Edge in the News

CHARLIE ROSE: Freeman Dyson is here. He has spent a lifetime grappling with some of the toughest problems in science and beyond. As a young physicist, he achieved worldwide recognition by merging three competing theories of quantum physics. Dyson has since become a best- selling author on topics from biotechnology to extraterrestrial
intelligence.

In recent years, he has emerged as a critic of climate change. In March, “The New York Times” profiled him in an article called, "The Globing Warming Heretic." The piece asked, "How did Freeman Dyson, revered scientist, liberal intellectual, problem solver, wind up infuriating the environmentalists?"

We’ll ask that and more. I’m pleased to have Freeman Dyson back at this table. Welcome.

FREEMAN DYSON: Thank you.

CHARLIE ROSE: I’ll get to this in a moment, but you really stirred them up when you talked about global warming, don’t you?

FREEMAN DYSON: So, that article, of course, is totally misleading. Global warming is a very small part of my concern. ...

[...]

[ED NOTE: Two years ago Edge published Freeman Dyson's essay "Heretical ThoughtsAbout Science and Society" [8.8.07]. In it he wrote:

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

The conversation around Dyson's "heretical" ideas has continued, and most recently he was the subject of a critical cover story in The New York Times Magazine. On August 14th he appeared on Charlie Rose to talk about global warming, origins of life, why he believes in belief. ... — JB]

Von aktuellen Entwicklungen aus der schönen neuen Welt der Genom-Sequenzierung berichtet Andrian Kreye: "Am letzten Juliwochenende trafen sich Craig Venter und George Church in Los Angeles, um für John Brockmans Wissenschaftsforum Edge.org ein Seminar über synthetische Gentechnik zu leiten. Die Gentechnik, so Church, habe die Informatik dabei längst hinter sich gelassen und entwickle sich mit einem Faktor von zehn pro Jahr. Immerhin - der Preis für die Sequenzierung eines Genoms ist von drei Milliarden Dollar im Jahr 2000 auf rund 50.000 Dollar gefallen, wie der Ingenieur der Stanford University Dr. Steven Quake diese Woche bekanntgab. 17 kommerzielle Firmen bieten ihre Dienste schon an."

Science Musuem, London/Bridgeman Art Library

The first balloon crossing of the English Channel, January 7, 1785; detail from an oil painting by E.W. Cocks, circa 1840

The Age of Wonder means the period of sixty years between 1770 and 1830, commonly called the Romantic Age. It is most clearly defined as an age of poetry. As every English schoolchild of my generation learned, the Romantic Age had three major poets, Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge, at the beginning, and three more major poets, Shelley and Keats and Byron, at the end. In literary style it is sharply different from the Classical Age before it (Dryden and Pope) and the Victorian Age after it (Tennyson and Browning). Looking at nature, Blake saw a vision of wildness:

Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Byron saw a vision of darkness:

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air….

During the same period there were great Romantic poets in other countries, Goethe and Schiller in Germany and Pushkin in Russia, but Richard Holmes writes only about the local scene in England.

Holmes is well known as a biographer. He has published biographies of Coleridge and Shelley and other literary heroes. But this book is primarily concerned with scientists rather than with poets. The central figures in the story are the botanist Joseph Banks, the chemists Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, the astronomers William Herschel and his sister Caroline and son John, the medical doctors Erasmus Darwin and William Lawrence, and the explorers James Cook and Mungo Park. The scientists of that age were as Romantic as the poets. The scientific discoveries were as unexpected and intoxicating as the poems. Many of the poets were intensely interested in science, and many of the scientists in poetry.

The scientists and the poets belonged to a single culture and were in many cases personal friends. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin and progenitor of many of Charles’s ideas, published his speculations about evolution in a book-length poem, The Botanic Garden, in 1791. Humphry Davy wrote poetry all his life and published much of it. Davy was a close friend of Coleridge, Shelley a close friend of Lawrence. The boundless prodigality of nature inspired scientists and poets with the same feelings of wonder. The Age of Wonder is popular history at its best, racy, readable, and well documented. The subtitle, “How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science,” accurately describes what happened.

