author : John Brockman

Contents

• The emerging third culture. 1995

• George C. Williams. A package of information. 1995

• Stephen Jay Gould. The pattern of life's history. 1995

• Richard Dawkins. A survival machine. 1995

• Brian C. Goodwin. Biology is just a dance. 1995

• Steve Jones. Why is there so much genetic diversity. 1995

• Niles Eldredge. A battle of words. 1995

• Lynn Margulis. Gaia is a tough bitch. 1995

• Marvin L. Minsky. Smart machines. 1995

• Roger C. Schank. Information is surprises. 1995

• Daniel C. Dennett. Intuition pumps. 1995

• Nicholas Humphrey. The thick moment. 1995

• Francisco J. Varela. The emergent self. 1995

• Steven Pinker. Language is a human instinct. 1995

• Roger Penrose. Consciousnes involved noncomputable ingredients. 1995

• Martin J. Rees. An ensemble of universes. 1995

• Alan H. Guth. A universe in your backyard. 1995

• Lee Smolin. A theory of the whole universe. 1995

• Paul C. W. Davies. The synthetic path. 1995

• Murray Gell-Mann. Plectics. 1995

• Stuart A. Kauffman. Order for free. 1995

• Christopher G. Langton. A dynamical pattern. 1995

• J. Doyne Farmer. The second law of organization. 1995

• W. Daniel Hillis. Close to the singularity. 1995

Contents

• Brian C. Goodwin. The Printing Press. 2000

• Rodney A. Brooks. The Electric Motor. 2000

• Tom Standage. Telecommunications Technology. 2000

• Colin Tudge. The Plow. 2000

• Arnold Trehub. Otto von Guericke's Static Electricity Machine. 2000

• Alun Anderson. The Caravel. 2000

• Samuel H. Barondes. Organized Science. 2000

• John R. Searle. The Green Revolution. 2000

• Marc D. Hauser. The Electric Light and Aspirin. 2000

• John D. Barrow. The Indo-Arab Counting System. 2000

• Leon Lederman. The Printing Press and the Thermos Bottle. 2000

• Richard Potts. Flying Machines. 2000

• Paolo Pignatelli. The University. 2000

• Douglas Rushkoff. The Eraser. 2000

• Viviana Guzman. Television. 2000

• Garniss Curtis. Gutenberg's Press with Movable Type. 2000

• Susan Blackmore. The Contraceptive Pill. 2000

• Patrick Bateson. The Harnessing of Electricity. 2000

• Carl Zimmer. Waterworks. 2000

• Robert Shapiro. Genetic Sequencing. 2000

• Howard Gardner. Classical Music. 2000

• Roger C. Schank. The Internet. 2000

• Randolph M. Nesse. Printing. 2000

• Ron Cooper. Distillation. 2000

• David M. Buss. Television in its Effects on Mating Patterns. 2000

• Dan Sperber. The Computer and the Atomic Bomb. 2000

• Maria Lepowsky. The Pill, the Gun, and Hydraulic Engineering. 2000

• Robert R. Provine. Universal Schooling. 2000

• Duncan Steel. The Thirty-Three Year English Protestant Calendar. 2000

(see also talk at Seacon'03)

• Peter Tallack. The Stirrup and the Horse Collar. 2000

• John C. Baez. Social Structures that Enable Inventions. 2000

• Terrence J. Sejnowski. The Digital Bit. 2000

• Nicholas Humphrey. Reading Glasses. 2000

• Clifford A. Pickover. Papermaking. 2000

• Freeman J. Dyson. Hay. 2000

• Daniel C. Dennett. The Battery. 2000

• Lawrence M. Krauss. The Programmable Computer. 2000

• Gino Segre. Lenses. 2000

• George Dyson. The Universal Turing Machine. 2000

• Karl Sabbagh. Chairs and Stairs. 2000

• Gordon Gould. Double-Entry Accounting. 2000

• Bob Rafelson. The Gatling Gun. 2000

• Stephen Budiansky. The Domestication of the Horse. 2000

• David Haig. The Computer. 2000

• William H. Calvin. Computers as Modelers of Climate. 2000

• Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. The Indo-Arabic Number System. 2000

• Peter Cochrane. The Thermionic Valve. 2000

• Hendrik Hertzberg. Printing. 2000

• Charles Simonyi. Public Key Cryptosystems. 2000

• John Rennie. Volta's Electric Battery. 2000

• Stuart R. Hameroff. Anasthesia. 2000

• James J. O'Donnell. Late-Twentieth-Century Health Care. 2000

• Steven Johnson. The City. 2000

• Jeremy Cherfas. The Basket. 2000

• Keith Devlin. The Hindu-Arabic Number System. 2000

• Eberhard Zangger. Nothing Worth Mentioning. 2000

• Henry Warwick. Nothing. 2000

• Murray Gell-Mann. Disbelief in the Supernatural. 2000

• Steven P. R. Rose. Democracy and Social Justice. 2000

• Joseph E. LeDoux. Various, Including the Idea that All People are Created Equal. 2000

