Science At the Edge edited by John Brockman

John Brockman, editor and author, founder of Edge, (www.edge.org), has provided a way for scientists and empirical thinkers to gather and share their explorations. At first, in the 1980’s, they met together in various locations, eventually meeting on the Internet at Edge, beginning in 1997. Brockman explains the expanding third culture as a way of thinking and exploration that goes beyond C.P. Snow’s concept of two the two cultures of the literary intellectual and the scientist. In Brockman’s words, “This new culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meaning of our lives, redefining who we are.” (Brockman, Science at the Edge, p.11). This new culture is one in which thinkers and scientists share their work, building and creating on each other’s ideas.

This optimistic and exciting way of exploring our world pushes aside the old dichotomies of God versus science, literature versus science, history versus science, or psychology versus science. There is, instead, exploration of our world and universe through the work of key thinkers like evolutionary biologist Helena Cronin, biogeographer Jared Diamond, technologist Ray Kurzweil, biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham and computer scientist Rodney Brooks, David Gelernter and Jaron Lanier.

Read Science at the Edge for a positive experience in learning about the expanding third culture, the new humanists.