SS > NF reviews > John Brockman

Books

[The Third Culture. 1995]
(The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years. 2000)
(The Next Fifty Years. 2002)
(What is Your Dangerous Idea?. 2006)

Books : reviews

Contents

• Brian C. Goodwin.
The Printing Press

• Rodney A. Brooks.
The Electric Motor

• Tom Standage.
Telecommunications Technology

• Colin Tudge.
The Plow

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

• Alun Anderson.
The Caravel

• Samuel H. Barondes.
Organized Science

• John R. Searle.
The Green Revolution

• Marc D. Hauser.
The Electric Light and Aspirin

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

• Leon Lederman.
The Printing Press and the Thermos Bottle

• Richard Potts.
Flying Machines

• Paolo Pignatelli.
The University

• Douglas Rushkoff.
The Eraser

• Viviana Guzman.
Television

• Garniss Curtis.
Gutenberg's Press with Movable Type

• Susan Blackmore.
The Contraceptive Pill

• Patrick Bateson.
The Harnessing of Electricity

• Carl Zimmer.
Waterworks

• Robert Shapiro.
Genetic Sequencing

• Howard Gardner.
Classical Music

• Roger C. Schank.
The Internet

• Randolph M. Nesse.
Printing

• Ron Cooper.
Distillation

• David Buss.
Television in its Effects on Mating Patterns

• Dan Sperber.
The Computer and the Atomic Bomb

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

• Robert R. Provine.
Universal Schooling

• Duncan Steel.
The Thirty-Three Year English Protestant Calendar: (see also talk at Seacon'03)

