I believe I like "What is your most dangerous idea" better

books:


	• What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty John Brockman Harper Perennial, 2006 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good but not great

As a scientist I approached this book with a lot of expectations. I wanted to know what the greatest minds in science believe but cannot prove. I was expecting a lot of cutting edge topics and revolutionary ideas. Yes, there are some pieces that fulfilled and even exceeded my expectations, but there were also others that I couldn't even get past the first paragraph.
I guess it is always difficult to put together a book with so many contributors and the result is always going to be a mix of, in this case, brilliant ideas and not so surprising monologues.

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Proof! Belief!

What we believe but cannot prove once again hits the nail on the head for the many issues that we think we know the answer to, but can't quite put it all together. Along with its companion piece, Dangerous Ideas, this makes for very stimulating reading. Nice to know what puzzles some of the top scientific minds in the world...

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I believe I like "What is your most dangerous idea" better

Some interesting ideas on the concept and philosophy of
"What we believe but Cannot Prove". Essays from top scientists on topics such as Consciousness (is there such a thing, does language bring it about?), quantum mechanics (is the electron composed of any smaller particles?), astronomy (is there more than one universe), time (is everything predetermined) just to name a few from memory. I had gotten this book because i enjoyed "What is your most dangerous idea" so much from the same "edge dot com" group/ editor. I wasn't as into this book I believe because "What is your most dangerous idea" was just more interesting and similar. Some topics overlap. For example this book may have the argument that they believe consciousness does not exist while "dangerous idea" will have the dangerous idea that the soul does not exist. (This book did come out before "what is your most dangerous idea"). Some great ideas in here regardless to ponder.

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Interesting and erratic

A bit disappointing. I thought that this would be a really special book, and I found it quite erratic. Some of the thinkers seem to have taken this very seriously, while others have not spent more than 10 minutes in this (that is not necessarily a bad thing). There are many repetitions, and some answers do not fit well in the book. Anyway, there are some very interesting ideas and clever answers, such as those given by Seth Lloyd, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others that made the book worth reading.

'Third world uncertainties- and their incompletenesses'

The one - hundred scientists, educators, psychologists, linguists, and other professionals of the life of the mind who provide answers to the 'title- question' do so apparently with little knowledge of what other respondents are saying. Thus for instance when Martin Rees raises the possibility that mankind may be the only advanced intelligence that has yet come into the universe, Craig Ventner who supports a form of Crick's panspermic view( i.e. We got here by being seeded by more advanced intelligences from elsewhere in the universe) there is no opportunity for give and take between them. My sense is that is that this whole enterprise might have been more productively conducted had it involved a dialogue around several major questions now confronting humanity i.e. the extraterrestial life question, the artificial intelligence in place of humanity, question, the ' understanding everything' question.
Another problem I had with the book is that while John Brockman has truly created an impressive enterprise with his 'Edge ' world and Third Culture, the Third Culture is largely devoid of religious thinkers, and of thinkers whose fundamental background is in the Humanities.
Consider for instance the one great Idea the great majority of Humanity believes in without having Proof of i.e. the idea of a Creator Who is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End,that Mankind has the purpose of in some way serving . Consider too some of the other beliefs most important to Mankind for which there is no proof i.e. the belief in an Afterlife, the belief that our loved ones have some kind of continuation beyond the life of earth.
These questions which burn in the heart of Humanity are by and large outside the consideration of those involved in 'The Third Culture'.
Here it is possible to point out that many of the respondents here give answers which come directly out of their own work. That is what interests them is beliefs they have related to their own special enterprise and skill. This makes sense, but it does not necessarily make for startling revelations.
Nonetheless, and here I come to what is truly praiseworthy in the enterprise this collection contains information on 'cutting edge' work now being done in various scientific areas. For instance on the whole question of ' extraterrestial intelligences' a number of respondents point to increasing evidence of a greater prevalence of earth- like planets, of conditions for life than was previously thought.
While many of the respondents give one or two - sentence brief answers a number like Martin Rees, Michael Shermer ,John Horgan, Rebecca Goldstein present positions which outline and justify their fundamental attitude to their own scientific enterprise.
Others like Ray Kurzweil who momentarily forgets about the 'Singularity' to seek out ways of abrograting the finite speed- of -laws, make speculative ventures . Stewart Kauffman for instance wonders if there will be a fourth- law of Thermodynamics, involving self- constructing non- equilibrium systems.
What emerges from reading through the whole discussion is a sense of how much Mankind has come to know and understand about the Universe, and yet how open the major questions relating to Mankind's near , and if it gets to this, distant future are. On so many levels it seems that the more answers we have the more questions we open up for ourselves. And this as if to suggest that the scientific enterprise, the whole enterprise of Man's knowing and learning about the world is a necessarily unfinishable one. There will be no unified- theory of 'everything' at any time in any foreseeable future.
What was encouraging was how , it seems to me, wise and humble many of the respondents were in acknowledging the limitations of understanding, while passionately engaging in their own efforts to know more.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

More than one hundred of the world's leading thinkers write about things they believe in, despite the absence of concrete proof

Scientific theory, more often than not, is born of bold assumption, disparate bits of unconnected evidence, and educated leaps of faith. Some of the most potent beliefs among brilliant minds are based on supposition alone -- yet that is enough to push those minds toward making the theory viable.

Eminent cultural impresario, editor, and publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), John Brockman asked a group of leading scientists and thinkers to answer the question: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it? This book brings together the very best answers from the most distinguished contributors.

Thought-provoking and hugely compelling, this collection of bite-size thought-experiments is a fascinating insight into the instinctive beliefs of some of the most brilliant minds today.

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