Edge in the News: 2017

Two publishers brought popular scientific books to the market earlier this year, so that the interested layman could simply help to deepen and broaden his knowledge of the current scientific state of affairs. One answers over 100 urgent questions, the other allows nearly 200 scientists to write and explain their most important scientific news item. The questions and the news stories both stem from 2015, but that does not matter. The vast majority has lost nothing to actuality.

Almost daily, newspaper readers get a number of new scientific findings. A remarkable nutritional advice, for example, or a promising medicine, or an ominous event that would point to climate change. For the average newspaper reader, it is impossible to judge whether this is really important, or that the proverbial storm is in a glass of water.

"Scientific pearls" (Know This) wants to offer handles. The composer of the bundle is the American science journalist John Brockman. He is also the administrator of the Edge website, a discussion center for writers, scientists and philosophers. To the most influential scientists and thinkers he has asked the question about what they think is the most interesting and important recent scientific news. 

Every year, since 1998, writer and founder of the site edge.org John Brockman asks dozens of top scientists and different personalities one question. The one in 2014 was like this:  Which idea deserves to disappear? ... [W]e might add to the idea that we should try for a self-sufficient way of life.

Even today, this idea enjoys great popularity among many people, for various reasons. Some believe that self-sufficiency will help them to more freedom and independence from many external influences. Self-sufficiency allows them to cut off from the system and gain, for example, energy or food independence. For others, the idea of ​​self-sufficiency is linked to the belief that interdependence outside of their nation or group is something that is untenable in the long run. And another reason is the belief that increasing our self-sufficiency will help solve many environmental problems.

Few ideas have been scrutinized by people as self-sufficiency. The results of these efforts clearly show that it is a bad and misguided idea that has far more negatives than positive. 

I graduated from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Science and Technology three years ago. I have been a secondary school teacher and have been writing philosophical articles on the Internet. Recently, I was asked to write on the topic of The Third Culture, borrowed from John Brockman's "third culture".

This is the urgent context for Know This. Even as it distills humankind’s capacity for knowledge and unveils learnings of the workings of the universe — from billion-year megatrends to infinitesimal quantum mechanics — it juxtaposes this astonishing progress with humankind’s wilful ignorance about how our actions blight the planet.

[Know This] encapsulates a convincing case for mandatory science literacy and it should be prescribed reading for government cabinets, company boards, and teachers — anyone shaping policies, people’s attitudes, or prioritising and allocating funds for research and development.

As we understand more, it becomes ever clearer that we live in an incredible world. Much of this is made possible by science, and Know This proves there are still more miracles to come.

This week's roundup of books highlights a diverse and exciting array of nonfiction titles.

Know This: Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments

With so much news on scientific developments inundating us today, how do we tell which are truly revolutionary? And what makes them so important? To help condense the most significant of the new theories and discoveries, John Brockman asked 198 of the world's finest minds which recent scientific ideas they found most significant. From technology to medical research to neuroscience to genetics, this book addresses a wide range of scientific developments, from the likes of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Carlo Rovelli, and Peter Gabriel.

Yves Petry is a writer. The new debate series De Morgen, uppercut, he challenged journalist Joel De Ceulaer for an interview.

Dear Joel De Ceulaer,

Perhaps you are familiar with the Edge Foundation, an organization dedicated to the spread of a so-called third culture. Intended becomes the dialogue between scientists and the public on issues of common interest: who we are, where we come from and where we are going. The first and second culture, the literary and scientific, the traditional domain of the respective alphas and betas. The third culture begins when the latter take on the role of intellectual audience and their ideas can get outside the walls of their institution influence.

John Brockman, founder of the Edge Foundation, says that he wants fast and smart thinking prevail "over the local anesthetic of wisdom." This does put a certain tone. Intellectuals from the first culture - writers, philosophers, psychoanalysts, the friends of literature, say - be dismissed as a kind of doctors from a prewetenschappelijk era, which at most can numb the pain of ignorance verbal first aid kit but not cured. A reading public, thirsting for knowledge, consult your doctor urgently serious!

The sense of cosmic dimensions in which I move has freed me from certain pretensions. But on closer inspection it was by no means a reason to deny myself the pleasure of captivating literature

Personally, I was more familiar for I had heard the term with that third culture. The book by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker I met decades ago. I am addressing you because you know those books to me. Only we draw there apparently opposite conclusions regarding the position of literature.

Found myself aforementioned book fascinating reading. Often I was touched by the concern spend the authors to their style and the composition of their story. Facts and understanding, all well and good, but it should also be brought compelling way, otherwise bored. Like a novel. Undoubtedly, science has something changed fundamentally my self-image. The evolutionary and cosmic dimensions in which I move, the only conceivable complexity that underlies even the slightest act I performed - a sharper awareness of it has freed me from certain pretensions and my I definitely instilled a deep humility as to what the know and can. But on closer inspection it was by no means a reason to deny myself the pleasure of fascinating literature.

We are in a particularly tribal moment in American politics in which “the enemy of my enemy is my ally” is the most powerful argument around.

John Tooby, the evolutionary psychologist, recently wrote that if he could explain one scientific concept to the public it would be the “coalitional instinct.” In our natural habitat, to be alone was to be vulnerable. If “you had no coalition, you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, pre-existing and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership,” Tooby wrote on Edge.org. “This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird.” 

We overlook the hypocrisies and shortcomings within our coalition out of a desire to protect ourselves from our enemies.

Today, the right sees the left as enemies — and, I should say, vice versa. ...

Three people are standing in front of a painting in the museum, each one taking a picture of it. The art student copies it with brush and paint; The professional photographer bans it on the film in its analog camera; The tourist presses on the button of her smartphone. Which of these images is different from the other two?

The art student has to spend more work on her copy; But in a sense the tourist is with the smartphone of cross-country skiers. Color on canvas, just like the bit of exposed film, is a purely physical representation; A chemical flower on a susceptible medium. The image can not exist independently of this physical embodiment. In contrast, the image stored in the smartphone is essentially numeric. In an approximate way, the camera divides its field of view into a grid of tiny cells in the smartphone and stores a set of numerical values ​​which represent the intensity of the colors in each of these cells; These numbers are the ones that are transmitted - in compressed form - when the picture is sent to friends or placed on the Internet.

Each year, the director of the website edge.org, John Brockman, asks a question to a group of intellectual collaborators, many of them belonging to the world of science but also personalities from the world of art, technology and of the music. The question he asked on January 1, 2017 was: Which term or scientific concept should be better known? According to psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker the second law of thermodynamics should be better known.