• Don Goldsmith. The Realization of Our Place in the Cosmos. 2000

• Steven Pinker. The Alphabet and the Lens. 2000

• Paul W. Ewald. Evolution by Selection. 2000

• Brian Greene. The Telescope. 2000

• Joseph F. Traub. The Scientific Method. 2000

• Stanislas Dehaene. The Concept of Education. 2000

• John C. Dvorak. Computer Networks. 2000

• Geoffrey F. Miller. Marketing. 2000

• Luyen Chou. Philosophical Skepticism. 2000

• Piet Hut. The Construction of Autonomous Tools. 2000

• Thomas de Zengotita. Geometry. 2000

• Marney Morris. The Atomic Bomb. 2000

• David E. Shaw. The Scientific Method. 2000

• David Berreby. The Information Economy. 2000

• John McCarthy. The Idea of Continued Scientific and Technological Progress. 2000

• David G. Meyers. The Control Group. 2000

• Jay Ogilvy. Secularism. 2000

• Milford H. Wolpoff. Science. 2000

• Reuben Hersh. The Interrogative Sentence; Space Travel. 2000

• Christopher Westbury. Probability Theory. 2000

• W. Daniel Hillis. The Clock. 2000

• Mary Catherine Bateson. Economic Man---Most Boring Invention. 2000

• Julian B. Barbour. The Bell and the Symphony Orchestra. 2000

• Marvin L. Minsky. The Identification of Smell. 2000

• Christopher G. Langton. The Telescope and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. 2000

• Clay Shirky. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. 2000

• Colin Blakemore. The Contraceptive Pill. 2000

• Oliver Morton. Genetic Engineering. 2000

• John Henry Holland. Board Games. 2000

• Jaron Lanier. The Human Ego. 2000

• Esther Dyson. Self-Government. 2000

• John Maddox. The Calculus. 2000

• Bart Kosko. The Calculus. 2000

• Verena Huber-Dyson. The Infinitesimal Calculus. 2000

• John Horgan. Free Will. 2000

• Tor Norretranders. The Mirror. 2000

• Sherry Turkle. The Idea of the Unconscious. 2000

• Richard Dawkins. The Spectroscope. 2000

• Philip W. Anderson. Quantum Theory. 2000

• Michael Nesmith. The Copernican Theory. 2000

• Stewart Brand. Christianity and Islam. 2000

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Various, Including the Flag. 2000

• Lee Smolin. Mathematical Representation. 2000

• George Lakoff. The Idea of an Idea. 2000

• Andy Clark. The Digital Ecosystem. 2000

• George Johnson. Mathematical Representation. 2000

• Howard Rheingold. The Evolution of Technology. 2000

Contents

• Lee Smolin. The Future of the Nature of the Universe. 2002

• Martin J. Rees. Cosmological Challenges: Are We Alone, and Where?. 2002

• Ian Stewart. The Mathematics of 2050. 2002

• Brian C. Goodwin. In the Shadow of Culture. 2002

• Marc D. Hauser. Swappable Minds. 2002

• Alison Gopnik. What Children will Teach Scientists. 2002

• Paul Bloom. Towards a Theory of Moral Development. 2002

• Geoffrey F. Miller. The Science of Subtlety. 2002

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Future of Happiness. 2002

• Robert M. Sapolsky. Will We Still be Sad Fifty Years from Now?. 2002

• Steven H. Strogatz. Fermi's "Little Discovery" and the Future of Chaos and Complexity Theory. 2002

• Stuart A. Kauffman. What is Life?. 1997

• Richard Dawkins. Son of Moore's Law. 2002

The ever-increasing cheapness of sequencing genomes, and what it might lead to.