Holmes presents the drama in ten scenes, each dominated by one or two of the leading characters. The first scene belongs to Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain James Cook on the ship Endeavour. This was Cook’s first voyage around the world. One of the purposes of the expedition was to observe the transit of Venus across the disc of the sun on June 3, 1769, from the island of Tahiti in the South Pacific. The tracking of the transit from the Southern Hemisphere, in combination with similar observations made from Europe, would give astronomers more accurate knowledge of the distance of the earth from the sun. Banks was officially chief botanist of the expedition, but he quickly became more interested in the human inhabitants of the island than in the plants. The ship stayed for three months at Tahiti, and he spent most of the time, including the nights, ashore. During the nights he was not observing plants.

A wealthy young man accustomed to aristocratic privileges in England, Banks quickly made friends with the Tahitian queen Oborea, who assigned one of her personal servants, Otheothea, to take care of him. With the help of Otheothea and other good friends, he acquired some fluency in the Tahitian language and customs. His journal contains a Tahitian vocabulary and detailed descriptions of the people he came to know. When the time came to set up the astronomical instruments and observe the transit of Venus, he took the trouble to explain to his Tahitian friends what was happening. “To them we shewd the planet upon the sun and made them understand that we came on purpose to see it.”

During the long months at sea after leaving Tahiti, Banks rewrote his journal entries into a formal narrative, “On the Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islands,” one of the founding documents of the science of anthropology. In a less formal essay written after his return to England, he wrote:

In the Island of Otaheite where Love is the Chief Occupation, the favourite, nay almost the Sole Luxury of the Inhabitants, both the bodies and souls of the women are modeld in the utmost perfection for that soft science.

The Tahiti that he describes was truly an earthly paradise, not yet ravaged by European greed and European diseases, twenty years before the visit of William Bligh and the Bounty mutineers, sixty-six years before the visit of Charles Darwin and the Beagle.

After exploring the South Seas, Cook sailed down the eastern coast of Australia and landed at Botany Bay. Banks failed to establish social contacts with the Australian aborigines and returned to his role as botanist, bringing back to England a treasure trove of exotic plants, many of them today carrying his name. After he returned to England, he found that he and Captain Cook had become public heroes. He was invited to meet King George III, who was then young and of sound mind and shared his passion for botany. He remained a lifelong friend of the King, who actively supported his creation of the national botanic garden at Kew.

Banks became president of the Royal Society in 1778 and held that office for forty-two years, officially presiding over British science for more than half of the Age of Wonder. He presided with a light hand and did not attempt to turn the Royal Society into a professional organization like the academies of science in Paris and Berlin. He believed that science was best done by amateurs like himself. If some financial support was needed for people without private means, it could best be provided by aristocratic patrons.

One of those for whom Banks found support was William Herschel, the greatest astronomer of the age. Herschel was a native Hanoverian, and was conscripted at the age of seventeen to fight for Hanover in the Seven Years’ War against the French. After surviving a battle that the Hanoverians lost, he escaped to England to begin a new life as a professional musician. Starting as a penniless refugee, he rose rapidly in the English musical world. By his late twenties he was director of the orchestra in the Pump Room at Bath, the health resort where people of wealth congregated to take the waters and listen to concerts. He stayed at Bath for sixteen years, running the musical life of the city by day and scanning the sky at night. As an astronomer he was a complete amateur, unpaid and self-taught.

At the beginning, when Herschel began observing the heavenly bodies, he believed that they were inhabited by intelligent aliens. The round objects that he saw on the moon were cities that the aliens had built. He continued throughout his life to publish wild speculations, many of which turned out later to be correct. He had two great advantages as an observer. First, he built his own instruments, and with his musician’s hands made exquisitely figured mirrors that gave sharper images than any other telescopes then existing. Second, he brought his younger sister Caroline over from Hanover to be his assistant, and she became an expert observer with many independent discoveries to her credit. His life as an amateur ended in 1781 when with Caroline’s help he discovered the planet Uranus.

