Edge 7th Anniversary: A Photo Album

CONNECTIONS
Finding the Universal Laws That Are There, Waiting . . .
By Edward Rothstein, January 10, 2004 [free registration required]

Nature abhors a vacuum. Gravitational force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects. Over the course of evolution, each species develops larger body sizes. If something can go wrong, it will.

Such are some of nature's laws as handed down by Aristotle, Newton, Edward Cope and Murphy. And regardless of their varying accuracy (and seriousness), it takes an enormous amount of daring to posit them in the first place. Think of it: asserting that what you observe here and now is true for all times and places, that a pattern you perceive is not just a coincidence but reveals a deep principle about how the world is ordered.

If you say, for example, that whenever you have tried to create a vacuum, matter has rushed in to fill it, you are making an observation. But say that "nature abhors a vacuum" and you are asserting something about the essence of things. Similarly, when Newton discovered his law of gravitation, he was not simply accounting for his observations. It has been shown that his crude instruments and approximate measurements could never have justified the precise and elegant conclusions. That is the power of natural law: the evidence does not make the law plausible; the law makes the evidence plausible.

But what kind of natural laws can now be so confidently formulated, disclosing a hidden order and forever bearing their creator's names? We no longer even hold Newton's laws sacred; 20th-century physics turned them into approximations. Cope, the 19th-century paleontologist, created his law about growing species size based on dinosaurs; the idea has now become somewhat quaint. Someday even an heir to Capt. Edward Aloysius Murphy might have to modify the law he based on his experience about things going awry in the United States Air Force in the 1940's.

So now, into the breach comes John Brockman, the literary agent and gadfly, whose online scientific salon, Edge.org, has become one of the most interesting stopping places on the Web. He begins every year by posing a question to his distinguished roster of authors and invited guests. Last year he asked what sort of counsel each would offer George W. Bush as the nation's top science adviser. This time the question is "What's your law?"

"There is some bit of wisdom," Mr. Brockman proposes, "some rule of nature, some lawlike pattern, either grand or small, that you've noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you." What, he asks, is your law, one that's ready to take a place near Kepler's and Faraday's and Murphy's.

More than 150 responses totaling more than 20,000 words have been posted so far at www.edge.org/q2004/q04_print.html. The respondents form an international gathering of what Mr. Brockman has called the "third culture" ú scientists and science-oriented intellectuals who are, he believes, displacing traditional literary intellectuals in importance. They include figures like the scientists Freeman Dyson and Richard Dawkins, innovators and entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil and W. Daniel Hillis, younger mavericks like Douglas Rushkoff and senior mavericks like Stewart Brand, mathematicians, theoretical physicists, computer scientists, psychologists, linguists and journalists....

Edge.org Compiles Rules Of The Wise Observations Of Thinking People [free registration required]
January 9, 2004 By John Jurgensen, Courant Staff Writer

Everything answers to the rule of law. Nature. Science. Society. All of it obeys a set of codes...It's the thinker's challenge to put words to these unwritten rules. Do so, and he or she may go down in history. Like a Newton or, more recently, a Gordon Moore, who in 1965 coined the most cited theory of the technological age, an observation on how computers grow exponentially cheaper and more powerful... Recently, John Brockman went looking for more laws.

A Week in Books: Core principles are needed in the muddled business of books
By Boyd Tonkin, 02 January 2004

The literary agent John Brockman, who makes over significant scientists into successful authors, has posted an intriguing question on his Edge website. He seeks suggestions for contemporary "laws", just as Boyle, Newton, Faraday and other pioneers gave their names to the rules of the physical universe. (That eminent pair, Sod and Murphy, soon followed suit.) Brockman advises his would-be legislators to stick to the scientific disciplines, and you can find their responses at www.edge.org.

From 1981 through 1996, The Reality Club held its meetings in Chinese restuarants, artists lofts, the Board Rooms of Rockefeller University, The New York Academy of Sciences, and investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, and living rooms, among other venues. In January, 1997, The Reality Club migrated to the Internet as Edge. Here you will find a number of today's sharpest minds taking their ideas into the bull ring knowing they will be challenged. The ethic is thinking smart vs. the anesthesiology of wisdom.

The late Heinz Pagels and I wrote the following statement:

"We charge the speakers to represent an idea of reality by describing their creative work, their lives, and the questions they are asking themselves. We also want them to share with us the boundaries of their knowledge and experience and to respond to the challenges, comments, criticisms, and insights of the members. The Reality Club is a point of view, not just a group of people. Reality is an agreement. The constant shifting of metaphors, the intensity with which we advance our ideas to each other—this is what intellectuals do. The Reality Club draws attention to the larger context of intellectual life.

"Speakers seldom get away with loose claims. Maybe a challenging question will come from a member who knows an alternative theory that really threatens what the speaker had to say. Or a member might come up with a great idea, totally out of left field, that only someone outside the speaker's field could come up with. This creates a very interesting dynamic.

