What scientists believe but can't prove . . .
Body&Soul
Dec. 24, 2005

Christmas brings with it the ultimate suspension of disbelief: a virgin birth of the Son of God. And a lack of substantial evidence to back up this claim seems to be no barrier to the belief of millions of Christians.

But when it comes to asking leading lights of science and medicine how they square belief with scientific fact, you might imagine a different story.

Body&Soul asked leading experts in their fields:

"What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it?" The answers reveal unsubstantiated, but nevertheless influential, theories from yodelling ancestors to winning formulas for artistic achievement. Belief appears tomotivate even the most rigorously scientific minds. It stimulates and challenges, it tricks us into holding things to be true against our better judgment, and, like scepticism — its opposite — it serves a function in science that is playful as well as thought-provoking.

Tasty reads from the newsstand
John Sakamoto
Dec. 18, 2005

SEED December/January Science factions: The flood of "year in review" round-ups about to wash over us could do worse than take a cue from this penetrating recap, which has the smarts to set its individual ideas within the context of one Big Idea, in this case, the "Third Culture."

John Brockman, editor of the fascinating website edge.org, explains it like this: "The third culture 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."

Circling around that intersection of science and philosophy are ideas as disparate as star athletes on drugs, Africa as an incipient centre for scientific research, race-based medicine, and the death throes of the oil economy. Amen.

We feel your pain... and your happiness too
The human brain's source of empathy may also play a role in autism
By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff | December 12, 2005

...One report, by the prominent neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego, even suggested that mirror neurons could be involved when people understand metaphors.

These are early days for research into mirror neurons, but Ramachandran predicted in a 2000 essay (available online at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html) that they ''will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."

They could even help explain how language emerged in early humans, he argued in the essay. ...

Seebach: It might just be for the best if we read too much into our lives
Linda Seebach
December 10, 2005

Daniel Gilbert, in an essay The Vagaries of Religious Experience posted at edge.org, says, "things can be viewed in many ways, but human brains like the most rewarding view and thus they search for and hold on to that view whenever they can." He is writing primarily about religious belief, but the observation is broader.

For instance, he says, "a significant portion of those who survive major traumas not only do well, but claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience."

Science and nature
The meaning of life
Asking 100 of the world's great thinkers to answer the same big question proves a fascinating exercise. And, yes, aliens are involved
Tim Adams
Sunday December 11, 2005 — Print Edition

What We Believe by Cannot Prove
edited by John Brockman
The Free Press £9.99, pp266

Brockman has set up a kind of global online Royal Society, called the Edge. The Edge promotes what he calls the Third Culture, a marriage of science and philosophy and even poetry, an alternative to CP Snow. This cross-fertilising club, the most rarefied of chat-rooms, has its premises on his website www.edge.org, which presents monthly interviews and debates with many of the world's foremost thinkers.

TRIBUNA: JOHN BROCKMAN
La tercera cultura en Kosmopolis
John Brockman
EL PAÍS - 05-12-2005

In terms of science, the third culture is front and center: geneticist J. Craig Venter is attempting to create synthetic genes as an answer to our energy needs; biologist Robert Trivers is exploring the evolutionary basis for deceit and self-deception in human nature; biologist Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the sheep, is using nuclear transfer to produce embryonic stem cells for research purposes and perhaps eventually as cures for disease; cosmologist Lee Smolin researches the Darwinian evolution of universes; quantum physicist Seth Lloyd is attempting to build quantum computers; psychologist Marc D. Hauser is examining our moral minds; and computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are radically altering both the way we search for information, as well as the way we think.

Brockman: "Hoy la cultura es la ciencia, los intelectuales de letras estan desfasados"
Justo Barranco — 05/12/2005 — Barcelona

"The thinkers of the third culture are the new public intellectuals" as "science is the only news"... "Nobody voted the electricity, the Internet, the birth control pill, or for fire. "The great inventions that change everything involves technology based on science "... "It is critical to participate in the discussion of such questions today as the culture is science."

Las nuevas lecturas del 'Quijote' copan los actos de Kosmopolis
Israel Punzano — Barcelona
EL PAÍS - Cultura - 04-12-2005

Cervantes was not the the only protagonist of the second day of Kosmopolis. Also debated was the influence of Darwin's theory of the natural selection in the advances of diverse scientific disciplines, that include evolutionary biology to neuroscience to cosmology. In this colloquy, which also covered the future of the humanism, were the cosmologist Lee Smolin, the biologist Robert Trivers and the neurocientist Marc Hauser. The presentation of the event was Eduard Punset and the moderator was John Brockman, who is know for spreading scientific publications. Smolin emphasized the importance of the investigations of Darwin in the later development of Einstein's theory of the relativity and wondered if we were prepared to accept a world without absolute laws, where everything changes. Hauser pointed out that the revolution of Darwin's revolution was also about morality, as it counters the rationality of Kant and the predominance of emotions in Hume.

CULTURA
Kosmopolis, literatura a la ultima
Eva Belmonte
December 3, 2005

Kosmopolis 2005. Celebration of International of Literature in the Center of Contemporanea Culture of Barcelona (CCCB).

