NON- FICTION
Know This: Today’s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments edited by JOHN BROCKMAN
THE EDGE. org is the website of the Edge Foundation, which was launched in 1996 as the online version of “The Reality Club”, an association of science and technology intellectuals who met from 1981 to 1996 to have their ideas challenged by others in the group.
The driving force of Edge is a Boston literary agent and author with a scientific bent, John Brockman. But it takes its name from the motto of the Reality Club, inspired by the late artist-philosopher James Lee Byars: “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.”
Most years, Brockman comes out with an anthology of essays by the world’s finest thinkers about a specific scientific theme – the aim being to examine it from as many angles as possible. Of course, it’s also a lovely excuse to rummage around inside the minds of some of the best and brightest scholars around today and to reinforce Brockman’s unapologetic faith in Enlightenment culture.
“The gifts of progress we have enjoyed are the result of institutions and norms that have been entrenched in the last two centurie: reason, science, technology, education, expertise, democracy, regulated markets and a moral commitment to human rights and human flourishing,” he writes. While the world might fall short of a utopia, the norms and institutions of modernity “have put us on a good track.
The past few years has seen Brockman pose questions about hidden threats in What Should We Be Worried About? and scientific theories that are blocking progress in This Idea Must Die and What to Think About Machines That Think.
This year’s poser – “What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news?” – resulted in 197 responses displaying an exhilarating variety of topic and author speciality. Most of the contributors are scientists but there are also psychologists, economists, sociologists, linguists, artists, poets, musicians and philosophers.
The responses are organised by topic and cover global warming and climate change; dark matter, dark energy and quantum gravity; gene editing; what it will mean to be human in a world dominated by Big Data and artificial intelligence; and the mind-bending number of planets out there orbiting distant stars.
Contributors form a dazzling constellation in themselves, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond on the best way to understand complex problems; Seven Brief Lessons on Physics author Carlo Rovelli on the mystery of black holes; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the quantification of human progress; Harvard physicist Lisa Randall on the true measure of breakthrough discoveries; Nobel Prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczec on why the 21st century will be shaped by our mastery of the laws of matter, and music legend Peter Gabriel on tearing down the barriers between imagination and reality.
The short essays are conveniently bite-sized, making this a volume to keep by your side to dip into again and again – a great travel or nightstand companion or an aide memoire for further study.