Know This

Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments

John Brockman

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062562074
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Ciencia cognitiva

Today's most visionary thinkers reveal the cutting-edge scientific ideas and breakthroughs you must understand.

Scientific developments radically change and enlighten our understanding of the world -- whether it's advances in technology and medical research or the latest revelations of neuroscience, psychology, physics, economics, anthropology, climatology, or genetics. And yet amid the flood of information today, it's often difficult to recognize the truly revolutionary ideas that will have lasting impact. In the spirit of identifying the most significant new theories and discoveries, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ("The world's smartest website" -- The Guardian ), asked 198 of the finest minds What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important?

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond on the best way to understand complex problems * author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics Carlo Rovelli on the mystery of black holes * Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the quantification of human progress * TED Talks curator Chris J. Anderson on the growth of the global brain * Harvard cosmologist Lisa Randall on the true measure of breakthrough discoveries * Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on why the twenty-first century will be shaped by our mastery of the laws of matter * philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on the underestimation of female genius * 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 cofounder Bill Joy, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, psychologist Alison Gopnik, Genome author Matt Ridley, Harvard geneticist George Church, Why Does the World Exist? author Jim Holt, anthropologist Helen Fisher, and more.

Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Dedication
4. Preface
5. Human Progress Quantified
6. Doing More with Less
7. The “Specialness” of Humanity
8. J. M. Bergoglio’s 2015 Review of Global Ecology
9. Leaking, Thinning, Sliding Ice
10. Glaciers
11. Our Collective Blind Spot
12. Three De-carbonizing Scientific Breakthroughs
13. Juice
14. A Call to Action
15. A Bridge Between the 21st and 22nd Century
16. The Greatest Environmental Disaster
17. Technobiophilic Cities
18. LENR Could Supplant Fossil Fuels
19. Emotions Influence Environmental Well-Being
20. Global Warming Redux: A Serious Challenge to Our Species
21. Blue Marble 2.0
22. High-Tech Stone Age
23. The Dematerialization of Consumption
24. Science Made This Possible
25. The Brain Is a Strange Planet
26. The Abdication of Spacetime
27. The News That Wasn’t There
28. No News Is Astounding News
29. One Hundred Years of Failure
30. Hope Beyond the Higgs Boson
31. An Unexpected, Haunting Signal
32. News About How the Physical World Operates
33. Unpublicized Implications of Hawking Black-Hole Evaporation
34. The Energy of Nothing
35. The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was
36. Anomalies
37. Looking Where the Light Isn’t
38. Simplicity
39. The LHC Is Working at Full Energy
40. New Probes of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—and Beyond?
41. Supermassive Black Holes
42. Gigantic Black Holes at the Center of Galaxies
43. The Universe Is Infinite
44. Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
45. The News Is Not the News
46. We Know All the Particles and Forces We’re Made Of
47. Computational Complexity and the Nature of Reality
48. Einstein Was Wrong
49. Replacing Magic with Mechanism?
50. Quantum Entanglement Is Independent of Space and Time
51. Breakthroughs Become Part of the Culture
52. Space Exploration, New and Old
53. Pluto Is a Bump in the Road
54. Pluto Now, Then on to 550 AU
55. The Universe Surprised Us, Close to Home
56. Progress in Rocketry
57. The Space Age Takes Off . . . and Returns to Earth Again
58. How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?
59. A New Algorithm Showing What Computers Can and Cannot Do
60. Designer Humans
61. Cellular Alchemy
62. A Terrible Beauty Has Been Born
63. DNA Programming
64. Human Chimeras
65. The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering
66. The Ongoing Battles with Pathogens
67. Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live An...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Human Progress Quantified
• Doing More with Less
• The “Specialness” of Humanity
• J. M. Bergoglio’s 2015 Review of Global Ecology
• Leaking, Thinning, Sliding Ice
• Glaciers
• Our Collective Blind Spot
• Three De-carbonizing Scientific Breakthroughs
• Juice
• A Call to Action
• A Bridge Between the 21st and 22nd Century
• The Greatest Environmental Disaster
• Technobiophilic Cities
• LENR Could Supplant Fossil Fuels
• Emotions Influence Environmental Well-Being
• Global Warming Redux: A Serious Challenge to Our Species
• Blue Marble 2.0
• High-Tech Stone Age
• The Dematerialization of Consumption
• Science Made This Possible
• The Brain Is a Strange Planet
• The Abdication of Spacetime
• The News That Wasn’t There
• No News Is Astounding News
• One Hundred Years of Failure
• Hope Beyond the Higgs Boson
• An Unexpected, Haunting Signal
• News About How the Physical World Operates
• Unpublicized Implications of Hawking Black-Hole Evaporation
• The Energy of Nothing
• The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was
• Anomalies
• Looking Where the Light Isn’t
• Simplicity
• The LHC Is Working at Full Energy
• New Probes of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—and Beyond?
