John Brockman - The Universe - Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos

I wish to thank Peter Hubbard of HarperCollins for his encouragement. I am also indebted to my agent, Max Brockman, for his continued support of this project.

Alan Guth

Paul Steinhardt

Alan Guth

Andrei Linde

Lisa Randall

Neil Turok

Sean Carroll

Martin Rees

Lee Smolin

Leonard Susskind (with an introduction by John Brockman)

Lee Smolin, Leonard Susskind (with an introduction by John Brockman)

Carlo Rovelli (with an introduction by Lee Smolin)

Lawrence Krauss

Brian Greene, Walter Isaacson, Paul Steinhardt (with an introduction by John Brockman)

Peter Galison

Raphael Bousso (with an introduction by Leonard Suskind)

Seth Lloyd

Frank Wilczek

Steven Strogatz (with an introduction by Alan Alda)

David Deutsch

Benoit Mandelbrot (with an introduction by John Brockman)

In this, the fourth volume of The Best of Edge series, following Mind, Culture, and Thinking, we focus on ideas about the universe. We are pleased to present twenty-one pieces, original works from the online pages of Edge.org, which consist of interviews, commissioned essays, and transcribed talks, many of them accompanied online with streaming video.

Edge, at its core, consists of the scientists, artists, philosophers, technologists, and entrepreneurs at the center of todays intellectual, technological, and scientific landscape. Through its lectures, master classes, and annual dinners in California, London, Paris, and New York, Edge gathers together the third-culture scientific intellectuals and technology pioneers exploring the themes of the post-industrial age. These are the people who are rewriting our global culture.

And its website, Edge.org, is a conversation. The online Edge.org salon is a living document of millions of words that charts the conversation over the past eighteen years. It is available, gratis, to the general public.

Edge.org was launched in 1996 as the online version of the Reality Club, an informal gathering of intellectuals that met from 1981 to 1996 in Chinese restaurants, artists lofts, the boardrooms of Rockefeller University and the New York Academy of Sciences, investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms, and elsewhere. Though the venue is now in cyberspace, the spirit of the Reality Club lives on, in the lively back-and-forth conversations on hot-button ideas driving the discussion today. In the words of novelist Ian McEwan, a sometime contributor, Edge.org is open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful... an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world... an ongoing and thrilling colloquium.

This is science set out in the largely informal style of a conversation among peersnontechnical, equationless, and colloquial, in the true spirit of the third culture, which I have described as consisting 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.

For this volumecoming as it does in the wake of the recent stunning discovery of gravitational waves by the BICEP2 radio telescope at the South Pole, an apparent confirmation of the prime cosmological theory of inflationweve assembled online contributions from some of Edges best minds, most of them pioneering theoretical physicists and cosmologists. They provide a picture of cosmology as it has developed over the past three decadesa golden age, in the words of MITs Alan Guth, one of its leading practitioners.

This Golden Age of Cosmology has reached a high pointnot just with the recent revelations at the South Pole but with the 2012 discovery, by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, of the long-sought Higgs boson, whose field is thought to give mass to the elementary particles making up the universe.

We lead off, appropriately enough, with a 2001 talk by Guth, the father of inflationary theory. Then, at an Edge gathering at Eastover Farm in Connecticut a year later, Guth goes head to head with Paul Steinhardt, who presents his rival theory of a cyclic universea theory that the new data on gravitational waves may put paid to. Stay tuned.

Andrei Linde, the father of eternal chaotic inflation, emphasizes the concepts of the multiverse and the anthropic principle that arose from it (... different exponentially large parts of the universe may be very different from each other, and we live only in those parts where life as we know it is possible).

Lisa Randall and Neil Turok elaborate on the theory of branes, two-dimensional structures arising from string theoryand whose existence is central to the cyclic universe.

Sean Carroll ponders the mystery of why our observable universe started out in a state of such pristine regularity and order.

Martin Rees, the U.K.s Astronomer Royal, speculates on whether we are living in a simulation produced by a superintelligent hypercomputer.

Lee Smolin discusses the nature of time. Then he and Leonard Susskind (string theorys father) engage in a gentlemanly donnybrook over Smolins theory of cosmological natural selection and the efficacy of the anthropic principle.

Brian Greene, Paul Steinhardt, and Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson speculate on how Einstein might view the theoretical physics of the 21st century, and Steinhardt and Greene come to gentlemanly blows over string theory.

In a calmer vein:

Science historian Peter Galison muses on the similarity, and fundamental dissimiliarity, between two contemporaries and giants of early 20th-century physics, Einstein and Poincar; Arizona State University cosmologist Lawrence Krauss throws up his hands at the conundrum of dark energy; Carlo Rovelli (Professeur de classe exceptionelle, Universit de la Mditerrane) recommends a willingness to return to basics; and Nobelist Frank Wilczek relishes a future devoted to following up ideas in physics that Ive had in the past that are reaching fruition.

Berkeleys Raphael Bousso, too, is an optimist. (I think were ready for Oprah, almost... [W]ere going to learn something about the really deep questions, about what the universe is like on the largest scales, how quantum gravity works in cosmology.)

Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer, explains how the universe can, in a sense, program itself; Steven Strogatz sees cosmic implications in the synchronous flashing of crowds of fireflies; and Oxford physicist David Deutsch predicts that his constructor theory will eventually provide a new mode of description of physical systems and laws of physics. It will also have new laws of its own, which will be deeper than the deepest existing theories such as quantum theory and relativity.

And finally, as a kind of envoi, the late Benoit Mandelbrot, nearing eighty, looks back on a long career devoted to fractal geometry and newly invigorated: A recent, important turn in my life occurred when I realized that something I have long been stating in footnotes should be put on the marquee.... Im particularly long-lived and continue to evolve even today. Above a multitude of specialized considerations, I see the bulk of my work as having been directed toward a single overarching goal: to develop a rigorous analysis for roughness. At long last, this theme has given powerful cohesion to my life.

A Golden Age of Cosmology it may be, but you will find plenty of roughnessof doubt and disagreementhere. In spite of its transcendent title, this collection is hardly the last word. In the months (and the years) ahead, as the Large Hadron Collider pours out more data about the microworld and powerful telescopes and satellites continue to confirmor, who knows, cast fresh doubt onour leading theories of the macroworld, the arguments will surely continue.