• Peter Tallack.
The Stirrup and the Horse Collar

• John C. Baez.
Social Structures that Enable Inventions

• Terrence J. Sejnowski.
The Digital Bit

• Nicholas Humphrey.
Reading Glasses

• Clifford A. Pickover.
Papermaking

• Freeman J. Dyson.
Hay

• Daniel C. Dennett.
The Battery

• Lawrence M. Krauss.
The Programmable Computer

• Gino Segre.
Lenses

• George Dyson.
The Universal Turing Machine

• Karl Sabbagh.
Chairs and Stairs

• Gordon Gould.
Double-Entry Accounting

• Bob Rafelson.
The Gatling Gun

• Stephen Budiansky.
The Domestication of the Horse

• David Haig.
The Computer

• William H. Calvin.
Computers as Modelers of Climate

• V. S. Ramachandran.
The Indo-Arabic Number System

• Peter Cochrane.
The Thermionic Valve

• Hendrik Hertzberg.
Printing

• Charles Simonyi.
Public Key Cryptosystems

• John Rennie.
Volta's Electric Battery

• Stuart R. Hameroff.
Anasthesia

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

• Steven Johnson.
The City

• Jeremy Cherfas.
The Basket

• Keith Devlin.
The Hindu-Arabic Number System

• Eberhard Zangger.
Nothing Worth Mentioning

• Henry Warwick.
Nothing

• Murray Gell-Mann.
Disbelief in the Supernatural

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

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

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

• Steven Pinker.
The Alphabet and the Lens

• Paul W. Ewald.
Evolution by Selection

• Brian Greene.
The Telescope

• Joseph F. Traub.
The Scientific Method

• Stanislas Dehaene.
The Concept of Education

• John C. Dvorak.
Computer Networks

• Geoffrey F. Miller.
Marketing

• Luyen Chou.
Philosophical Skepticism

• Piet Hut.
The Construction of Autonomous Tools

• Thomas de Zengotita.
Geometry

• Marney Morris.
The Atomic Bomb

• David E. Shaw.
The Scientific Method

• David Berreby.
The Information Economy

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

• David G. Meyers.
The Control Group

• Jay Ogilvy.
Secularism

• Milford H. Wolpoff.
Science

• Reuben Hersh.
The Interrogative Sentence; Space Travel

• Christopher Westbury.
Probability Theory

• W. Daniel Hillis.
The Clock

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

• Julian B. Barbour.
The Bell and the Symphony Orchetra

• Marvin L. Minsky.
The Identification of Smell

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

• Clay Shirky.
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem

• Colin Blakemore.
The Contraceptive Pill

• Oliver Morton.
Genetic Engineering

• John Henry Holland.
Board Games

• Jaron Lanier.
The Human Ego

• Esther Dyson.
Self-Government

• John Maddox.
The Calculus

• Bart Kosko.
The Calculus

• Verena Huber-Dyson.
The Infinitesimal Calculus

• John Horgan.
Free Will

• Tor Norretranders.
The Mirror

• Sherry Turkle.
The Idea of the Unconscious

• Richard Dawkins.
The Spectroscope

• Philip W. Anderson.
Quantum Theory

• Michael Nesmith.
The Copernican Theory

• Stewart Brand.
Christianity and Islam

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Various, Including the Flag

• Lee Smolin.
Mathematical Representation

• George Lakoff.
The Idea of an Idea

• Andy Clark.
The Digital Ecosystem

• George Johnson.
Mathematical Representation

• Howard Rheingold.
The Evolution of Technology

Contents

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

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

• Ian Stewart.
The Mathematics of 2050

• Brian C. Goodwin.
In the Shadow of Culture

• Marc D. Hauser.
Swappable Minds

• Alison Gopnik.
What Children will Teach Scientists

• Paul Bloom.
Towards a Theory of Moral Development

• Geoffrey F. Miller.
The Science of Subtlety

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
The Future of Happiness

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

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

• Stuart A. Kauffman.
What is Life?

• 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?

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

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

• Peter W. Atkins.
The Future of Matter

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

• Jaron Lanier.
The Complexity Ceiling

• David Gelernter.
Tapping into the Beam

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

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

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

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

• Paul W. Ewald.
Mastering Disease

Contents

• John Horgan.
We have no souls

• Paul Bloom.
The rejection of the soul

• David Buss.
The evolution of evil

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

• Steven Pinker.
Goups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temeraments

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

• Jerry Coyne.
Marionettes on genetic strings

• V. S. Ramachandran.
Francis Crick's dangerous idea

• Rodney A. Brooks.
Being alone in the universe

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

• Keith Devlin.
We are entirely alone

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

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

• Jeremy Bernstein.
The idea that we understand plutonium

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

• Daniel Gilbert.
The idea that ideas are dangerous

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

• Gregory Benford.
Think outside the Kyoto box

• Oliver Morton.
Our planet is not in peril

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

• Denis Dutton.
A 'grand narrative'

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

• Nicholas Humphrey.
Bertrand Russell's dangerous idea

• David Pizarro.
Hodgepodge morality

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

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

• Marco Iacoboni.
The problem with super mirrors

• Daniel Goleman.
Cyberdisinhibition

• Alun Anderson.
Brains cannot become minds without bodies

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

• Kevin Kelly.
More anonymity is good

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

• Samuel H. Barondes.
Uisng medications to change personality

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

• David G. Meyers.
A marriage option for all

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

• Seth Lloyd.
The idea of ideas

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

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

• Leonard Susskind.
The 'landscape'

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

• Brian Greene.
The multiverse

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

• Paul Steinhardt.
It's a matter of time

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

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

• Steven H. Strogatz.
The end of insight

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

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

• Rudy Rucker.
Mind is a universally distributed quality

• Thomas Metzinger.
The forbidden fruit intuition

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

• Sam Harris.
Science must destroy religion

• John Allen Paulos.
The self is a conceptual chimera

• Carolyn C. Porco.
The greatest story ever told

• Jordan B. Pollack.
Science as just another religion

• Robert R. Provine.
This is all there is

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

• Jesse Bering.
Science will never silence God

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

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

• David Lykken.
Parental licensure

• Judith Rich Harris.
Zero parental influence

• John Gottman.
The focus on emotional intelligence

• Alison Gopnik.
A cacophany of 'controversy'

• Stewart Brand.
Applied history

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

• Charles Seife.
Nothing

• Susan Blackmore.
Everything is pointless

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

• Randolph M. Nesse.
Unspeakable ideas

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

• Rupert Sheldrake.
Navigating by new scientific principles

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

• Tor Norretranders.
Social relativity

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

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

• Gerald Holton.
Projection of the longevity curve

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

• Freeman J. Dyson.
The domestication of biotechnology

• Philip Campbell.
Public engagement in science and technology

• Joel Garreau.
Suppose Faulkner was right?

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

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

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

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
The free market

• Arnold Trehub.
Modern science is a product of biology

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

• Clifford A. Pickover.
We are all virtual

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

• Sherry Turkle.
Simulation versus authenticity

• Dan Sperber.
Culture is natural

• Tim Taylor.
The human brain is a cultural artifact

• Eric R. Kandel.
Free will is exercised unconsciously

• Clay Shirky.
Free will is going away

• Mahzarin R. Banaji.
The limits of introspection

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

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

• Andy Clark.
The quick-thinking zombies inside us

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

• Douglas Rushkoff.
Open-source currency

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

• Juan Enriquez.
Technology can untie the United States

• Haim Harari.
Democracy may be on its way out

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

• Howard Gardner.
Following Sisyphus

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

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