• Paul C. W. Davies. Was there a Second Genesis?. 2002

• John Henry Holland. What is to Come and How to Predict It. 2002

• Rodney A. Brooks. The Merger of Flesh and Machines. 2002

• Peter W. Atkins. The Future of Matter. 2002

• Roger C. Schank. Are We Going to Get Smarter?. 2002

• Jaron Lanier. The Complexity Ceiling. 2002

• David Gelernter. Tapping into the Beam. 2002

• Joseph E. LeDoux. Mind, Brain, and Self. 2002

• Judith Rich Harris. What Makes Us the Way We Are: the View from 2050. 2002

• Samuel H. Barondes. Drugs, DNA, and the Analyst's Couch. 2002

• Nancy Etcoff. Brain Scans, Wearables, and Brief Encounters. 2002

• Paul W. Ewald. Mastering Disease. 2002

Contents

• John Horgan. We have no souls. 2006

• Paul Bloom. The rejection of the soul. 2006

• David M. Buss. The evolution of evil. 2006

• Irene Maxine Pepperberg. The differences between humans and nonhumans are quantitative, not qualitative. 2006

• Steven Pinker. Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments. 2006

• J. Craig Venter. The genetic basis of human behavior. 2006

• Jerry A. Coyne. Marionettes on genetic strings. 2006

• Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. Francis Crick's dangerous idea. 2006

• Rodney A. Brooks. Being alone in the universe. 2006

• Scott D. Sampson. Life as an agent of energy dispersal. 2006

• Keith Devlin. We are entirely alone. 2006

• Martin J. Rees. Science may be running out of control. 2006

• Frank J. Tipler. Why I hope the Standard Model is wrong about why there is more matter than antimatter. 2006

• Jeremy Bernstein. The idea that we understand plutonium. 2006

• W. Daniel Hillis. The idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas. 2006

• Daniel Gilbert. The idea that ideas are dangerous. 2006

• Paul C. W. Davies. The fight against global warming is lost. 2006

• Gregory Benford. Think outside the Kyoto box. 2006

• Oliver Morton. Our planet is not in peril. 2006

• April Gornik. The effect of art can't be controlled or anticipated. 2006

• Denis Dutton. A 'grand narrative'. 2006

• Marc D. Hauser. Our universal moral grammar's immunity to religion. 2006

• Nicholas Humphrey. Bertrand Russell's dangerous idea. 2006

• David Pizarro. Hodgepodge morality. 2006

• Robert Shapiro. We will understand the origin of life within the next five years. 2006

• George Dyson. Understanding molecular biology without discovering the origins of life. 2006

• Marco Iacoboni. The problem with super mirrors. 2006

• Daniel Goleman. Cyberdisinhibition. 2006

• Alun Anderson. Brains cannot become minds without bodies. 2006

• David Gelernter. What are people well informed about in the Informatin Age?. 2006

• Kevin Kelly. More anonymity is good. 2006

• Paul W. Ewald. A new Golden Age of medicine. 2006

• Samuel H. Barondes. Uisng medications to change personality. 2006

• Helen Fisher. Drugs may change the patterns of human love. 2006

• David G. Meyers. A marriage option for all. 2006

• Diane F. Halpern. Choosing the sex of one's child. 2006

• Seth Lloyd. The idea of ideas. 2006

• Karl Sabbagh. The human brain will never understand the universe. 2006

• Lawrence M. Krauss. The world may be fundamentally inexplicable. 2006

• Leonard Susskind. The 'landscape'. 2006

• Lee Smolin. Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin. 2006

• Brian Greene. The multiverse. 2006

• Carlo Rovelli. What twentieth-century physics says about the world might be true. 2006

• Paul J. Steinhardt. It's a matter of time. 2006

• Piet Hut. A radical re-evaluation of the character of time. 2006

• Marcelo Gleiser. It's OK not to know everything. 2006

• Steven H. Strogatz. The end of insight. 2006

• Terrence J. Sejnowski. When will the internet become aware of itself?. 2006

• Neil A. Gershenfeld. Democratizing access to the means of invention. 2006

• Rudy Rucker. Mind is a universally distributed quality. 2006

• Thomas Metzinger. The forbidden fruit intuition. 2006

• Philip W. Anderson. The posterior probability of any particular god is pretty small. 2006

• Sam Harris. Science must destroy religion. 2006

• John Allen Paulos. The self is a conceptual chimera. 2006

• Carolyn C. Porco. The greatest story ever told. 2006

• Jordan B. Pollack. Science as just another religion. 2006

• Robert R. Provine. This is all there is. 2006

• Stephen M. Kosslyn. A science of the divine?. 2006

• Jesse Bering. Science will never silence God. 2006

• Scott Atran. Religion is the hope that is missing in science. 2006

• Todd E. Feinberg. Myths and fairy tales are not true. 2006

• David Lykken. Parental licensure. 2006

• Judith Rich Harris. Zero parental influence. 2006

• John Gottman. The focus on emotional intelligence. 2006

• Alison Gopnik. A cacophany of 'controversy'. 2006

• Stewart Brand. Applied history. 2006

• Jared Diamond. Tribal peoples often damage their environment and make war. 2006

