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What are you optimistic about? : today's leading thinkers on why things are good and getting better
- Available as
- Physical
- Summary
-
Spanning a wide range of topics--from string theory to education, from population growth to medicine, and even from global warming to the end of world--What Are You Optimistic About? is an impressi...
Spanning a wide range of topics--from string theory to education, from population growth to medicine, and even from global warming to the end of world--What Are You Optimistic About? is an impressive array of what world-class minds (including Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times bestselling authors, and Harvard professors, among others) have weighed in to offer carefully considered optimistic visions of tomorrow. Their provocative ideas may rouse skepticism, but they might possibly change our perceptions of humanity's future.
Details
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- Creator
- edited by John Brockman
- Format
- Books
- Language
- English
- Contributors
- Publication
-
- First U.S. edition
- New York : Harper Perennial, [2007]
- ©2007
- Physical Details
-
- xxii, 374 pages ; 21 cm
- ISBNs
- 0061436933, 9780061436932
- OCLC
- ocn174138046
- "With contributions by Jared Diamond [and others]"--Cover.
- Includes index.
- Preface: the annual Edge question -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction / Daniel C. Dennett -- Incredible odds / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- Our species can unravel mysteries / Brian Greene -- Good choices sometimes prevail / Jared Diamond -- The decline of violence / Steven Pinker -- War will end / John Horgan -- World peace / John McCarthy -- We are making moral progress / Sam Harris -- The unending stream of bad news is itself flawed / Chris Anderson -- Techno-optimism and the energy challenge / Martin Rhees -- The divide between scientific thinking and the rest of our culture is decreasing / Carlo Rovelli -- The evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion / Daniel C. Dennett -- A proper scientific understanding of irrationality (and religion in particular) / Andrew Brown -- The final scientific enlightenment / Richard Dawkins -- Science and the decline of magic / Michael Shermer -- Evidence-based decision making will transform society / J. Craig Venter -- Human beings are different from their ancestral species / Douglas Rushkoff -- The future of science, religion, and technology / Anton Zeilinger -- Going beyond our Darwinian roots / Leonard Suskind -- A secular humanist death / Geoffrey Miller -- The war between science and religion will see new light / Marcelo Gleiser -- The first coming / Martin E.P. Seligman -- A new tool leading us toward a deep understanding of human nature / Freeman J. Dyson -- Sometime in the 21st century I will understand 20th century physics / Jerry Adler -- The future of string theory / Gino Segre -- Renewal of science for public good / Lawrence M. Krauss -- Strangers in our midst / Robert Shapiro -- Physics will not achieve a theory of everything / Frank Wilczek -- Bullish on cosmology / Paul Steinhardt -- The return of the discipline of experiment will transform our knowledge of fundamental physics / Lee Smolin -- People will increasingly value truth (over truthiness) / Lisa Randall -- Physics will flourish once more / Charles Seife -- The optimism of scientists / Karl Sabbagh -- What lies beyond our cosmic horizon / Alexander Vilenkin -- We're not insignificant after all / Max Tegmark -- Coraggio, domani sara peggio! / George F. Smoot -- Progress is surprisingly durable / James O'Donnell -- The situational focus / Philip G. Zimbardo -- The women of the 110th Congress / Roger Bingham -- The zombie concept of identity / David Berreby -- Us-them dichotomies will become far more benign / Robert Sapolsky -- Multilingualism in Europe / Gloria Origgi -- We have the ability to understand one another / Rebecca Goldstein -- How technology is saving the world / Diane F. Halpern -- Neuroscience will improve our society / Marco Iacoboni -- The end of -isms / Marc D. Hauser -- The globalization of higher education / Jamshed Bharucha -- The power of educated people to make important innovations / Nathan Myhrvold -- And now the good news / Brian Eno -- We will overcome agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance) / Andrian Kreye -- The major climate makeover / William Calvin -- Optimism has a bright future / Tor Norretranders -- Save the Arctic -- now / Gregory Benford -- The return of commercial sailing vessels / George Dyson -- The ozone hole / Stephen H. Schneider -- A new, environmentally sustainable worldview / Scott D. Sampson -- PCT allows individuals to address a global problem / James Geary -- The challenge presented by Peak Oil / Brian Goodwin -- Once and future optimism / Seth Lloyd -- The shifting ration of benefit and cost / Colin Blakemore -- The sunlight-powered future / Alun Anderson -- The coming solar power boom / Oliver Morton -- The sorcerer's apprentice / Gregory