The Edge Foundation was created in 1988 to 'seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have themselves ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.' Its main activity is maintaining the Edge website [1], edited by publisher and businessman John Brockman. John Brockman is a literary agent who specialising in scientific literature. ...

The Third Culture

The Third Culture is a term used to describe the growing movement towards an integration of literary and scientific thinking. John Brockman published a book of the same name whose themes are continued at the Edge website. Here, scientists and others are invited to contribute their thoughts in a manner readily accessible to non-specialist readers. In doing so, leading thinkers are able to communicate directly with their each other and the public without the intervention of middlemen such as journalists and jounal editors. Many areas of academic work are incorporated, including genetics, physics, mathematics, psychology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and computing technology. Past and present contributors include: Martin Rees, Craig Venter, V.S. Ramachandran, Paul Bloom, Jesse Bering, Matt Ridley, Marco Iacaboni, Paul Davies, Ernst Poeppel, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Leonard Susskind, Brian Greene, Simon Baron-Cohen, Freeman Dyson and Steven Pinker. The Third Culture is the title of a book by John Brockman which discusses the work of several well-known thinkers who are directly communicating their new, sometimes provocative, ideas to the general public. ... The Right Honourable Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, FRS (born 23 June 1942) is a professor of astronomy. ... Dr. Venter (right) with Michael Janich on his visit in Hong Kong in December 2004 John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946, Salt Lake City) is an American biologist and businessman. ... Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition. ... Matt (Matthew) Ridley (born February 7, 1958 at Newcastle upon Tyne) is a British science writer. ... Paul Charles William Davies (born April 22, 1946) is a British-born, internationally acclaimed physicist, writer and broadcaster, who holds the position of Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University, Sydney. ... Richard Dawkins Clinton Richard Dawkins DSc, FRS, FRSL (known as Richard Dawkins; born March 26, 1941) is an eminent British ethologist, evolutionary theorist, and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. ... Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher. ... Jared Diamond Jared Mason Diamond (born 10 September 1937) is a Jewish-American nonfiction author, evolutionary biologist, physiologist, and biogeographer. ... Lenny Susskind at Stanford University Leonard Susskind is a theoretical physics professor at Stanford University who is widely considered to be one of the most entertaining mavericks in the field of string theory. ... Brian Greene at Harvard Dr. Brian Greene (born February 9, 1963, New-York), is a physicist and one of the worlds foremost string theorists. ... Simon Baron-Cohen, PhD, is a renowned British psychologist and director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. ... // Freeman Dyson in San Francisco in 2005 (Photo: Jacob Appelbaum) Freeman John Dyson (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons design and policy, and for his serious theorizing in futurism and science fiction concepts, including the... Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is a prominent American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and popular science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging defence of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. ...

Publications

In recent years Edge has posed its members an annual question. In 2005 this was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The responses generated were published as a book under the title 'What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty' with an introduction by the novelist Ian McEwan. Ian McEwan CBE, (born June 21, 1948), is a British novelist (sometimes nicknamed Ian Macabre because of the nature of his early work). ...

External links

• Edge.org website
• Profile of John Brockman @ Guardian Unlimited

References

John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Simon & Schuster: 1995 ISBN 0684823446

What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, Free Press, UK, 2005 ISBN 0743275926