...The relation between science and the third culture was another one of the subjects of debate of this Celebration of Literature. Four personalities of the scientific world participated in the Third Culture event. They are Robert Trivers, John Brockman, Marc Hauser and Lee Smolin. They demonstrated that Literature is not is not just the province of the old school of the humanities culture.

Feuilleton
The First Edge of Computation Science Prize Awarded
Jordan Mejias
24. November 2005

NEW YORK The Edge of Computation Science Prize endowed with a hundred housand dollars goes at David Deutsch, the pioneer of quantum computer research. The honor is aimed at scientists, who advance the "computatrional idea" in the past ten years with their work. Deutsch, born in Israel and trained in Oxford and Cambridge, is credited with the development of a set of algorithms on which the theoretical conditions for a recent revolution in computation are based. The Edge Prize, named after the virtual Internet salon Edge, in which an international avant-garde of researchers and philosophers meet, was organized by John Brockman, the New York Guru of the third culture.

The Prize was initiated by the investor Jeffrey Epstein, an inspired promoter of science, who also donated the Prize money. Among the other nominees were researchers such as Tim Berners Lee, Noam Chomsky, David Gelernter, Larry Smarr and J. Craig Venter.

Random Samples
PEOPLE
Edited by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
SCIENCE VOL 310 25 NOVEMBER 2005

Qubits for dollars. Quantum computing guru David Deutsch is the first recipient of the $95,000 Edge of Computation Science Prize for researchers whose computerrelated ideas touch on broader questions about life, the universe, and everything.

The 52-year-old Deutsch, at the University of Oxford,U.K., provided the first blueprints for a universal quantum computer in 1985, bringing to life an earlier suggestion from physicist Richard Feynman.Quantum computation,which theoretically is exponentially faster than classical computing, could potentially speed up calculations that currently hamper fields such as physics, biology, and nanotechnology.

"Deutsch clearly deserved the prize because of his seminal role in creating and furthering quantum computation", says physicist and computer scientist Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who was a judge. But it's an unusual reward that transcends disciplines; other nominees were from fields of computational biology, software development, and communications, he notes."I'll be very interested to see who wins it next," says Lloyd.

The prize is funded by philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein.

Science & Culture
THE BURZIO FOUNDATION
Bianucci Piero
November 8, 2005

Elsewhere, the debate has moved ahead. John Brockman has launched the idea of "the third culture", a creative interaction of Snow's two cultures. Its scientists, are, in reality "The New Humanists": the cosmologist Alan Guth has rewritten the history of the first moments of the universe; the psychologist Steven Pinker brings to light the biological basis of the human mind; the computer science Jordan Pollack suggests an analogy between the very complex software and living organisms; the mathematician Mandelbrot, with his fractal geometry, interprets phenomena that range from financial markets to the distribution of galaxies. The future of the culture, Brockman says to us, lies in an increased knowledge at the intersection between the frontiers of the scientific disciplines. Filippo Burzio would have agreed with him.

Is science driven by inspired guesswork?
November 1, 2005

History abounds with examples of how instinct, not data, led to discoveries. Even Einstein's theory of relativity had to wait decades for verification, says Ian McEwan

...This collection, mostly written by working scientists, does not represent the antithesis of science. These are not simply the unbuttoned musings of professionals on their day off. The contributions, ranging across many disparate fields, express the spirit of a scientific consciousness at its best - informed guesswork that is open-minded, free-ranging, intellectually playful.

Many replies offer versions of the future in various fields of study. Those readers educated in the humanities, accustomed to the pessimism that is generally supposed to be the mark of a true intellectual, will be struck by the optimistic tone. Some, like the psychologist Martin Seligman, believe we are not rotten to the core. Others even seem to think that the human lot could improve.

Generally evident is an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world which does not have an obvious equivalent in, say, cultural studies. In the arts, perhaps lyric poetry would be a kind of happy parallel.... [click here to continue]

Copyright © Ian McEwan, 2005. Excerpted in The Telegraph from Ian McEwan's introduction to What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, edited by John Brockman (UK: Free Press); (US: HarperCollins, forthcoming).

What scientists believe but cannot yet prove

Time, space, aliens, and God...the views of 18 great minds give their answers

THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE
Testi di Riccardo Oldani
Illustrazioni di Mario Taddei
Ed Eduoardo Zanon/STUDIODDM

Gilbert once asked a religious colleague how he felt about helping to discover that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to acts of God. The reply: "I feel fine. God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."

