This Will Make You Smarter

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This Will Make You Smarter Page 38

by John Brockman


  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

  Speculations

  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

  12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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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!”

 

 

 


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