And Elegant Theories of How the World Works (Edge Question Series)

Articles on various topics, usually short, that describe interest of their author in a theory of their choice. It is good for reading in the occasions where you don't have dwell time for longer thought. Having a world view beyond the secular, I did get tired of it in spots and nearly put it down.

Anyone who reads this book will probably find their own highlights, insights, confirmations, and things to disagree with. This is more than a review, it's the better part of a blog entry, see everythingequalseverything dot blogspot dot com, if you want to see even more. May 2013. Sorry in advance for the length of this!

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This Explains Everything, edited by John Brockman, is a string of short answers to a question posed to the Reality Club, originally New York City intellectuals and now online at the Edge Foundation. According to its website, the Foundation tries "to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."

The question 148 people answered was this: What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful
explanation? I liked it enough to go back through a second time and extract tidbits and gems, so this has become more of a book report for myself than a book review, I'm afraid.

There were, as you can imagine, all sorts of answers. Why the sky is blue (not as simple as I had remembered), the origin of money, Bayesian probability, empiricism, organic electricity, the importance of individuals, germ theory, sexual selection. Why Greeks painted red figures on black pots, The scientific method. How languages change. A haiku poem. Some were sweet and obvious. One just wrote "keep it simple" and then crossed it out..

I found amongst them a lot of nice little take-aways: To learn how something works, first figure out how it got that way. Information is the resolution of uncertainty. To have a good idea, stop having a bad one. The brain's job is not to store or process information, it's to drive and control the actions of its large appendage, the body. When it's clear that change is needed, it is often expensive, difficult, and time consuming; and when change is easy, the need for it is difficult to foresee. Intervention in any complicated system usually causes unintended effects. Epigenetics may be the "missing link" in the nature/nurture debate. We can't perceive our environment accurately, or process it rationally. Sometimes limiting one's own choices can be a good idea. Our skill at metarepresentations, like "Mary thinks John thinks it's going to rain," may be what distinguishes us as human.

Evolution figured in strongly, as I expected. Gender ratio was used to explain the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (S. Abbas Raza). Samuel Arbesman explained how natural camouflage occurs; if you mix specific chemicals they result in unique patterns depending on the size and shape of the canvas. The same mix that makes spots on the cheetah body will form stripes on his tail. Make a giraffe the size and shape of a cow and the spots change to Heifer.

Dawkins explained how sight in animals saves bandwidth by mainly detecting edges of moving objects with "strangeness neurons." The brain assumes everything else has remained the same. David Eagleman called the brain an "inelegant device" with enough redundancy to solve the problem many different ways.

Jennifer Jacquet explained why tit for tat is a simple solution to the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma, and Robert Sapolsky showed how simple algorithms applied in quantity, as with ants, can lead to "swarm intelligence" of groups.

The ratio between the second and fourth finger length shows how much testosterone one received in the womb, which directly affects one's personality and interests.

Memes got support, of sorts, from Clay Shirky. Dan Dennett argued that when someone derides an evolutionary explanation as a "just so" story they usually have a political motive. They aren't presenting evidence that the story is false, he said -- plenty end up true. It only means perhaps the hypothesis hasn't been adequately tested. And they are incredulous.

I liked these two a lot: "Natural selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to lose rather than grow functional organization - the only natural physical process that pushes populations of organisms uphill (sometimes) into higher degrees of functional order" (John Tooby). And Peter Atkins added that evolution is a device, like a water turbine, which harnesses entropy, and "thus, dispersal results in a local structure, even though, overall, the world has sunk a little more into disorder." Regardless of how it may seem, everything is always getting worse!

Alison Gopniks explained that puberty comes much earlier now than in our evolutionary past, probably because of better nutrition. What's more, common sense kicks in later than before, due to a more protective environment today: "It's truer to say that our experience of controlling our impulses makes the prefrontal cortex develop than it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses." Result: a long period in adolescence where the engines are revved but neither steering nor brakes are ready. Hence violence, accidents, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, etc.

Another nice if simple one, by Brian Eno - yes, that Brian Eno. He pointed out the nature of intuition. "[It] is not a quasi-mystical voice from outside ourselves speaking through us but a sort of quick-and-dirty processing of our prior experience."
Barry Smith was one of several who focused on metaphor. We're full of "cross-modal correspondences," such that happy is high, sad is low, music is sharp or flat, lemons are fast and mangos are slow ... and this is useful in communication and quite likely influences our aesthetic sense.

People who make more money feel more pressed for time. Hence, someone suggested, by volunteering ones time, time itself is worth less, and so you feel you have more of it! And that was Elizabeth Dunn; I think I once read something similar by Douglas Adams, in praise of misery.

I loved this one: Recursive abstraction by Douglas Rushkoff: "Land becomes territory; territory then becomes property that is owned. Property itself can be represented by a deed, and the deed can be mortgaged. The mortgage is itself an investment that can be bet against with a derivative, which can be secured with a credit default swap." There's value, the representations of value, and eventually a disconnection from what has value. The tragedy comes at the moment when we forget what the abstractions represent, and then we become vulnerable to fantasy, illusion, and abuse. "Because once we're living in a world of created symbols and simulations, whoever has control of the map has control of our reality."