9/14/2005
CULTURAS — COVER STORY [PDF]

Can a person be considered cultured today with only slight knowledge of fields such as molecular biology, artificial intelligence, chaos theory, fractals, biodiversity, nanotechnology or the human genome?  Can we construct a proposal of universal knowledge without such knowledge?  The integration of  "literary culture" and "scientific culture" is the basis for what some call the "third culture":  a source of metaphors that renews not only the language, but also the conceptual tookit of classic humanism
The New Humanists
SALVADOR PÁNIKER
A polifacética figure
Brockman and the New Intellectuals
Interview
“Science won the battle”
SALVADOR LLOPART
“¿Qué queda del marxismo? ¿Qué queda de Freud? La neurociencia le ha dejado como una superstición del siglo XVIII, de ideas irrelevantes"

[Click here for PDF]

August 28, 2005

Brilliant!
Michael Wright enjoys a eureka moment at the edge of knowledge, as scientists ponder the imponderable

Here is a good-news story: a website that will expand your mind. Edge.org is a forum for science, philosophy and culture that maps the boundary fence over which today’s big thinkers, standing on tiptoes, are peering. Well-known scientists and assorted eggheads can post their opinions on hotly debated topics of the moment — from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, discussing why science has more in common with literature than we might think, to the leading geneticist and human-genome maverick J Craig Venter on why he wants to create life.

Some of the presentations are available to watch as QuickTime movies, if you prefer not to read, and keen thinkers can have a bimonthly e-mail of the latest discussions delivered to their inbox.

Each year, John Brockman, the site’s American editor, also sends a big, open-ended question to all the notable thinkers he knows, then publishes their responses online. This year’s little teaser — “What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?” — prompted 60,000 words in reply, on subjects including particle physics, consciousness, arti- ficial intelligence, global warming and tedious sophistry.

I like the belief of Alun Anderson, the editor-in-chief of New Scientist, that cockroaches are conscious, but cannot comment on the theoretical physicist who denies that black holes destroy information or the computer scientist who believes the continuum hypothesis is false.

Visiting Edge will make pseudo- scientists feel cleverer, and the rest of us more than usually stupid, as we discover, with a jolt of pleasure, how little we really know about the world

Review
April 30, 2005
by Andrew Brown

THE HUSTLER

[Brockman is] an impresario and promoter of scientific ideas who is changing the way that all educated people think about the world. Richard Dawkins, his friend and client, says, "his Edge web site has been well described as an online salon, for scientists and for other intellectuals who care about science. John Brockman may have the most enviable address book in the English-speaking world, and he uses it to promote science and scientific literature in a way that nobody else does."

[...more]

April 4, 2005
by Edoardo Boncinelli

"THE NEW HUMANISTS AND THE FUTURE. BETWEEN SCIENCE AND SCIENCE FICTION."

The main thesis of this book is very interesting and challenging: modern science is blowing fresh air into the contemporary cultural agenda, making a very important contribution, sparkling and polychromatic. (...) A book like this one may be read in many different ways, following different propensities and needs. I was enlightened by the windows it opens on our future.

[From a review in Corriere della Sera of I Nuovi Umanisti (the Italian translation of The New Humanists, Garzanti Libri ) — the best of Edge— now available in a book.]

March 12, 2005
Inserto Tuttolibri: Libri, Recensioni E Presentazioni

URGE UNA "TERZA CULTURA"
Ermanno Bencivenga

In Brockman's intentions, this running fire of a provocative and fascinating thesis should provoke a healthy optimism. The "new humanists" of his book are 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. Their turn then to speak: biologists, computer scientists, geographers, physicists, astronomers, inventors outline in a few pages their own experience and ideas.

The "third culture" invoked by John Brockman is now an absolute necessity. We can't stand unproductive fences and mutual misunderstandings anymore.

[From a review of I Nuovi Umanisti (The New Humanists), Garzanti Libri — the best of Edge — now available in a book.]

Society
LO QUE CREEN LOS CIENTIFICOS
Domingo 20 of February of 2005

JAVIER SAMPEDRO, Madrid

John Brockman, writer, publisher and events manager for the science elite, has asked a hundred researchers the question, What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? The answers are posted at his e-magazine Edge (www.edge.org), and they exert an unquestionable morbid fascination—those are the very ideas that scientists cannot confess in their technical papers.

Spanish original...

January 16 — Domenica
EDGE QUESTION FORUM
Curated by Armando Massarenti

In a front-page article, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy's largest financial daily, announced the "Edge Question Forum" in "Domenica", the weekend Arts & Culture section. The Forum, an ongoing project designed to bring third culture thinking to Italy, features excerpts from the Edge responses in addition to articles solicited rom Italian humanist intellectuals and scientists. [click here]

Bangladesh
SATURDAY FEATURE
Where reasoning loses its power
by Syed Fattahul Alim
Saturday, January 15

A wide cross-section of people from among the intelligentsia responded to this fundamental paradox of life. The cynic and the optimist, the agnostic and the believer, the rationalist and the obscurantist, the scientist and the speculative philosopher, the realist and the idealist-all converge on a critical point in their thought process where reasoning loses its power. Love, existence of God, primacy of the entity called consciousness or life were the issues that came within the purview of the deliberation.

Moralists merely wail, but science gives us answers
By Minnette Minette Marrin
Comment — Sunday, January 9

Scientists, increasingly, have become our public intellectuals, to whom we look for explanations and solutions. These may be partial and imperfect, but they are more satisfactory than the alternatives.

So here is what I believe, without being able to prove it. If there are any answers to life's greatest questions, or if there are other questions that we should be asking instead, it is science that will provide them.