Two continuing Reality Club discussions (see below) are underway recent Edge features: Jaron Lanier's provocative ideas in "Why Gordian Software Has Convinced Me to Believe in the Reality of Cats and Dogs", and Lenny Susskind's radical take on the current state of physics and cosmology in "The Landscape".

As one Edge kibitzer remarked: "Tough crowd."

Responses by Paul Steinhardt, Lee Smolin, Kevin Kelly, Alexander Vilenkin, Steve Giddings, Lee Smolin, Gino Segre, Lenny Susskind, Gerard 't Hooft , Lenny Susskind, Maria Siropulu on [continue...]

re: WHY GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF CATS AND APPLES: A Talk with Jaron Lanier

Responses by Dylan Evans, Daniel C. Dennett, Steve Grand, Nicholas Humphrey, Clifford Pickover, Marvin Minsky, Lanier replies, George Dyson, Steven R. Quartz, Lee Smolin, Charles Simonyi, John Smart, Daniel C. Dennett, Dylan Evans [continue...]

"The best, most amazing Edge interview yet. It was educational beyond the call of duty, full of insider gossip, and funny! I inhaled it in one breath. Great going." — Kevin Kelly

THE LANDSCAPE
A Talk with Leonard Susskind

Leonard Susskind Edge Video DSL+ | Modem

What we've discovered in the last several years is that string theory has an incredible diversity—a tremendous number of solutions—and allows different kinds of environments. A lot of the practitioners of this kind of mathematical theory have been in a state of denial about it. They didn't want to recognize it. They want to believe the universe is an elegant universe—and it's not so elegant. It's different over here. It's that over here. It's a Rube Goldberg machine over here. And this has created a sort of sense of denial about the facts about the theory. The theory is going to win, and physicists who are trying to deny what's going on are going to lose. [continue...]

---

On Sunday, December 14 at 2:00 pm

---

Description: John Brockman, editor of "The New Humanists," moderated a discussion between contributors Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky. During the course of the discussion, Dennett and Minsky talked about the existence of the universe, intelligent design vs. evolution, and the theories of Stephen Jay Gould. The event was hosted by Barnes & Noble Booksellers in New York City. The panelists answered questions from the audience following their remarks.
[continued...]

Buy the Book

NEW PILLS FOR THE MIND
A Talk with Samuel Barondes, M.D.

Samuel Barondes Video DSL+ | Modem

Most of the psychiatric drugs we use today are refinements of drugs whose value for mental disorders was discovered by accident decades ago. Now we can look forward to a more rational way to design psychiatric drugs. It will be guided by the identification of the gene variants that predispose certain people to particular mental disorders such as schizophrenia or severe depression.

I've had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few important starting points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew.

WHY GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF CATS AND APPLES
A Talk with Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier Video DSL+ | Modem

The Third Culture — Class of 2003
Seed presents and exclusive portfolio of the icons and iconoclasts who redefined science in 2003. With an introduction by John Brockman.

"THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE"
A Talk with Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Kauffman Video DSL+ | Modem

An autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.

God does throw dice
The Third Culture defends itself in New York
by Andrian Kreye
October 1, 2003

The leading thinkers of the Third Culture argue only seldom in such a popular forum, but it is precisely in this way that one can assess the pragmatic aspect of their declaration of war. For them it does not concern only the honor of holding intellectual sovereignty over interpretation. At the beginning of the 21st century the sciences stand on the brink of enormous progress. The human genome has been decoded, technology has reached the nano-scale, and it is possible to research human and artificial intelligence. In view of these new possibilities, science sees dogmatic ethics and the moral burdens of history as obstacles on the road to progress. Not to mention the science policy of the American president, who must take consideration of those who elected him and who continue to take creationism at face value. [more]

[Original German text]

"THAT DAMN BIRD"
A Talk with Irene Pepperberg
Introduction by Marc D. Hauser

What the data suggest to me is that if one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system. Of course, chimpanzees don't proceed to develop full-blown language the way you and I have. Grey parrots, such as Alex and Griffin, are never going to sit here and give an interview the way you and I are conducting an interview and having a chat. But they are going to produce meaningful, complex communicative combinations. It is incredibly fascinating to have creatures so evolutionarily separate from humans performing simple forms of the same types of complex cognitive tasks as do young children. [more]

Irene Pepperberg Video DSL+ | Modem
Requires Real Player plug-in (Free Download)

THE NEW HUMANISTS: SCIENCE AT THE EDGE

Marvin Minsky • Andrea Cane • Daniel C. Dennett • JB

The first of two live events re:The New Humanists: Science at the Edge, open to the public, was held September 18, in the wake of Hurricane Isabel at the flagship B&N superstore at Union Square in New York City. The event was taped by C-Span for broadcast in a few weeks. The house was full. Edgies from as far away as Milan, were present. I was pleased to moderate the panel of Dan Dennett and Marvin Minsky (Lee Smolin canceled due to Isabel) and it was Marvin who opened the evening with the following remark: "The Universe doesn't exist". Stay tuned. More to come.

—JB

---

Order The New Humanists from bn.com

[continue....]