As soon as Banks heard of the discovery, he invited Herschel to dinner, introduced him to the King, and arranged for him to be appointed the King’s personal astronomer with a salary of £200 a year, later supplemented by a separate salary of £50 a year for Caroline. Herschel’s musical career was over, and he spent the rest of his life as a professional astronomer. He obtained royal funding to build bigger telescopes, and embarked on a systematic survey of every star and nebulous object in the sky, pushing his search outward to include objects fainter and more distant than anyone else had seen.

Herschel understood that when he looked at remote objects he was looking not only into deep space but into deep time. He correctly identified many of the nebulous objects as external galaxies like our own Milky Way, and calculated that he was seeing them as they existed at least two million years in the past. He showed that the universe was not only immensely large but immensely old. He published papers that moved away from the old Aristotelian view of the heavens as a static domain of perpetual peace and harmony, and toward the modern view of the universe as a dynamically evolving system. He wrote of “a gradual dissolution of the Milky Way” that would provide “a kind of chronometer that may be used to measure the time of its past and future existence.” This idea of a galactic chronometer was the beginning of the new science of cosmology.

As Holmes’s account suggests, all the leading scientists of the Romantic Age, like Banks and Herschel, started their lives as brilliant, unconventional, credulous, and adventurous amateurs. They blundered into science or literature in pursuit of ideas that were often absurd. They became sober professionals only after they had achieved success. Another example was Humphry Davy, who originally intended to be a physician and worked, as part of his medical training, as an assistant at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. The Pneumatic Institution was a clinic where patients were treated for ailments of all kinds by inhaling gases. Among the gases available for inhaling was nitrous oxide. Davy experimented enthusiastically with nitrous oxide, using himself and his friends, including Coleridge, as subjects. After one of these sessions, he wrote:

I have felt a more high degree of pleasure from breathing nitrous oxide than I ever felt from any cause whatever—a thrilling all over me most exquisitely pleasurable, I said to myself I was born to benefit the world by my great talents.

Davy was so popular in Bristol that he was invited at the age of twenty-three to become assistant lecturer in chemistry at the Royal Institution in London. The Royal Institution was a newly founded venture that provided “regular courses of philosophical lectures and experiments” for fashionable London audiences. For the preparation of experimental demonstrations to astound and educate the public, the lecturer was provided with a laboratory where he could also do original research.

Davy promptly switched his research activities from physiology to chemistry. He became the first electrochemist, using a huge electric battery to decompose chemical compounds, and discovered the elements sodium and potassium. Later he invented the Davy safety lamp, which made it possible for coal miners to work underground without killing themselves in methane explosions. The lamp made him even more famous. Coleridge invited him to move north and establish a chemical laboratory in the Lake District where Coleridge and Wordsworth lived. Coleridge wrote to him, “I shall attack Chemistry like a Shark.” Davy wisely stayed in London, where he succeeded Banks as president of the Royal Society and chief panjandrum of British science. The poet Byron gave him a couple of lines in his poem Don Juan :

The Genome Wager

In the spirit of famous scientific wagers by notable scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, two leading biologists, Professor Lewis Wolpert and Dr Rupert Sheldrake, have set up a wager on the predictive value of the genome.

The wager will be decided on May 1, 2029, and if the outcome is not obvious, the Royal Society, the world’s most venerable scientific organization, will be asked to adjudicate. The winner will receive a case of fine port, Quinta do Vesuvio, 2005, which should have reached perfect maturity by 2029 and is being stored in the cellars of The Wine Society.

Prof Wolpert bets that the following will happen. Dr Sheldrake bets it will not:

By May 1, 2029, given the genome of a fertilized egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities.

Prof Wolpert and Dr Sheldrake agree that at present, given the genome of an egg, no one can predict the way an embryo will develop. The wager arose from a debate on the nature of life between Wolpert and Sheldrake at the 2009 Cambridge University Science Festival.

[ED. NOTE: This wager began with the replies by Wolpert and Sheldrake to the EdgeQuestion Center 2009.]