• Charles Seife. Nothing. 2006

• Susan Blackmore. Everything is pointless. 2006

• Daniel C. Dennett. There aren't enough minds to house the population explosion of memes. 2006

• Randolph M. Nesse. Unspeakable ideas. 2006

• Kai Krause. Anty gravity: chaos theory in an all-too-practical sense. 2006

• Rupert Sheldrake. Navigating by new scientific principles. 2006

• Simon Baron-Cohen. A political system based on empathy. 2006

• Tor Norretranders. Social relativity. 2006

• Gregory Cochran. There is something new under the sun -- us. 2006

• Donald D. Hoffman. A spoon is like a headache. 2006

• Gerald Holton. Projection of the longevity curve. 2006

• Ray Kurzweil. The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion. 2006

• Freeman J. Dyson. The domestication of biotechnology. 2006

• Philip Campbell. Public engagement in science and technology. 2006

• Joel Garreau. Suppose Faulkner was right?. 2006

• Eric Fischl. What if the unknown becomes known and is not replaced with a new unknown?. 2006

• Michael Shermer. Where goods cross frontiers, armies won't. 2006

• Matt Ridley. Government is the problem, not the solution. 2006

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The free market. 2006

• Arnold Trehub. Modern science is a product of biology. 2006

• Roger C. Schank. No more teacher's dirty looks. 2006

• Clifford A. Pickover. We are all virtual. 2006

• Geoffrey F. Miller. Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox. 2006

• Sherry Turkle. Simulation versus authenticity. 2006

• Dan Sperber. Culture is natural. 2006

• Timothy Taylor. The human brain is a cultural artifact. 2006

• Eric R. Kandel. Free will is exercised unconsciously. 2006

• Clay Shirky. Free will is going away. 2006

• Mahzarin R. Banaji. The limits of introspection. 2006

• Barry C. Smith. What we know may not change us. 2006

• Richard E. Nisbett. Telling more than we can know. 2006

• Andy Clark. The quick-thinking zombies inside us. 2006

• Philip G. Zimbardo. The banality of evil, the banality of heroism. 2006

• Douglas Rushkoff. Open-source currency. 2006

• David Bodanis. Is the West already on a downhill course?. 2006

• Juan Enriquez. Technology can untie the United States. 2006

• Haim Harari. Democracy may be on its way out. 2006

• James J. O'Donnell. Marx was right: the state will evaporate. 2006

• Howard Gardner. Following Sisyphus. 2006

• Ernst Pöppel. How can I trust, in the face of so many unknowables?. 2006

• Leo M. Chalupa. A twenty-four-hour period of absolute solitude. 2006

This collection provides 148 answers to the 2012 Edge question: “What is your favourite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” Each entry is one-half to three pages; some are insightful, some are obvious, some are captured by the title, some are bonkers. The shortness of the essays makes the book a useful travelling companion, for those situations where reading can only occur in snatched fragments of time. But my objection at the end of my review of Cochran’s Tips for Time Travellers holds here too: the shortness of the articles allows no space for developing an argument.

Contents

• Susan Blackmore. Evolution by Means of Natural Selection. 2013

• Matt Ridley. Life Is a Digital Code. 2013

• Richard Dawkins. Redundancy Reduction and Pattern Recognition. 2013

Horace Barlow's 1961 neurobiology papers

• Scott Atran. The Power of Absurdity. 2013

The paradox of believing in absurd ideas

• Carlo Rovelli. How Apparent Finality Can Emerge. 2013

Final cause as an explanatory shortcut

• Aubrey de Grey. The Overdue Demise of Monogamy. 2013

Rawls' idea of "reflective equilibrium", how we "identify and resolve logical inconsistencies" in our moral ideas

• Leonard Susskind. Boltzmann's Explanation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 2013

• Joel Gold. The Dark Matter of the Mind . 2013

On self-sabotage. [And what a horrifically revealing very first sentence: "There are people who want stable marriage yet continue to cheat on their wives."]

