violence, institutionalized, 96
viruses, 166
vision, 130, 139, 140, 144, 147–48, 149, 163, 188–90
robotic, 190
vitamin C, 269
Von Euxküll, Jakob, 143
Von Neumann, John, 94
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 109
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 34
Warburg, Aby, 186–87
Wason, P. C., 122
water, 157
Watson, James D., 165, 244
wave-particle duality, 28, 296–98
weather, 103, 151–52, 184
Wegener, Alfred, 244
weights and measures, standard, 341
Weinstein, Eric, 321–23
Weiss, Ben, 326
well-being, 92–93
Wetware (Bray), 171–72
Whiteread, Rachel, 283
Whitman, Walt, 229
wicked problems, 203–5
Wiesel, Torsten, 189, 190
Wilczek, Frank, 188–91
William of Ockham, 324–27
Williams, G. C., 196
willpower, 46–47, 48
Wilson, E. O., xxv, 196–97, 386
Winer, Dave, 328–29
woe, 386
Woese, Carl, 15
Wolf, Gary, 306
Woolley, Leonard, 282–83
words:
evolution of, 245
naming, 62–64, 190–91
scientific terms, 64, 190–91, 192, 193
World War II, 270
World Wide Web, see Internet
Worringer, William, 248
wrestling, 321–23
Wright, Robert, 97
writing skills, 287
Wurman, Richard Saul, 358
zero-sum games, 94–96
Zimmer, Carl, 359
Zweig, Jason, 101–2
About the Author
The founder and publisher of the online science salon Edge.org, JOHN BROCKMAN is the editor of Culture, The Mind, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, This Will Change Everything, and other volumes. He is CEO of the literary agency Brockman Inc., and lives in New York City.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Books by John Brockman
As Author:
By the Late John Brockman
37
Afterwords
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
Digerati
As Editor:
About Bateson
Doing Science
Ways of Knowing
Creativity
The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years
The Next Fifty Years
The New Humanists
Curious Minds
What We Believe but Cannot Prove
My Einstein
Intelligent Thought
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
What Are You Optimistic About?
What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
This Will Change Everything
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
As Coeditor:
How Things Are (with Katinka Matson)
Credits
Cover design by Oliver Munday
Copyright
THIS WILL MAKE YOU SMARTER. Copyright © 2012 by Edge Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780062109408
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Footnotes
* In our universe, too many things are interconnected for absolute statements of any kind, so we usually relax our criteria; for instance, “total confidence” might be relaxed from a 0 percent chance of being wrong to, say, a 1 in 3 quadrillion chance of being wrong—about the chance that as you finish this sentence, all of humanity will be wiped out by a meteor.
* If you’re wondering about the second Veeck effect, it’s the intellectual equivalent of putting a midget up to bat. And that’s another essay.
* Some have pointed out that “supervenience” may also refer to exceptional levels of convenience, as in “New Chinese take-out right around the corner—Supervenient!”