WHAT'S NEXT: DISPATCHES ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE
Edited by Max Brockman
Vintage, $15, 256 pages
REVIEWED BY JULIE ROBISON

People's exposure to the world of science is too often limited to watching the Discovery Channel or "reading" National Geographic. But the essence of science is not only what is happening today, but what could happen tomorrow. "What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science" is a book of science essays collected and edited by Max Brockman. It boasts that the authors of the 18 original essays that make up this book come from a "new generation of scientists" and are the future of science.

The essays cover a range of topics. In "Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?," Lawrence C. Smith writes that the world can't escape global warming, regardless of policy changes. Stephon H.S. Alexander discusses dark matter and vacuum energy in "Just What Is Dark Energy." Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare's "Out of Our Minds: How Did Homo sapiens Come Down From the Trees, and Why Did No One Follow?" notes the theory of evolution and its relation to humans is still a work in progress.

In his essay, "Watching Minds Interact," Jason P. Mitchell argues that humans are superior because "natural selection has equipped us with an adaptation more fearsome than teeth or claws: the human brain." He reports how neuroscience has begun to show "how exquisitely sensitive our minds are to the goings-on of the minds around us by suggesting that our brains spontaneously mirror the pattern of activity of other brains in our vicinity." This is important because it means we're social beings; "our brains prefer to be in register with the brains around us."

In tandem, Matthew D. Lieberman's "What Makes Big Ideas Sticky?" explores how minds relate to one another. Mr. Lieberman references great thinkers like Descartes, Thomas Aquinas and Plato and compares Eastern and Western religions, saying that while we would "like to think of our beliefs as stemming from some combination of logical analysis and peer influence," they more likely come from genetic roots. This has been seen recently in multiple studies and Lieberman points to "Baldwin Way, a postdoctoral fellow in my lab at UCLA, [who] has recently come across a key genetic difference between individuals of Eastern and Western descent that differentially affects their brains."

Religion and science are usually subjects that get along as well as water and oil, but it does not stop these scientists from tackling them. Evolution and the big bang theory are both discussed at length from differing perspectives in Sean Carroll's "Our Place in an Unnatural Universe" and in Nick Bostrom's "How to Enhance Human Beings."

"Medical science is difficult," writes Mr. Bostrom. "We know this because, despite our best efforts, it often fails. Yet medicine typically aims merely to fix something that's broken. Human enhancement, by contrast, aims to take a system that's not broken and make it better — in many ways a more ambitious goal." He discusses enhancement to give people more mental energy, to increase DNA repair activity in cells, and improve concentration.

Whether scientists should even be making these types of changes is also called into question; the need to make ethical decisions in science are not uncommon, but Sam Cooke asks in his essay "Memory Enhancement, Memory Erasure: the Future of Our Past" whether scientists should. "Some may argue that it is not the role of scientists to make ethical judgments about the potential impact of their work — that such decisions are the job of the government, or the electorate, who should decide which scientific research is funded by public money and which is not."

Nonetheless, Joshua D. Greene believes there is a science to making moral and ethical decisions. In his essay "Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind," he discusses the "complex interplay between intuitive emotional responses and more effortful cognitive processes" involved with making moral judgments.

"People sometimes ask me why I bother with these bizarre hypothetical dilemmas," says Mr. Greene. "Shouldn't we be studying real moral decision making instead? To me, these dilemmas are like a geneticist's fruit flies. They're manageable enough to play around with in the lab but complex enough to capture something interesting about the wider and wilder world outside." An interesting way to view moral dilemmas; it therefore should not be a surprise that Mr. Greene ends the essay wondering if we can ever "transcend the limitations of our moral instincts." This is especially intriguing after reading Christian Keysers' "Mirror Neurons: Are We Ethical By Nature?" and his remark that the "brain is ethical by design."

Story Continues →

By Norbert Cunningham

Hello everyone! I've a little science today, but first note that language is a communication tool; it's what allows us to relate our experiences and thoughts, all, of course, as processed by our brains.

And while we don't yet understand how our brains work very well, scientists have lately been making remarkable progress, in part thanks to new technologies such as MRI scanners that allow them to observe healthy (as well as damaged) brains as they work.

Time flies

Now to connect this to language: we've all heard or used the cliché that "time flies."