• Alan Alda. "There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth … Than Are Dreamt of in Your Philosophy.". 2013

There is always more to know

• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. An Unresolved (and Therefore Unbeautiful) Reaction to the Edge Question. 2013

Explanations are beautiful because they are satisfying, not vice versa (or maybe not…)

• James J. O'Donnell. Ptolemy's Universe. 2013

… was "a huge advance on what had gone before"

• Paul J. Steinhardt. Quasi-elegance. 2013

Quasicrystals with forbidden symmetries as evidence that the "elegance and simplicity" of standard crystallography is "infinitely wrong"

• Shing-Tung Yau. Mathematical Object or Natural Object?. 2013

That abstract concepts describe nature quite accurately

• Frank Wilczek. Simplicity. 2013

Simplicity as short description length

• Thomas Metzinger. Simplicity Itself. 2013

Elegance as simplicity

• Sean M. Carroll. Einstein Explains Why Gravity Is Universal. 2013

Gravity is a property of spacetime iteself

• Steven Pinker. Evolutionary Genetics and the Conflicts of Human Social Life. 2013

• Jonathan Gottschall. The Faurie-Raymond Hypothesis. 2013

Why left-handedness has survived

• David G. Myers. Group Polarization. 2013

Group interaction tends to amplify people's initial inclinatons

• Armand Marie Leroi. The Price Equation. 2013

… describes all kinds of variation-selection processes

• Gerd Gigerenzer. Unconscious Inferences . 2013

Cognition with incomplete information needs to make bets and risk errors: optical illusions are one such error

• Martin J. Rees. Snowflakes and the Multiverse. 2013

Snowflakes obey the same laws of physics ut each is different; so with the multiverse?

• Anton Zeilinger. Einstein's Photons. 2013

Einstein invented photons not to explain the photo-electric effect, but to explain the entropy of radiation

• Jeremy Bernstein. Go Small. 2013

A clock that could measure the Planck time would collapse into a black hole

• Andrei Linde. Why Is Our World Comprehensible?. 2013

We can only live in a universe where we can predict the future, and that's why mathematics describes the world well

• George Dyson. Alfven's Cosmos. 2013

A hierarchical universe can have an average density of zero yet contain infinite mass

• Max Tegmark. Our Universe Grew Like a Baby. 2013

Immediately after the Big Bang the universe "inflated" by repeatedly doubling in size, and this inflation explains many properties of the universe we see

• Gino Segre. Kepler et al. and the Nonexistent Problem. 2013

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the solar system "solved" a non-existent problem; attempts to explain elementary particle masses are similar

• Freeman J. Dyson. How Incompatible Worldviews Can Coexist . 2013

A LIGO-like experiment to detect a single graviton would collapse into a black hole; theories of quantum gravity may be untestable in principle

• Satyajit Das. Impossible Inexactness. 2013

The quantum uncertainty principle

• Haim Harari. The Next Level of Fundamental Matter?. 2013

Creating the universe from two types of particles, "rishons"

• Robert R. Provine. Observers Observing. 2013

Observation as the link between all empirical sciences

• Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. Genes, Claustrum, and Consciousness. 2013

The clausrum in the brain as the seat of the unity of consciousness

• David M. Eagleman. Overlapping Solutions. 2013

The brain is made of many competing, overlapping, interfering processes

• Mahzarin R. Banaji. Our Bounded Rationality. 2013

• Robert M. Sapolsky. Swarm Intelligence. 2013

• Keith Devlin. Language and Natural Selection. 2013

• Richard H. Thaler. Commitment. 2013

Becoming better off by restricting our future choices; self-commitment to a future course of action

• Jennifer Jacquet. Tit for Tat. 2013

Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma stragey

• Judith Rich Harris. True or False: Beauty Is Truth. 2013

The deeper an explanation, the less likely to be elegant; the theory of the modular mind

• Dan Sperber. Eratosthenes and the Modular Mind . 2013

Some of the modules in our minds are meta-representational

• Clay Shirky. Dan Sperber's Explanation of Culture. 2013

Culture as the residue of the epidemic spread of ideas

• Hugo Mercier. Metarepresentations Explain Human Uniqueness. 2013

• Nicholas Humphrey. Why the Human Mind May Seem to Have an Elegant Explanation Even If It Doesn't. 2013

Evolution does not produce elegant explanations

• Stewart Brand. Fitness Landscapes. 2013

• Kevin P. Hand. On Oceans and Airport Security. 2013

The same fundamental physics discovers oceans on Europa and metal on passengers

• Paul Saffo. Plate Tectonics Elegantly Validates Continental Drift. 2013

• Daniel C. Dennett. Why Some Sea Turtles Migrate. 2013

… may be due to continental drift

• Carl Zimmer. A Hot Young Earth: Unquestionably Beautiful and Stunningly Wrong. 2013

Kelvin's model of the age of the Earth: elegant, beautiful, simple, wrong

• David M. Buss. Sexual-Conflict Theory. 2013

• David Pizarro. The Seeds of Historical Dominance. 2013

… are due to different physical environments, according to Jared's Guns, Germas and Steel

