bacteria swimming up a glucose gradient to get food.
....[more]
Stuart A. Kauffman, an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UPenn, is a
theoretical biologist and author of Investigations.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Universe or multiverse, that is the question?"
Of late, it is fashionable among leading physicists and cosmologists to
suppose that alongside the physical world we see lies a stupendous array
of alternative realities, some resembling our universe, others very
different.....[more]
Paul Davies, a physicist, writer and broadcaster, now based in South
Australia, is author of How to Build a Time Machine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What is your heresy?"
I've noticed that the more scientifically educated a person is, the more
likely they will harbor a quiet heresy. ....[more]
Kevin Kelly is Editor-At-Large for Wired Magazine and author of New Rules
for the New Economy.
--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
EDGE
John Brockman, Publisher & Editor
Copyright © 2002 by Edge Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Published by Edge Foundation, Inc.,
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