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"Edge.org...a
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SCIENCE
JOURNAL
By SHARON BEGLEY
December 27, 2002
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Dear
W: Scientists Offer
President Advice on Policy
DEAR READER,
Congratulations! President George W. Bush is considering asking
you to serve as his science adviser. He asks that you write
him a memo addressing, "What are the pressing scientific
issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice
on how I can begin to deal with them?"
So begins this year's online question from Edge, an e-salon
of leading scientists and members of the "Third Culture"
(in answer to C.P. Snow's scientists vs. humanists)...
This year—with smallpox vaccination, bioterror, stem-cell
research, climate change, energy policy and missile defense
dominating news—the annual question eschews intellectual
posturing and gets down to practicalities... ...You
can improve your own science education at www.edge.org,
where the Edge memos will be available January 6.
[Click
here for article—subscription required]
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THE
YEAR IN IN IDEAS—2002
Scanner
Photography
By Paul Tough
December
15, 2002
As
the moving lens slides along the surface of one of [Katinka]
Matson's tulips, it is able to view the flower from all sides;
her floral pictures are so intense that looking at them, you
almost get the feeling that you are able to peer around the
flowers themselves. Another advantage: the distortion that
a single lens inevitably creates disappears—details at
the corners of these pictures are as sharp and clear as those
at the center.
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New
WHICH
UNIVERSE WOULD YOU LIKE?
Five stars of American science meet in Connecticut to explain
first and last things.
By Jordan Mejias
August 28, 2002
They
begin a free-floating debate, which drives them back and forth
across the universe. Guth encourages the exploration of black
holes, not to be confused with cosmic wormholes, which Kurzweil—just
like the heroes of Star Trek—wants to use as a shortcut
for his intergalactic excursions and as a means of overtaking
light. Steinhardt suggests that we should realize that we are
not familiar with most of what the cosmos consists of and do
not understand its greatest force, dark matter. Understand?
There is no such thing as a rational process, Minsky objects;
it is simply a myth. In his cosmos, emotion is a word we use
to circumscribe another form of our thinking that we cannot
yet conceive of. Emotion, Kurzweil interrupts, is a highly intelligent
form of thinking. "We have a dinner reservation at a nearby
country restaurant," says Brockman in an emotionally neutral
tone.
[English
Translation | Original
German text]
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WEEK
IN REVIEW
New
WHAT'S
SO NEW IN A NEWFANGLED SCIENCE?
By George Johnson
Sunday, June 16, 2002
.....Interesting
ideas rarely spring up in isolation. The vision Dr. Wolfram
has so meticulously laid out in such an arresting manner is
part of a movement some call digital physics or digital philosophy
— a worldview that has been slowly developing for 20
years.
Just last week, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology named Seth Lloyd published a paper in Physical
Review Letters estimating how many calculations the universe
could have performed since the Big Bang — 10120 operations
on 1090 bits of data, putting the mightiest supercomputer
to shame. This grand computation essentially consists of subatomic
particles ricocheting off one another and "calculating"
where to go.
As the researcher Tommaso Toffoli mused back in 1984, "In
a sense, nature has been continually computing the `next state'
of the universe for billions of years; all we have to do —
and, actually, all we can do — is `hitch a ride' on this
huge ongoing computation."
This may seem like an odd way to think about cosmology. But
some scientists find it no weirder than imagining that particles
dutifully obey ethereal equations expressing the laws of physics.
Last year Dr. Lloyd created a stir on Edge.org,
a Web site devoted to discussions of cutting edge science,
when he proposed "Lloyd's hypothesis": "Everything
that's worth understanding about a complex system can be understood
in terms of how it processes information.".... [New
York Times article]
[George Johnson's
Edge Bio Page]
["Seth
Lloyd: How Fast, How Small, and How Powerful: Moore's Law
and the Ultimate Laptop"]
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ELOQUENT
INTELLECTUALS
By Hubertus Breuer
May 12, 2002
Clever
minds debate there about God and the world: what life is,
what will result from global warming, or what the most recent
discoveries in immunology research tell us. It is almost as
colorful as the days of Louis XVI, when philosophers, writers,
and political thinkers disputed one another in Parisian living
rooms — and prepared the way for revolution.