• Howard Gardner. The Importance of Individuals . 2013

Individuals, or small groups, can change the world

• Andrian Kreye. Subjective Environment. 2013

Umwelt, the subjective environment perceived and acted on by an organism, as opposed to Umfeld, objective environment that acts on all organisms in it

• Raphael Bousso. My Favorite Annoying Elegant Explanation: Quantum Theory. 2013

Many physical theories point to their own destruction, where they fail; quantum mechanics does not

• Eric R. Weinstein. Einstein's Revenge: The New Geometric Quantum. 2013

Geometry as the unifying principle

• Dave Winer. What Time Is It?. 2013

Why I don't wear a watch any more

• Tania Lombrozo. Realism and Other Metaphysical Half-Truths. 2013

Explanations so complelling we don't even notice them

• Seirian Sumner. All We Need Is Help. 2013

The evolution of cooperation

• Helena Cronin. In the Beginning Is the Theory. 2013

The primacy and fundamental role of theories in the aquistion and growth of knowledge

• Paul Bloom. Thompson On Development. 2013

D'Arcy Thompson: "Everything is the way it is because it got that way"; organisms have two histories: evolution and development

• John McWhorter. How Do You Get from a Lobster to a Cat?. 2013

We chordates have our spines at the back, unlike arthropods, possibly because some ancient ancestor started swimming upside-down

• Gregory Cochran. Germs Cause Disease. 2013

• Christine A. Finn. Dirt Is Matter Out of Place. 2013

• Andrew Lih. Information Is the Resolution of Uncertainty. 2013

• P. Z. Myers. Everything Is the Way It Is Because It Got That Way. 2013

D'Arcy Thompson, and the importance of process and history in biology

• David Christian. The Idea of Emergence. 2013

Emergent properties are real, but don't exist in the components

• Dimitar D. Sasselov. Frames of Reference. 2013

Flow moves through an Eulerian frame; a Lagrangian frame moves with the flow

• Helen Fisher. Epigenetics---the Missing Link. 2013

Epigenetics allows different expression of genes from the same genome

• John Naughton. Flocking Behavior in Birds. 2013

Complex behaviour from simple rules

• Barry C. Smith. Lemons Are Fast. 2013

People share certain cross-modal correspondences between the senses

• John Tooby. Falling into Place: Entropy and the Desperate Ingenuity of Life. 2013

Natural selection as an entropy-delaying process

• Peter W. Atkins. Why Things Happen. 2013

... because entropy increases

• Elizabeth Dunn. Why We Feel Pressed for Time. 2013

As time becomes more valuable, it is perceived as scarcer

• Bart Kosko. Why The Sun Still Shines. 2013

Hydrogen fusion

• Charles Simonyi. Boscovich's Explanation of Atomic Forces. 2013

Why particles must exert a repulsive force when they are close together

• Gregory S. Paul. Birds Are the Direct Descendants of Dinosaurs. 2013

• Bruce Hood. Complexity Out of Simplicity . 2013

Fourier's theorem shows how everything can be made from sine waves.

• A. C. Grayling. Russell's Theory of Descriptions. 2013

How Russell formalised the statement "the present king of France is bald" and showed that it is false, rather than indeterminate.

• Timo Hannay. Feynman's Lifeguard. 2013

Feynamn path integrals and the principle of least action.

• Brian Eno. The Limits of Intuition. 2013

Intuition provides us quick-and-dirty answers based on our prior experience, and can sometimes be totally wrong.

• Lisa Randall. The Higgs Mechanism. 2013

How particles get their mass.

• Simone Schnall. The Mind Thinks in Embodied Metaphors. 2013

"embodied metaphors provide a common language of the mind"

• Benjamin K. Bergen. Metaphors Are in the Mind. 2013

Metaphors are central to cognition: they are how we understand abstractions by relation to the physical world.

• Jon Kleinberg. The Pigeonhole Principle. 2013

Why some of your ancestors must have been blood relations.

• Marti Hearst. Why Programs Have Bugs. 2013

Combinatorial explosion means that the "universe of possibilities is too wide open, too unconstrained, to permit elimination of errors."

• Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Cagepatterns. 2013

How the artist Gerhard Richter and the composer John Cage use chance and uncertainty in their work.

• Seth Lloyd. The True Rotational Symmetry of Space. 2013

You need to rotate the world through 720 degrees, not just 360 degrees, to get back to the same state.

• Charles Seife. The Pigeonhole Principle Revisited. 2013

Why it is impossible to have a universal file compressor, and how the same argument possibly implies the universe contains an infinite number of copies of each of us.

• Rodney A. Brooks. Moore's Law. 2013

Why Moore's law is possible for digital technology, but not for material technologies.

