What are you optimistic about? : today's leading thinkers on why things are good and getting better / edited by John Brockman.

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 b...

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Bibliographic Details
Other Authors: Brockman, John, 1941-
Diamond, Jared M.
Language:English
Published: New York : Harper Perennial, 2007.
Edition:First U.S. edition.
Subjects:
Social prediction.
Physical Description:xxii, 374 pages ; 21 cm
Format: Book
Contents:
  • 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.