Cochran -- Science on the agenda / Adam Bly -- We will embrace the reality of progress / Kevin Kelly -- Cities cure poverty / Stewart Brand -- New children will be born / Alison Gopnik -- A one-way ticket to Mars / Paul C.W. Davies -- Geomorphic evidence for early life on Mars / Garniss Curtis -- By the early 22nd century, we will be living on more than one tiny ball in our solar system / Rodney Brooks -- The future of human mating / David Buss -- The hedonic set point can be raised / Nancy Etcoff -- Romantic love / Helen Fisher -- Malthus was wrong / Geoffrey Carr -- The long view of demographics / W. Daniel Hillis -- Research will provide the first effective treatments for many diseases / Ian Wilmut -- Early cancer detection / Philip Campbell -- Cancer stem cells and novel cancer therapies / Stuart A. Kauffman -- The human epigenome project / Jill Neimark -- Growing older / Peter Schwartz -- We will lead healthy and productive lives well past our tenth decade / Leo M. Chalupa -- New prospects of immortality / Marvin Minsky -- Personal genomics / George Church -- Finding mental illness genes / Samuel Barondes -- The end of the 'natural' / Andy Clark -- A breakthrough in understanding intelligence is around the corner / Terrence Sejnowski -- AI will arise / Jordan Pollack -- Technology in education / David Dalrymple -- Science as a broadly participatory activity / Neil Gershenfeld -- We will finally get mathematics education right / Keith Devlin -- The nervous system of the human race has come alive / Alex (Sandy) Pentland -- Emergent democracy and global voices / Joichi Ito -- Humanity's coming enlightenment / Larry Sanger -- Metcalfe's law of minds / Chris Anderson -- Altruism on the web / Dan Sperber -- The end of the commoditization of knowledge / Roger C. Schank -- Metacognition for kids / Gary F. Marcus -- The immeasurables / Sherry Turkle -- The coming revolution in science education / Leon Lederman -- High-resolution images of earth will thwart global villainy / Chris DiBona -- Transparency is inevitable / Daniel Goleman -- Power is moving to the masses -- as a market / Esther Dyson -- Capitalism is aligning with the good / Jason McCabe Calacanis -- Individuals are empowered in a knowledge-driven economy / Juan Enriquez -- Humans will learn to learn from diversity / Daniel L. Everett -- Early detection of learning disabilities or difficulties / Howard Gardner -- The human response to vast change will involve strange bounces / Joel Garreau -- The future of software / David Gelernter -- Getting it all wrong / Steve Grand -- Unraveling beliefs / Mahzarin R. Banaji -- Long-term trends toward honesty to others and self / Robert Trivers -- The baby boomers will soon retire / Jonathan Haidt -- The evolutionary ability of humankind to do the right things / Haim Harari -- When men are involved in the care of their infants, the cultures do not make war / John Gottman -- The survival of friendship / Judith Rich Harris -- The public will become immune to hype / Roger Highfield -- Solving the mind-body problem / Donald D. Hoffman -- Print as a technology / Walter Isaacson -- Truth prevails -- sometimes technology helps / Xeni Jardin -- Human intelligence can be increased dramatically / Stephen M. Kosslyn -- A new contentism / Kai Krause -- The young will take repair of the world into their own hands / Howard Rheingold -- Toward a broader sense of global issues and possibilities / Linda Stone -- Optimism on the continuum between confidence and hope / Ray Kurzweil -- Skeuomorphism / Timothy Taylor -- The rise of usability / Marti Hearst -- Interpersonal communication will become more profound; rationality will more romantic / Jaron Lanier -- Universal telepathy / Rudy Rucker -- The best is yet to come / Nicholas Humphrey -- The restoration of innocence / Elizabeth F. Loftus -- I will be dead wrong again / Thomas Metzinger -- The modeling of group behavior / Pamela McCorduck -- Assistive listening / David G. Myers -- We will find new ways to block pessimism / Randolph M. Nesse -- The limits of democracy / Mark Pagel -- The world of a wunderkammer / David Pescovitz -- Overcoming the burden of monocausalitis / Ernst Poppel -- Things could always be worse / Robert R. Provine -- The future / Matt Ridley -- Humankind is particularly good at muddling / Paul Saffo -- The increasing coalescence of scientific disciplines / Gerald Holton -- The end of hegemonies / Barry C. Smith -- Understanding sleep / Steven Strogatz -- Shortening sleep will enrich our lives / Marcel Kinsbourne -- The joys of failing enterprises / Michael Wolff -- Copying is what bits are for / Cory Doctorow -- Whether solutions are possible / David Deutsch -- Reforming scientific and medical publishing via the internet / Beatrice Golomb -- The real purity of pure science / Piet Hut -- A core decency even the worst government machinations can't hold down / David Bodanis -- The rise of autism and the digital age / Simon Baron-Cohen -- A second (and better) enlightenment / Irene Pepperberg -- Corrective goggles for our conceptual myopia / Corey S. Powell -- Index