What Are You Optimistic About?: Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better

by John Brockman

Book Overview

The nightly news and conventional wisdom tell us that things are bad and getting worse. Yet despite dire predictions, scientists see many good things on the horizon. John Brockman, publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), the influential online salon, recently asked more than 150 high-powered scientific thinkers to answer a vital question for our frequently pessimistic times: "What are you optimistic about?"

Spanning a wide range of topics--from...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061436933
• ISBN13: 9780061436932
• Release Date: July 2014
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

I love this series

Many of the essays in this collection are short 1-pagers. Nonetheless, reading through the book, one gets the sense that one is in the midst of great thinkers, peering over their shoulders as they speak candidly about their worldviews.

OPTIMISTIC about optimism

This is an excellent text: brief statements by a variety of top flight scientists, giving me much more to be optimistic about!

Enlightening and Sometimes Brilliant

Here is the 2007 EDGE question, put by the editor to prominent scientists all over the world: "As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put. What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!" I counted 153 essays. Naturally, with only a half-page to four pages each, they are not greatly detailed. Certain themes caught the attention of many contributors: 1. Organized violence is at an all time low. You wouldn't believe it by listening to the news, but the statistics are clear. In the future, live internet access to anywhere on earth by GPS will cause exploiters of all cloths to have to resort to "Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes." 2. We're on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance. We will be able to make a self-replicating machine that will absorb energy through solar cells, eat rocks, and be working for humanity by the millions. We will figure out ways to harness solar energy and not need to use energy sources that pollute the environment. 3. Research in physics has been dominated by string theory in recent years which so far is untestable. New technologies will produce astounding insights very soon. The LHC (proton-proton collider) will advance the Standard Model and will find the Higgs boson or perhaps something unexpected. The new LIGO detectors may find gravitational waves. Arrays of wide-field telescopes on earth are being programmed to rapidly scan the universe. PLANCK is Europe's first space mission to study the relic radiation from the Big Bang, cosmic microwave background radiation. The AUGER array in Argentina will collect and quantify this same radiation. The GLAST satellite will place a telescope in orbit in May, 2008 to study the extreme universe without having to deal with earth's atmosphere. All these projects involve multiple nations and are guaranteed to provide astronomers and physicists with a new plethora of evidence to glean over for years. 4. There are many mentions of religion, only a few of them sympathetic, all of them seeing a decrease in the conflict between science and religion: "The number of people who realize how much of religious belief is non-sensical will continue to grow...I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion...a final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions...we will learn to shed the unessential dogmas, rules, definitions, and prejudices that religions have built up over the centuries and millennia...people will begin to see science as a vehicle for mutual understanding and for respecting life. Science will teach people these lessons, ins

It is not always wise to be optimistic

The 2007 Edge Symposium contains one- hundred sixty answers to the questions, "What are you optimistic about?' As many of the same respondents to previous Edge questions are present here, there is a great deal that in one way or another has been said before. There are also many interesting new ideas, and insights into what is presently happening now in academic, and most particularly, in scientific worlds. In the oft- heard of , and repeated ideas category star the super-brights, Dennett and Dawkins each in his own separate way is looking for a new Age of Enlightenment in which most of mankind will be `cured' of `religious faith'. Dawkins even goes farther and looks forward to the time when Humanity will be cured of itself, and our central interest will be in our successors in colonizing the universe. This answer is indicative of what I found to be a general failing in the work, a very skewed and mistaken view of the human situation, ignoring major problems, and exhibiting a lack of sensitivity to what is of ultimate value in human life and experience. It is true globalwarming is worried about. This more than any other problem features. One optimist tells us that while it will wipe out cities and cause millions of deaths the good news is that Mankind will survive. Thank you. Other optimists tell us that we will soon be harnessing the sun's energy and beating the fossil fuel, carbon- emissions cause of it all. Unfortunately those of us who have been hearing these promises for half - a - century now are perhaps a bit less optimistic that this is what is going to happen soon. Keep the sun and wind coming you guys in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia and other enlightened points in the world. Keep the sun coming at thirty forty fifty sixty seven eighty ninety one - hundred two hundred dollars a barrel. Another of our great optimists, Ray Kurzweil of `Intelligent machine' fame does not preach this time about how we are all going to disappear into the Singularity by 2030. Instead he promises us one hundred year plus life- spans and disease-less lives. Apparently Kurzweil has not seen how wonderfully we have extended the lives of millions of chronically ill people whose continued existence weighs so heavily not only upon the health system but above all on their relatives and themselves. . In another area Paul Horgan and Steven Pinker look forward to the new era of Universal peace, no more war soon to be upon us. Pinker ignores the Holocaust, the Gulag, Mao's one -hundred million murders, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and tells us that mankind overall is killing less people over time than we have ever before in our history. He hasn't apparently been reading another of the respondents Martin Rees who has been envisioning for some time now various ways our technically advanced civilization might find for making an end of all of us. No comet needed, just a few vicious nuts somewhere manufacturing a bit of biotech viral newness, and goodbye to us all. No gl