Recipes worldwide are based on 300 ingredients, according to Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, and the ingredients vary in several dimensions (sweet, sour, bitter, etc.). By categorizing ingredients and studying recipes researchers found that meals in the West are mostly coordinated (creamy with creamy, etc.) while easterners combine polar opposites.

Videos consist of sequential frames, so how do we perceive motion? First, an object must move not too fast and not too far between frames. Then, there is a persistence of vision itself which fills the short gap between them. Finally, movement creates a blur in each frame, which indicates what is moving, in what direction, and how fast. Pixar makes animations that look so real by adding the little blur.

Time Perspective Theory was pretty interesting: some people are oriented toward the past, present, or future and each of these has negative or positive spin. So there are six "time zones" to choose from. For example, past-oriented folks may be driven by regret, failure, abuse, or trauma - or by gratitude, success, or nostalgia. Apparently past-negative is related to anxiety, depression, and anger "with correlations as robust as .75," and others are correlated with particular afflictions too.

One extraordinary claim was that a normal brain shows activity about a third of a second before the person is aware of the sensation or phenomenon. I've heard this before. And Gerald Smallberg said we simply erase confusing bits from our stream of consciousness to make our experiences more understandable -- it's these gaps that are exploited by card sharks, hustlers, and magicians. Eric Topol reported that researchers in Berkeley have used a brain image to reconstruct the youtube video the person was watching at the time. I looked it up on youtube and wow. It's uncanny.

A handful came across to me as misguided, mistaken, or wrong. The process of natural selection was completely misrepresented, like here: "Nature, unlike risk engineers, prepares for what has not happened before, assuming worst harm is possible. If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next war." Someone else argued the opposite, also wrong: The Generalized Peter Principle: "in evolution, systems tend to develop up to the limit of their adaptive competence." Someone made an argument on raw incredulity that consciousness can't have evolved. One claimed that the Inverse Power Law is ubiquitous in natural systems, so that the thousandth largest stone on a beach is a thousandth the size of the largest one, and so on , and the same for everything else. It is "inevitable as entropy or the law of gravity." I know some bell curves which would disagree. And here's another: someone actually claimed déjà vu experiences happen every six months, like clockwork. Every year, "Not one. Not three. Two." And there was a blank slate claim that people discover who they are by observing their own behavior, and therefore personalities can be shaped by manipulating experiences. Someone liked the Gaia Hypothesis.

But anything having to do with deep physics, I could not judge. There were many, and they just went right over my head. Higgs Boson. Holographic pigeonhole, infinite universes, spiners. Fermi levels at a junction ... words, just words.

This is not another "A Short History of Everything", an amusing and informative Bill Bryson book. This is an overly intellectual, dry, abstract collection of essays that put me to sleep all too fast. I asked for my money back.

Of the 150 essays a few were very interesting and were written so that people other than specialists in the field could understand their points.. The remainder were mostly scientific jargon or discussions so deep that only people who have studied the field could follow the points that were trying to be made.

I enjoy the scientific method, but this book was self congratulatory and boring. I learned nothing other than arrogance. True science is humble and curious. This was like Dawkins in a drunken rant.

Not sure if it is because English is my second language, I couldn't understand most of the content in this book. But I am in this country for 22 years in Information Technology field and never had to read through such tough English. The author should have written the book in simple English so that much more people could have enjoyed the book.

There is a lot to interest, amuse, and enlighten the reader in this volume, but, as you would expect, the quality of the essays varies greatly. Some authors take the question seriously and give answers worth reading. Others, like today's experienced politicians, replace it with one they prefer, and in at least one case, one the author invented himself. Since these essays are brief, they often glide over details and omit counter arguments, but may lead the reader to further inquiry. The best--those by Dawkins, Diamond, and Freeman Dyson--are terrific.

One howler stands out. Stanislas Dehaene begins his essay on The Universal Algorithm for Human Decision Making with the sentence: "The ultimate goal of science, as the French physicist, Jean Perrin once stated, should be "to substitute visible complexity for an invisible simplicity." In fact Perrin said exactly the opposite-- and Dehaene himself actually means the opposite of what he wrote since he argues that behind the observable complexity of human decision making one finds the mathematical simplicity of Bayes' Law,

The Edge question anthologies are remarkable collections of brief essays on a wide variety of scientific topics. Reading them at once provides a small education in much of the most interesting scientific research being done today. This particular Anthology is no exception and the choices of the most elegant, beautiful and comprehensive scientific explanations are almost always interesting. One answer however provides the keynote to the whole collection. That answer is that it is the scientific method itself as Nathan Myrhvold suggests, Man's moving from explaining through storytelling to explaining by observation and test, which is key to so many of the other interesting explanations provided here.

