What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty

275 Pages·2006·1.02 MB·English

by  John Brockman

What We Believe
but Cannot Prove
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T ’ L T
ODAY S EADING HINKERS ON
S A C
CIENCE IN THE GE OF ERTAINTY
Edited by John Brockman
TO MY PEERLESS LONGTIME EDITOR,
SARA LIPPINCOTT
Contents
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PREFACE
The Edge Question VII
INTRODUCTION
by Ian McEwan XI
contributors
Martin Rees 1
Ray Kurzweil 3
Douglas Rushkoff 7
Richard Dawkins 9
Chris Anderson 10
Stephen Petranek 11
Carolyn Porco 14
Paul C. W. Davies 17
Kenneth W. Ford 19
Karl Sabbagh 21
J. Craig Venter 23
Leon Lederman 25
Maria Spiropulu 27
Philip W. Anderson 29
Robert M. Sapolsky 30
Jesse Bering 32
Ian McEwan 36
Michael Shermer 37
iv � CONTENTS
Susan Blackmore 40
Randolph M. Nesse, M.D. 42
Tor Nørretranders 45
Scott Atran 47
David G. Myers 48
Jonathan Haidt 50
Sam Harris 51
David Buss 53
Seth Lloyd 55
Denis Dutton 56
Jared Diamond 59
Timothy Taylor 62
Judith Rich Harris 64
John H. McWhorter 68
Elizabeth Spelke 71
Stephen H. Schneider 73
Bruce Sterling 75
Robert Trivers 76
Verena Huber-Dyson 77
Keith Devlin 79
Freeman Dyson 82
Rebecca Goldstein 84
Stuart A. Kauffman 86
Leonard Susskind 88
Donald D. Hoffman 91
Terrence Sejnowski 95
John Horgan 98
Arnold Trehub 100
Ned Block 102
Janna Levin 103
Daniel Gilbert 105
Todd E. Feinberg, M.D. 107
Clifford Pickover 109
CONTENTS � v
Nicholas Humphrey 111
Pamela McCorduck 113
Charles Simonyi 114
Alan Kay 118
Steven Pinker 120
Christine Finn 123
Daniel C. Dennett 124
Alun Anderson 128
Joseph LeDoux 132
George Dyson 136
Alison Gopnik 137
Paul Bloom 140
William H. Calvin 142
Robert R. Provine 145
Stanislas Dehaene 148
Stephen Kosslyn 152
Alex Pentland 154
Irene Pepperberg 158
Howard Gardner 161
David Gelernter 164
Marc D. Hauser 167
Gary Marcus 169
Brian Goodwin 171
Leo M. Chalupa 174
Margaret Wertheim 176
Gino Segrè 179
Haim Harari 181
Donald I. Williamson 184
Ian Wilmut 187
Daniel Goleman 189
Esther Dyson 192
James J. O’Donnell 195
Jean Paul Schmetz 197
vi � CONTENTS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb 199
Simon Baron-Cohen 201
Kevin Kelly 203
Martin Nowak 206
Tom Standage 207
Steven Giddings 209
Alexander Vilenkin 212
Lawrence M. Krauss 214
John D. Barrow 216
Paul J. Steinhardt 217
Lee Smolin 220
Anton Zeilinger 223
Gregory Benford 225
Rudy Rucker 227
Carlo Rovelli 229
Jeffrey Epstein 231
Howard Rheingold 232
Jaron Lanier 235
Marti Hearst 239
Kai Krause 241
Oliver Morton 244
W. Daniel Hillis 246
Martin E. P. Seligman 248
Neil Gershenfeld 250
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 251
About the Author
Books by John Brockman
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
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The Edge Question
In 1991 I suggested the idea of a third culture, which “consists of
those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who,
through their work and expository writing, are taking the place
of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper
meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.” By 1997
the growth of the Internet had allowed implementation of a
home for the third culture on the Web, on a site named Edge
(www.edge.org).
Edge is a celebration of the ideas of the third culture, an
exhibition of this new community of intellectuals in action.
They present their work, their ideas, and comment about the
work and ideas of third culture thinkers. They do so with the
understanding that they are to be challenged. What emerges is
rigorous discussion concerning crucial issues of the digital age in
a highly charged atmosphere where “thinking smart” prevails
over the anesthesiology of wisdom.
The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent
the frontiers in the areas of evolutionary biology, genetics, com-
puter science, neurophysiology, psychology, and physics. Some
of the fundamental questions posed are: Where did the universe
come from? Where did life come from? Where did the mind
viii � PREFACE
come from? Emerging out of the third culture is a new natural
philosophy, new ways of understanding physical systems, new
ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of
our basic assumptions of who we are, of what it means to be
human.
An annual feature of Edge is The World Question Center,
which was introduced in 1971 as a conceptual art project by my
friend and collaborator the late artist James Lee Byars, who died
in Egypt in 1997. I met Byars in 1969, when he sought me out
after the publication of my first book, By the Late John Brock-
man. We were both in the art world, we shared an interest in lan-
guage, in the uses of the interrogative, and in “the Steins”—
Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Frankenstein. Byars
inspired the idea of Edge and is responsible for its motto:
To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out
the most complex and interesting minds, put them in a
room together, and have them ask each other the ques-
tions they are asking themselves.
He believed that to arrive at an axiology of societal knowl-
edge it was pure folly to go to a Widener Library and read 6 mil-
lion books. (He kept only four books at a time in a box in his
minimally furnished room, replacing books as he read them.)
His plan was to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world
together in a room, lock them in, and “have them ask each other
the questions they were asking themselves.” The result was to be
a synthesis of all thought. But between idea and execution are
many pitfalls. Byars identified his 100 most brilliant minds,
called each of them, and asked them what questions they were
asking themselves. The result: seventy people hung up on him.
By 1997 the Internet and e-mail had allowed for a serious