Anybody over 40 has also likely remarked at how much faster time flies as you get older. It's a common observation many find puzzling: why does summer as a youngster seem "endless," yet pass in the blink of an eye to adults who swear it was only a couple weeks ago that they put the snow shovel away?

Does time speed up in some magical, bizarre way as we age?

Do people in traumatic events like car crashes actually witness time slowing down as they so often report?

The intuitive answer is that these are matters of perception more than reality in which time has been said to flow like a river, sure and steady (only, as Einstein showed, does time actually slow significantly enough to truly notice if you travel at incredibly high speeds beyond anything most of us will ever experience).

That intuition it is our perception has been shown to be correct, so why do we perceive time to speed up as we age? Our everyday language and the millions of people commenting on the fact are not wrong: the perception is real.

Perception

I take the following from an essay titled "Brain Time" by Dr. David M. Eagleman which appears in a book called "What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science," edited by Max Brockman.

Dr. Eagleman is a bright young scientist who has undergraduate degrees from Rice University and Oxford University in literature, but who obtained a doctorate in neuroscience from the Baylor College of Medicine 11 years ago. Today he is director of the Baylor College of Medicine's Laboratory for Perception and Action. The lab's long-term goal is to "understand the neural mechanisms of time perception," which in plain English is to figure out how our brains make us think time has slowed or sped up when it hasn't. It was his and his colleagues' work that allowed me to say that our intuitions are correct: people in traumatic situations do perceive time to slow, but a hair-raising experiment shows they have no extra time to react or do anything extra beyond what would normally be possible.

An explanation

We perceive the slow motion because time and memory are "tightly linked," says Dr. Eagleman. In such critical situations a part of our brain called the amygdala kicks into high gear and takes over most of the brain's resources. This forces a secondary memory system to do the processing, a system that can later produce flashbacks of the sort soldiers with post-traumatic stress experience. This backup memory is "stickier" than what our brains usually use to store memories, producing more vivid and clear images in our minds; more detail. And in remembering these, since there are many more images, just like inserting extra images in a movie reel, it makes the event appear to last longer and slows motion down. That much is fairly certain.

Less certain, but strongly suspected by Dr. Eagleman, is that the same or a similar process is what makes time seem to speed up as we age. As we experience ever more in life, familiar patterns recur and the memories our brains store get ever more compressed. Our brain can skip or compress a lot of things we know or have already experienced because we've got the general template from the first time and it need add only new details. As a result, when we draw on our memory, it is much less vivid and detailed, having the effect of cutting some frames out of a film, which seemingly speeds time up. Children, on the other hand, are frequently having first-time experiences, encountering novel things. Their brains store that information in all its detail and richness since it is the first time. Recalling it, even decades later, we remember those "endless summers" and wonder whatever happened to them. This is not "proven" yet, but it sounds logical and fits with what is known about the sensation of time slowing when in a critical situation. It's a good tentative explanation.

Full circle

So it's back to language, which does describe what we perceive well. But time to us is not really a steady flowing river after all. It's relative, according to how our brains stored our memories. And time flies as we age . . . it seems.

The last word

Here is author and wit Douglas Adams:

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

* Lex Talk! is researched and written by Times & Transcript editorial page editor Norbert Cunningham. It appears in this space every Monday.

The humanities are in the same state financial markets were in before they crashed. Assessing the growing mountain of toxic intellectual debt, Philip Gerrans considers going short on some overvalued research.. ...

...The academic market is also like the financial market in another way. Stocks trade above their value, which leads to bubbles and crashes. Brain- imaging studies, for example, are a current bubble, not because they don't tell us anything about the brain, but because the claims made for them so vastly exceed the information they actually provide. As with a leveraged investment in mortgage bonds hedged by a foreign-exchange credit swap, most customers have no idea how a brain-imaging result is produced and what it is really worth. Those who do - the ones in labs using complicated statistical algorithms to map impossibly messy signals to artificial 3D models of brains - are usually very circumspect about the results. But every week we read in the science pages that brain-imaging studies prove X, where X is what the readers or columnists already believe. Women can't read maps! Men like sex! Childhood trauma affects brain development! There is an Angelina Jolie neuron! The bosses of big labs that employ hundreds of people use these studies, along with artfully placed articles about them, to get funding for future research. In a similar way, directors of mining companies raise funds on the basis of prospecting reports "leaked" to the financial press.