A curious blend of thoughts and many beautiful writings encompassing many scientific disciplines. The premise of the book is good too. I am rereading many of the essays and tatooing many pages with notes and exclamations.

Very much enjoyed these little gems of essays/paragraphs/lines (some weren't even a sentence; longest is 3 pages) about many different topics.

Favorite and longest-lasting: hormesis. I wrote about that in a blog post, relating to to romantic heartbreak, on 2/15/14.

90+% of the short pieces in the book are dazzling, amazing. [One that wasn't was written by Alan Alda; what the hell was he doing in there, in the midst of brilliant scientists, I don't know.] A smile never left my face reading this incredibly interesting book. After consuming it with my eyes, I jumped on the computer to try to learn yet more on what all I learned from the Internet.

If you love science and learning about a galaxy of different things, you will respond to this book's charms and wonders.

Great idea for a collection of essays, and impressive array of thinkers, writers, and "doers" who have weighed in. Only complaint is, of all things, brevity. The essays are so short that I found it hard to "sink into" any one particular suggestion, idea, or response. Maybe if I could read one--only one--essay at a time, then I could consider the ideas more carefully. But I can't seem to do that, so I found it disconcerting to bounce around so frequently.

I sincerely enjoyed this book and all of it's essays. Each time I would read an essay I would feel a warmth inside of me as if I grew that very moment of allowing myself to view what each and every one of those writers feel the most beautiful theory is.

yes I know it sounds cheesy, but hey it's a great book and short incase you are looking for a quick read.

Since Darwin's simple and elegant theory of Evolution and Natural Selection explains so much with so little, including how the horses the essayists rode in on evolved, any idea or theory proposed other than was not a genuine response to the question of "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation". Most of the essays do not gain any traction with the reader, and many are incomprehensible to most lay people or even academics with a different area of expertise as the topic written about. Take the following as an example: "Unfortunately for physics, mathematicians had dropped the ball and not sufficiently developed the geometry of infinite-dimensional systems (such as the Standard model), which would have been analogous to the four-dimensional Riemannian geometry appropriated from mathematics by Einstein." Who was this sentence written for, or more importantly, who was the intended target audience of this book? I find the statements on the book cover and the resulting expectations set as borderline misleading.

This book will not "Revolutionize your understanding of the world." It's more intellectual grand standing than anything else. One cannot compress and convey deep ideas in short essay format.

A variety of essays on everything from particle physics to evolution. Not really an effort to answer questions, more an effort to raise them. These will keep the reader thinking and pondering for days to come

I agree with many of the negative reviews here I'm afraid and am sad I wasted my money that I should have spent on 10 more science degrees, plus a vocabulary course to understand what many of them were writing about.

I got 2/3's through it and couldn't stand any more, so I gave it a good test but never got anything like I had hoped from this so called "Explains Everything" manual.

To top it all off, it was in the kings English and I couldn't understand a good deal of that as well, so I was just frustrated on every level.
There is NO STORY at all, but a compilation of what other scientists thought were amazing discoveries. Right up my alley so to speak, and they went from laughable foolishness, to so involved I had no idea what they were talking about, especially in the social sciences.
I could give examples, but no one cares anyhow and it just frustrates me to deal with this book right now in any form so....I'll end with saying the book was awful for me.
I would never, EVER recommend it and some of those people that wrote good reviews have no idea what they heard, but still wrote something nice.
I'm a science major all my life, and still didn't get some of these concepts they attempted to explain.
Total waste of my time and money.

SORRY I BOUGHT THIS book, as once more, someone that says they have all the answers, has only one answer as usual and that's....."how to get our money in their bank account."

It looks like very few women, and almost nobody outside the USA/Northern Europe axis are smart enough to join this party - or maybe they were never invited. It would be nice to hear from the 1 billion or so people on the planet who are on the edge of starvation, the edge of citizenship, the edge of justice. I got about 1/3 of the way into this collection before I got so bored I had to quit. Clever, but no more plausible than Velikovsky or Von Daniken, who were at least amusing.

Ask a bunch of university luminaries in the sciences and mathematics to describe an elegant theory, and you'll end up with 400 pages of the most boring writing you'll ever read! These are very bright people, but they are completely lost in their intellectual ivory towers. They are trying to describe the universe from a rational, scientific perspective and it is BORING! This should not be a book for common consumption. I fell asleep regularly trying to read it! Oh, and by the way, the book "explains" nothing . . .

Absolutely amazing book! Round up 150 great thinkers (researchers, philosophers, and various academics in the arts and sciences) and ask them each to write a brief essay on what they consider theiir favorite "deep, beautiful and elegant explanation." The essays range in length from a brief (but memorable) single sentence, to maybe 3 pages. Each essay is self-contained, and with the exception of a couple of duds (one in economics, and another too-densely-written philosophical note) ranged from superb to outstanding. With only one or two exceptions, all essays are accessible to people who don't have a Ph.D. in the field. It might make your brain hurt from time to time, but it's worth it.
I immediately ordered the other 4 books in this series. This'll be a very hard act to follow, though.