• John C. Mather. Cosmic Complexity. 2013

How complexity arises from instability.

• Scott D. Sampson. The Gaia Hypothesis. 2013

"The Gaia lens encourages us to reenvision Earthbound nature as an intertwined, finite whole"

• Laurence C. Smith. The Continuity Equations. 2013

Consequences of the conservation of mass, because the Earth is an open system with respect to energy, but a closed system with resept to mass.

• Tim O'Reilly. Pascal's Wager. 2013

Pascal's wager applied to climate change: even if there is no climate change, investing to combat it will result in new jobs, more security, and less pollution.

• S. Abbas Raza. Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. 2013

Why walruses are 50:50 male:female, despite many males never breeding.

• Evgeny Morozov. The Collingridge Dilemma. 2013

The tradeoff between knowing the impact of a new technology, and the ease of controlling it: once the impact has become apparent, it is too entrnched to be easily controllable.

• Ernst Pöppel. Trusting Trust. 2013

Several haiku on trust.

• Bruce Parker. It Just Is?. 2013

If there is a most fundamental form of matter, will it have an explanation?

• Patrick Bateson. Subverting Biology. 2013

The balance between the benefits of inbreeding and outbreeding affect who are the ingroup and outgroup; changing this could help us all live together.

• Simon Baron-Cohen. Sex at Your Fingertips. 2013

The correlation between testosterone and the ratio of finger lengths.

• Alvy Ray Smith. Why Do Movies Move?. 2013

Adding motion blur to animated films makes them appear less jerky; soon we will have the computer power to do the same for video games.

• Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Would You Like Blue Cheese with It?. 2013

Which food combinations work differ between Western and Eastern cuisine.

• Stuart Pimm. Mother Nature's Laws. 2013

Laws of evolution, and why it's easier to make a species extinct than we might think.

• Karl Sabbagh. The Oklo Pyramid. 2013

A prehistoric natural nuclear reactor.

• Adam Alter. Kitty Genovese and Group Apathy. 2013

People in groups are more reluctant to take action than people alone.

• Gerald Smallberg. The Wizard of I. 2013

How internal processes remove some of our experience during saccades, to make vision work.

• Douglas Coupland. One Coincidence; Two Deja Vus. 2013

Coincidences almost never occur, given how many could; déjà vu happens twice a year.

• Katinka Matson. Occam's Razor. 2013

This summary is longer than the article.

• Alun Anderson. Deep Time. 2013

How the realisation that the Earth is incredibly old changed people's worldview.

• Eric R. Kandel. Placing Psychotherapy on a Scientific Basis: Five Easy Lessons. 2013

Psychotherapy has overtaken psychoanalysis because the former has been placed on a sound scientific basis.

• Sherry Turkle. Transitional Objects. 2013

Transitoinal objects, like a teddy bear, allow children to learn that external objects can be loved; now we have a new generation of digital transitional objects, computers, that are not meant to be abandoned,

• Randolph M. Nesse. Natural Selection Is Simple but the Systems It Shapes Are Unimaginably Complex. 2013

Change the metaphor: evolved organisms are better understood as complex intereacting ecosystems, rather than as machines.

• Marcel Kinsbourne. How to Have a Good Idea. 2013

Evolution

• Nicholas A. Christakis. Out of the Mouths of Babes. 2013

Why the sky is blue: a combination of Rayleigh scattering and how our eyes work.

• Philip Campbell. The Beauty in a Sunrise. 2013

Why the position of sunrise changes throughout the year; why the sky is blue and sunrises are red; what powers the sun.

• Dylan Evans. The Origin of Money. 2013

How money can emerge gradually, without the need for central banks or government control.

• Douglas Rushkoff. The Precession of the Simulacra. 2013

The distinction between reality and simulations or symbols is crucial, but some symbols have become real.

• Philip G. Zimbardo. Time Perspective Theory. 2013

Whether we are past, present or future-oriented has a great effect on our psychologies; altering the orientation can help treat some conditions.

• Alison Gopnik. Developmental Timing Explains the Woes of Adolescence. 2013

Children used to learn impulse control through practical experience before they hit puberty's motivational and emotional changes; more theoretical schooling and earlier puberty have reversed the timescales of these processes.

• Stephen M. Kosslyn, Robin Rosenberg. Implications of Ivan Pavlov's Great Discovery. 2013

Conditioned response explains dogs salivating, accidental drug overdoses, the placebo effect, food aversion after food poisoning, and more.

