John Brockman - This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

This Explains Everything

Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

Edited by
JOHN BROCKMAN

CONTENTS

SUSAN BLACKMORE

MATT RIDLEY

RICHARD DAWKINS

SCOTT ATRAN

CARLO ROVELLI

AUBREY DE GREY

LEONARD SUSSKIND

JOEL GOLD

ALAN ALDA

REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN

JAMES J. ODONNELL

PAUL STEINHARDT

SHING-TUNG YAU

FRANK WILCZEK

THOMAS METZINGER

SEAN CARROLL

STEVEN PINKER

JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL

DAVID G. MYERS

ARMAND MARIE LEROI

GERD GIGERENZER

MARTIN J. REES

ANTON ZEILINGER

JEREMY BERNSTEIN

ANDREI LINDE

GEORGE DYSON

MAX TEGMARK

GINO SEGR

FREEMAN DYSON

SATYAJIT DAS

HAIM HARARI

ROBERT PROVINE

V. S. RAMACHANDRAN

DAVID M. EAGLEMAN

MAHZARIN BANAJI

ROBERT SAPOLSKY

KEITH DEVLIN

RICHARD H. THALER

JENNIFER JACQUET

JUDITH RICH HARRIS

DAN SPERBER

CLAY SHIRKY

HUGO MERCIER

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY

STEWART BRAND

KEVIN P. HAND

PAUL SAFFO

DANIEL C. DENNETT

CARL ZIMMER

DAVID M. BUSS

DAVID PIZARRO

HOWARD GARDNER

ANDRIAN KREYE

RAPHAEL BOUSSO

ERIC R. WEINSTEIN

DAVE WINER

TANIA LOMBROZO

SEIRIAN SUMNER

HELENA CRONIN

PAUL BLOOM

JOHN McWHORTER

GREGORY COCHRAN

CHRISTINE FINN

ANDREW LIH

PZ MYERS

DAVID CHRISTIAN

DIMITAR D. SASSELOV

HELEN FISHER

JOHN NAUGHTON

BARRY C. SMITH

JOHN TOOBY

PETER ATKINS

ELIZABETH DUNN

BART KOSKO

CHARLES SIMONYI

GREGORY S. PAUL

BRUCE HOOD

A. C. GRAYLING

TIMO HANNAY

BRIAN ENO

LISA RANDALL

SIMONE SCHNALL

BENJAMIN K. BERGEN

JON KLEINBERG

MARTI HEARST

HANS-ULRICH OBRIST

SETH LLOYD

CHARLES SEIFE

RODNEY A. BROOKS

JOHN C. MATHER

SCOTT SAMPSON

LAURENCE C. SMITH

TIM OREILLY

S. ABBAS RAZA

EVGENY MOROZOV

ERNST PPPEL

BRUCE PARKER

PATRICK BATESON

SIMON BARON-COHEN

ALVY RAY SMITH

ALBERT-LSZL BARABSI

STUART PIMM

KARL SABBAGH

ADAM ALTER

GERALD SMALLBERG

DOUGLAS COUPLAND

KATINKA MATSON

ALUN ANDERSON

ERIC R. KANDEL

SHERRY TURKLE

RANDOLPH NESSE

MARCEL KINSBOURNE

NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS

PHILIP CAMPBELL

DYLAN EVANS

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

ALISON GOPNIK

STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN AND ROBIN ROSENBERG

TERRENCE J. SEJNOWSKI

MICHAEL I. NORTON

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS

NEIL GERSHENFELD

LEE SMOLIN

ERIC J. TOPOL

GERALD HOLTON

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

ROBERT KURZBAN

TIMOTHY D. WILSON

SAMUEL BARONDES

BEATRICE GOLOMB

EMANUEL DERMAN

DAVID GELERNTER

RUDY RUCKER

SAMUEL ARBESMAN

STANISLAS DEHAENE

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

VICTORIA STODDEN

GEORGE CHURCH

IRENE PEPPERBERG

GLORIA ORIGGI

RICHARD FOREMAN

JARED DIAMOND

TIMOTHY TAYLOR

ANDY CLARK

NICHOLAS J. CARR

MICHAEL SHERMER

KEVIN KELLY

THE EDGE QUESTION

In 1981, I founded the Reality Club. From its founding through 1996, the club held its meetings in Chinese restaurants, artists lofts, the boardrooms of investment-banking firms, ballrooms, museums, and living rooms, among other venues. The Reality Club differed from the Algonquin Round Table, the Apostles, and the Bloomsbury Group, but it offered the same quality of intellectual adventure. Perhaps the closest resemblance was to the late 18th- and early 19th-century Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal gathering of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial ageJames Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin. In a similar fashion, the Reality Club was an attempt to gather together those people exploring the themes of the postIndustrial Age.

In 1997, the Reality Club went online, rebranded as Edge . The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers in such areas as evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, cosmology, and physics. Emerging out of these contributions is a new natural philosophy, new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions.

For each of the anniversary editions of Edge , I and a number of Edge stalwarts, including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and George Dyson, get together to plan the annual Edge Questionusually one that comes to one or another of us or our correspondents in the middle of the night. Its not easy coming up with a question. (As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator, used to say: I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?) We look for questions that inspire unpredictable answersthat provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have. For this years question, our thanks go, once again, to Steven Pinker.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called beautiful or elegant. Historical examples are Keplers explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Niels Bohrs explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and James Watson and Francis Cricks explanation of genetic replication via the double helix. The great theoretical physicist P. A. M. Dirac famously said that it is more important to have beauty in ones equations than to have them fit experiment.

The Edge Question 2012

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

The online response to the Edge website this year (http://edge.org/annual-question/) was enormoussome 200 provocative (and often lengthy) discussions. What follows is necessarily an edited selection. In the spirit of Edge, the contributions presented here embrace scientific thinking in the broadest sense: as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anythingincluding such fields of inquiry as philosophy, mathematics, economics, history, language, and human behavior. The common thread is that a simple and nonobvious idea is proposed as the explanation for a diverse and complicated set of phenomena.

JOHN BROCKMAN

Publisher & Editor, Edge

SUSAN BLACKMORE

Psychologist; author, Consciousness: An Introduction

Of course it has to be Darwin. Nothing else comes close. Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selectionnatural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science. This simple three-step algorithm explains, with one simple idea, why we live in a universe full of design. It explains not only why we are here but why trees, kittens, Urdu, the Bank of England, Chelsea football team, and the iPhone are here.

You might wonder why, if this explanation is so simple and powerful, no one thought of it before Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace did, and why even today so many people fail to grasp it. The reason, I think, is that at its heart there seems to be a tautology. It seems as though you are saying nothing when you say that Things that survive survive or Successful ideas are successful. To turn these tautologies into power, you need to add the context of a limited world in which not everything survives and competition is rife, and also realize that this is an ever-changing world in which the rules of the competition keep shifting.