Consider, as an unrivalled piece of hyperbole, this statement from the websiteEdge.org, which aims "to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge" by seeking out "the most complex and sophisticated minds". It is by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, a brilliant experimental neuroscientist as well as a master publicist: "The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution ... is the single most important 'unreported' (or at least, unpublicised) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons 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."
That's not very likely. Mirror neurons are neurons in the monkey premotor cortex that are active both when a monkey produces an action such as grasping, and when it observes the action. No one yet knows quite why there is an overlap in patterns of neural activity. Ramachandran would like to find out, so he has made his pitch to investors. They know he has done some beautiful experiments and he is a charismatic public performer and Edge.org regular, so we can expect the mirror neuron boom to continue for a while. ...

[ED. NOTE: Philip Gerrans writes: "So we can expect the mirror neuron boom to continue for a while". Is nine years enough time to make this point? See Ramachandran's Edge essay "Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind 'the great leap forward' in human evolution" published on June 1, 2000. —JB]

Written by Sarah Boslaugh 

Each essay is self-contained, making it possible to choose those most relevant to your own interest

If your favorite day of the week is Tuesday, because that's when the Science section of The New York Times is published, and your favorite NPR show is Ira Flatow'sScience Times, then you'll love What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, a collection of essays written by young scientists about what they do and how they see the future of their fields. Even if you're not quite that much of a science geek, if you have an interest in the world around you and the process by which scientific research can both explain and mold that world, you'll enjoy this collection edited by Max Brockman. No expertise in any field is required to understand these essays; if you can follow Malcolm Gladwell, you'll have no troubles with What's Next?

Brockman's essayists represent a variety of fields, from physics to paleoanthropology, with a heavy leaning toward the human sciences. This is a good choice from the marketing point of view, since non-scientists tend to be more interested in topics relating to human psychology than, say, the role played by dark energy in accelerating the expansion of the universe, but fans of hard science may feel slighted. That objection aside, this is the perfect collection for people who like to stay up on recent scientific research but haven't the time or expertise to go to the original sources (which, in the case of modern science, usually means articles published in professional journals, which are not generally available to those without access to an academic library).

Each essay is self-contained, making it possible to choose those most relevant to your own interests. And it's a great airplane or beach book because you can read the essays in any order; each is brief enough to be read between the interruptions of gate announcements or children demanding attention. My personal favorite is "What Makes Big Ideas Sticky?" by UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman, which argues that ideas which mirror the structure and function of the human brain may seem so obviously true to us that they resist being discarded, even in the face of overwhelming amounts of scientific research demonstrating their lack of merit.

The collection closes with an essay by NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidtentitled "Why hasn't specialization led to the Balkanization of science?" He argues that in contradiction to the stereotype of the scientist as someone who knows more and more about less and less, interdisciplinary research is central to modern science and describes both the factors which lead to greater isolation among fields of research, and those which encourage cooperation and sharing of ideas. Communication of major ideas in nontechnical language is one of the factors which encourages cooperation, and What's Next? represents an important contribution to that effort.

Sarah Boslaugh

256 pages. $14.95 (paperback)

NONFICTION What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science

Sure, we often hear from the prominent, popular scientists of today: Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson. But what about the next generation? Who are they, and what are they thinking about? The answers can be found in the engrossing essay collection What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, which offers a youthful spin on some of the most pressing scientific issues of today—and tomorrow.

Take, for example, Laurence C. Smith's essay on global warming. Instead of rehashing the debate, Smith wonders about the possibility of people migrating to the Northern Rim as temperatures rise and inhospitable environments become more livable. Associate professor of physics Stephon H. S. Alexander tackles dark energy; other pieces address memory, morality, why viruses matter and the inevitability of human extinction. Kinda scary? Yes! Super smart and interesting? Definitely.