Know This: Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments
Written by John Brockman
Narrated by Gabra Zackman and Dan John Miller
4/5
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About this audiobook
The latest volume in the bestselling series from Edge.org—dubbed “the world’s smartest website” by The Guardian—brings together 175 of the world’s most innovative and brilliant thinkers to discuss recent scientific breakthroughs that will shape the future.
Scientific developments radically alter our understanding of the world. Whether it’s technology, climate change, health research, or the latest revelations of neuroscience, physics, or psychology, science has, as Edge editor John Brockman says, “become a big story, if not the big story.” In that spirit, this new addition to Edge.org’s fascinating series asks a powerful and provocative question: What do you consider the most interesting and important recent scientific news?
Contributors include: Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel JARED DIAMOND on the best way to understand complex problems; author of Seven Brief Lesson on Physics CARLO ROVELLI on the mystery of black holes; Harvard psychologist STEVEN PINKER on the quantification of human progress; TED conferences curator CHRIS J. ANDERSON on the growth of the global brain; Harvard physicist LISA RANDALL on the true measure of breakthrough discoveries; Nobel Prize-winning physicist FRANK WILCZEK on why the 21st century will be shaped by our mastery of the laws of matter; music legend PETER GABRIEL on tearing down the barriers between imagination and reality; Princeton physicist FREEMAN DYSON on the surprising ability of small (and cheap) upstarts to compete with billion-dollar projects. Plus: Nobel laureate JOHN C. MATHER, Sun Microsystems co-founder BILL JOY, Skeptic magazine publisher MICHAEL SHERMER, Genome author MATT RIDLEY, Harvard geneticist GEORGE CHURCH, and many more.
John Brockman
The publisher of the online science salon Edge.org, John Brockman is the editor of Know This, This Idea Must Die, This Explains Everything, This Will Make You Smarter, and other volumes.
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Reviews for Know This
17 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5amazing book. gives you a lot to think about. teachs you a lot. lets you know people and ideas that are very interesting.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Every year for the past two decades, John Brockman has been posing what has become known as the Edge Question. (Find it at Edge.org.) It is always science-related, and scientists and others interested in science are invited to answer it in their own way. He then gathers the responses together in a book. I recently read “Know This,” the book that resulted from his 2016 question: What was the most interesting scientific news of the year?The book has more than 200 essays, ranging from a single short paragraph to five pages in length. Most were written by scientists, but others are from science writers, philosophers, artists and even show business personalities such as actor Alan Alda and singer Peter Gabriel.Even when several contributors give the same basic answer — climate change, for example, or the Higgs boson — their perspectives are so different that the essays never seem repetitive. Some writers are much too technical for general readers. Consider this line from Maximilian Schich: “Driven by the quantification of nonintuitive dynamic cultural science is accelerated in an autocatalytic manner.” Yet most writers keep it as simple as possible most of the time.A bigger problem for me is that so many contributors stray from science into politics, feminism, theology or whatever their personal hobbyhorse happens to be. Journalist David Berreby writes about how wonderful it will be when America no longer has a racial majority and everyone is more tolerant of others, then shoots himself in the foot by saying, “We are seeing inevitable ethnic renegotiation, as what was once ‘harmless fun’ (like naming your football team the Redskins) is redefined as something no decent American should condone.” No decent American? How tolerant is that? It's like saying, how wonderful it will be when everybody thinks the same way I do.Imagining brave new worlds is, in fact, a common theme in many of the essays, as if the Edge Question had to do with science fiction, not science news. One considers the possibility of head transplants, another announces that "self-driving genes are coming," another that some "bacteria may have jumped from Mars to Earth." Noga Arikha, identified as an "historian of ideas," mocks this sort of thing in his own essay about claims that reflect "wishful thinking rather than actual reality, typical of what constitutes fast-burning 'news.'"When contributors stay on subject, the results can be edifying. Several, and these are among the most interesting, have to do with findings that a significant percentage of published research papers, especially in the field of psychology, cannot be replicated. The findings of such papers are often the ones most likely to be reported in news accounts. Yet when other researchers do the same study in the same way, they come up with different results. Too many researchers find what they want to find or what those paying for their research want them to find. As psychologist Philip Tetlock writes, "The road to scientific hell is paved with political intentions, some well intentioned, some maniacally evil."