English
Translation | German
Original
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"The
TED Conference: 3 Days in the Future"
By
Patricia Leigh Brown
February 28, 2002
(free registration required)
MONTEREY, Calif., Feb. 23 — What
preternatural power can prompt Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey Katzenberg,
Richard Dawkins, Neil Simon, Art Buchwald, Frank Gehry and Quincy
Jones to sit for hours in a hot room contemplating the nano-sized
split ends on gecko toes? ...
...Where else but at TED would Mr. Katzenberg, standing Armani-deep
in sawdust with Spirit, his stallion and the namesake of his
new animated film, be upstaged by Rex, a biologically inspired
robot with springy legs and gecko-like feet capable of navigating
the outer reaches of the Amazon — specifically, the leg
of the Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, a longtime Tedster?
It can get deep. Very deep. Steven Pinker, the eminent cognitive
psychologist, found himself deep in conversation with the singer
Naomi Judd about the role of the amygdala, the part of the brain
that colors memory with emotion; something, he aptly noted,
"that would not happen at the meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience
Society."
It happened here one night last week over chicken and polenta
at the annual private dinner, given by the New York literary
agent John Brockman, formerly called the Millionaires' and Billionaires'
Dinner after the rich techies who traditionally flocked to TED.
There were still a few members of that endangered species scattered
about, among them Nathan Myhrvold, the retired Microsoft chief
technology officer, who gave an electrifying discourse at the
1997 TED about dinosaur sex.
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New
Science Observer
"Postcards
from the Edge"
By Michael Szpir
March-April, 2002
"What would happen if you collected some of
the planet’s best minds in a single room and asked them
to share their thoughts? One possible result is manifested in
the virtual salon known as the Edge—www.edge.org—a
Web site that publishes the e-mail exchanges between a coterie
of (mostly) prominent thinkers...The responses are generally
written in an engaging, casual style (perhaps encouraged by
the medium of e-mail), and are often fascinating and thought-provoking....These
are all wonderful, intelligent questions, but what I’d
really like to see is an Internet salon of people who have the
answers. Can that happen?"
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New
WHO
READS WHAT?
Steve Jurvetson, venture capitlist
10.02 - Feb 2002
Edge
— "Awesome indie newsletter with brilliant contributors,
emceed by John Brockman. Monthly. (www.edge.org)."
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New
Vordenker
der "Dritten Kultur": Fragen für das Jahr 2002:
"Wer
Nicht Fragt, Bleibt Dumm"
THOSE
WHO DON'T ASK REMAIN DUMB
The haze of ignorance still has not disappeared: Whoever wants
real answers has to know what he's looking for — A
poll of scientists and artists for the year 2002.
In
a time when culture was still not numbered, the Count of Thüringen
invited his nobles to the "Singers' War at the Wartburg,"
where he asked questions (if we are to believe Richard Wagner)
that would bring glory, the most famous of which queried, "Could
you explain to me the nature of love?" The publisher and
literary agent, John Brockman, who now organizes singers' wars
on the Internet, enjoys latching on to this tradition at the
beginning of every year. (FAZ, January 9, 2001). His
Tannhäuser may be named Steven Pinker, and his Wolfram
von Eschenbach may go by Richard Dawkins, but it would do us
well to trust that they and their compatriots could also turn
out speculation on the count's favorite theme. Brockman's thinkers
of the "Third Culture," whether they, like Dawkins,
study evolutionary biology at Oxford or, like Alan Alda, portray
scientists on Broadway, know no taboos. Everything is permitted,
and nothing is excluded from this intellectual game. But in
the end, as it takes place in its own Wartburg, reached electronically
at www.edge.org, it concerns us and our unexplained and evidently
inexplicable fate. In this new year Brockman himself doesn't
ask, but rather once again facilitates the asking of questions.
The contributions can be found from today onwards on the Internet.
In conjunction with the start of the forum we are printing a
selection of questions and commentary, at times in somewhat
abridged form, in German translation. .... [click
here]
F.A.Z.
—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14.01.2002, Nr. 11 / Seite
38
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