• Terrence J. Sejnowski. Nature Is Cleverer Than We Are. 2013

Temporal-difference learning via dopamine and prediction

• Michael I. Norton. Imposing Randomness. 2013

Randomised experiments as a way of controlling for multiple factors (but they aren't always the right approach)

• Lawrence M. Krauss. The Unification of Electricity and Magnetism. 2013

Faraday's experiments explained by Maxwell, underpinning modern civilisation

• Neil A. Gershenfeld. Furry Rubber Bands . 2013

Explaining mathematical formalisms through familiar embodied experiences.

• Lee Smolin. The Principle of Inertia. 2013

A powerful principle, from Galileo and Descartes, to Einstein's General Relativity

• Eric J. Topol. Seeing Is Believing: From Placebos to Movies in Our Brain. 2013

Using fMRI we can see that placebos affect the same brain pathways as do the actual drug.

• Gerald Holton. The Discontinuity of Science and Culture. 2013

New science, such as Copernican theory, eventually leads to new culture and art.

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Hormesis Is Redundancy. 2013

A stressor can stimulate an organism to improve enough to be prepared for an even stronger stress. But we design our systems to be prepared only for the worst case seen so far, not realising that when that happened, it was worse than anything seen so far.

• Robert Kurzban. The Beautiful Law of Unintended Consequences. 2013

“Intervention in any sufficiently complicated system is bound to produce unintended effects”, but we can learn to see patterns of such, and maybe anticipate some of them.

• Timothy D. Wilson. We Are What We Do. 2013

Our actions can change our personalities; as Vonnegut says: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

• Samuel H. Barondes. Personality Differences: The Importance of Chance. 2013

Chance, through genetic and environmental contingencies, has a large effect on our personalities.

• Beatrice Golomb. Metabolic Syndrome: Cell Energy Adaptations in a Toxic World?. 2013

Metabolic syndrome (with symptoms of high BMI, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes) may be an adaptive response to toxins and pseudofoods.

• Emanuel Derman. Death Is the Final Repayment. 2013

Sleep puts off death.

• David Gelernter. Denumerable Infinities and Mental States. 2013

Two choices: (1) Cantor’s lovely proof that all denumerable infinities are the same size; (2) Searle’s argument that software cannot have mental states, because software only executes trivial arithmetic and logical instructions; you can imagine doing the same, but no mind emerges. [This latter argument strikes me as a case of an argument from personal incredulity, combined with a failure to scale up: yes, I can imagine doing several hundred, or even a thousand such instructions, but not billions and billions, and of course More is Different.]

• Rudy Rucker. Inverse Power Laws. 2013

Power laws, such as Zipf’s law, are ubiquitous in nature and in social systems. [Rucker has oversimplified somewhat: “the hundredth largest tree in a forest may be a hundredth as big as the largest tree”; so if the tallest tree in a redwood forest is 100m tall, then the hundredth tallest tree in that forest is 1m tall? No. The principal is correct, but the slope on the power law needs adjusting.]

• Samuel Arbesman. How the Leopard Got His Spots. 2013

Turing’s use of reaction-diffusion systems in “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” to explain animal coat patterns. [The real biology is, of course, more complicated than this.]

• Stanislas Dehaene. The Universal Algorithm for Human Decision Making. 2013

We makes decisions by accumulating the available statistical evidence and committing to a decision whenever the total exceeds a threshold.

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Lord Acton's Dilemma. 2013

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

• Victoria Stodden. Fact, Fiction, and Our Probabilistic World. 2013

Nature presents data from an unknown distribution; this variability is a different concept from measurement error.

• George Church. Elegant = Complex. 2013

Elegant explanations are those that predict the future further and better.

• Irene Maxine Pepperberg. Tinbergen's Questions. 2013

To understand a behaviour, ask its mechanism, its ontogeny, its function, and its origin.

• Gloria Origgi. The Universal Turing Machine. 2013

The UTM and the Halting Problem: the most powerful Universal Computer cannot however compute everything.

• Richard Foreman. A Matter of Poetics. 2013

Dirac's theory of holes can also be a powerful poetic metapho.

• Jared Diamond. The Origins of Biological Electricity. 2013

Hodgkin and Huxley's decisive experiments on the giant squid axon.

• Timothy Taylor. Why the Greeks Painted Red People on Black Pots. 2013

They were cheap imitations of gilded figures on unpolished silver pots.

• Andy Clark. Language As an Adaptive System. 2013

Languages alter their forms and structures to become increasingly learnable by human brians.

• Nicholas J. Carr. The Mechanism of Mediocrity. 2013

The Peter Principle.

• Michael Shermer. The Principle of Empiricism, or See for Yourself. 2013

Believe evidence, not authority.

• Kevin Kelly. We Are Stardust. 2013

We are made from byproducts of stellar nuclear fusion.