• Supermassive Black Holes
• Gigantic Black Holes at the Center of Galaxies
• The Universe Is Infinite
• Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
• The News Is Not the News
• We Know All the Particles and Forces We’re Made Of
• Computational Complexity and the Nature of Reality
• Einstein Was Wrong
• Replacing Magic with Mechanism?
• Quantum Entanglement Is Independent of Space and Time
• Breakthroughs Become Part of the Culture
• Space Exploration, New and Old
• Pluto Is a Bump in the Road
• Pluto Now, Then on to 550 AU
• The Universe Surprised Us, Close to Home
• Progress in Rocketry
• The Space Age Takes Off . . . and Returns to Earth Again
• How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?
• A New Algorithm Showing What Computers Can and Cannot Do
• Designer Humans
• Cellular Alchemy
• A Terrible Beauty Has Been Born
• DNA Programming
• Human Chimeras
• The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering
• The Ongoing Battles with Pathogens
• Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics!
• The 6 Billion Letters of Our Genome
• Systems Medicine
• Growing a Brain in a Dish
• Self-Driving Genes Are Coming
• Life Diverging
• Fundamentally Newsworthy
• Paleo-DNA and De-Extinction
• The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up
• Tabby’s Star
• Extraterrestrials Don’t Land on Earth!
• We Are Not Unique, but We Are Very Much Alone
• Breakthrough Listen
• Life in the Milky Way
• There Is (Already) Life on Mars
• The Breathtaking Future of a Connected World
• Everything Is Computation
• Identifying the Principles, Perhaps the Laws, of Intelligence
• Neuro-News
• Microbial Attractions
• The Epidemic of Absence
• Bugs R Us
• Fecal Microbiota Transplants
• Hi, Guys
• The Anti-democratic Trend
• The Age of Awareness
• A Large-Scale Personality Research Method
• The Conquest of Human Scale
• Big Data and Better Government
• This Is the Science-News Essay You Want to Read
• Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger of Good Things to Come
• Biology Versus Choice
• How to Be Bad Together
• Psychology’s Crisis
• The Truthiness of Scientific Research
• Blinded by Data
• The Epistemic Trainwreck of Soft-Side Psychology
• Science Itself
• A Compelling Explanation for Scientific Misconduct
• Sub-Prime Science
• The Infancy of Meta-Science
• The Disillusion and the Disaffection of Poor White Americans
• Inequality of Wealth and Income: A Runaway Process
• The Age of Visible Thought
• Our Changing Conceptions of What It Means to Be Human
• Complete Head Transplants
• The En-Gendering of Genius
• Diversity in Science
• The Democratization of Science
• News About Science News
• The Broadening Scope of Science
• Q-Bio
• Mathematics and Reality
• Synthetic Learning
• A Genuine Science of Learning
• Bayesian Program Learning
• FSM (Feces-Standard Money)
• The Ironies of Higher Arithmetic
• Broke People Ignoring $20 Bills on the Sidewalk
• We Fear the Wrong Things
• Living in Terror of Terrorism
• The State of the World Isn’t As Bad As You Think
• The Healthy Diet U-Turn
• Fatty Foods Are Good for Your Health
• Partisan Hostility
• Cognitive Science Transforms Moral Philosophy
• Morality Is Made of Meat
• People Kill Because It’s the Right Thing to Do
• Interdisciplinary Social Research
• Intellectual Convergence
• Weapons Technology Powered Human Evolution
• The Immune System: A Grand Unifying Theory for Biomedical Research
• Harnessing Our Natural Defenses Against Cancer
• Cancer Drugs for Brain Diseases
• The Most Powerful Carcinogen May Be Entropy
• The Decline of Cancer
• The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women
• The Most Important X . . . Y . . . Z . . .
• The Mother of All Addictions
• The Trust Metric
• Optogenetics
• The State of Brain Science
• Nootropic Neural News
• Memory Is a Labile Fabrication
• The Continually New You
• Toddlers Can Master Computers
• The Predictive Brain
• A New Imaging Tool
• Sensors: Accelerating the Pace of Scientific Discovery
• 3D Printing in the Medical Field
• Deep Science
• A World That Counts
• Programming Reality
• Pointing Is a Prerequisite for Language
• Macro-Criminal Networks
• Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream
• The Twin Tides of Change
• Imaging Deep Learning
• The Neural Net Reloaded
• Differentiable Programming
• Deep Learning, Semantics, and Society
• Seeing Our Cyborg Selves
• The Rejection of Science Itself
• Re-thinking Artificial Intelligence
• I, for One
• Data Sets over Algorithms
• Biological Models of Mental Illness Reflect Essentialist Biases
• Neuroprediction
• The Thin Line Between Mental Illness and Mental Health
• Theodiversity
• Modernity Is Winning
• Religious Morality Is Mostly Below the Belt
• A Science of the Consequences
• Creation of a “No Ethnic Majority” Society
• Interconnectedness
• Early Life Adversity and Collective Outcomes
• We’re Still Behind
• Neural Hacking, Handprints, and the Empathy Deficit
• Send in the Drones
• That Dress
• Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy
• The Origin of Europeans
• The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, but Worth It
• Adjusting to Feathered Dinosaurs
• People Are Animals
• The Longevity of News
• Weather Prediction Has Quietly Gotten Better
• The Word: First As Art, Then As Science
• The Convergence of Images and Technology
• The Mindful Meeting of Minds
• Carpe Diem
• Linking the Levels of Human Variation
• Challenging the Value of a University Education
• The Hermeneutic Hypercycle
• Rethinking Authority with the Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment
• Envoi: We May All Die Horribly
• Acknowledgments
• Also by John Brockman
• Copyright
• About the Publisher