Lawrence Krauss, Physicist, Foundation Professor, and director, Origins Project, Arizona State University; author, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science The notion of uncertainty is perhaps the least well understood concept in science. In the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad...

Kevin Kelly, Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants points out that we can learn nearly as much from an experiment that does not work as from one that does. Failure is not something to be avoided but rather something to be cultivated. That’s a lesson from science that...

Neil Gershenfeld, Physicist; director, MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; author, Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t—they make and...

Martin Seligman, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and director of the Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania; author, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being Is global well-being possible? Scientists commonly predict dystopias: nuclear war,...

Paul Kedrosky, Editor, Infectious Greed; senior fellow, Kauffman Foundation When John Cabot came to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in 1497, he was astonished at what he saw. Fish, so many fish—fish in numbers he could hardly comprehend. According to Farley Mowat, Cabot wrote that the...

George Church, Professor, Harvard University; director, Personal Genome Project The names Lysenko and Lamarck are nearly synonymous with bad science—worse than merely mediocre science because of the huge political and economical consequences. From 1927 to 1964, Trofim Lysenko managed to keep...

Thomas A. Bass, Professor of English, State University of New York–Albany; author, The Spy Who Loved Us This year, Edge is asking us to identify a scientific concept that “would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit.” Not clever enough to invent a concept of my own, I am voting for a...

Gerald Holton, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and professor of the history of science, emeritus, Harvard University; coeditor, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art and Modern Culture In politics and society at large, important decisions are all too often based on deeply...

Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine; adjunct professor, Claremont Graduate University; author, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths One of the most general shorthand abstractions that, if...

Robert R. Provine, Psychologist and neuroscientist, University of Maryland; author, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation TANSTAAFL is the acronym for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” a universal truth having broad and deep explanatory power in science and daily life. The...

Nicholas A. Christakis, Physician and social scientist, Harvard University; coauthor (with James H. Fowler), Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives Some people like to build sand castles and some like to tear them apart. There can be much joy in the...

Jon Kleinberg, Professor of computer science, Cornell University; coauthor (with David Easley), Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World If you used a personal computer twenty-five years ago, everything you needed to worry about was taking place in the box in...

Clay Shirky, Social and technology network topology researcher; adjunct professor, NYU Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program; author, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age You see the pattern everywhere: The top 1 percent of the population controls...

Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time points out that the universe functions according to rules based on the state of the universe and the laws of the universe. The world consists of things, which obey rules. If...

Lisa Randall, Physicist, Harvard University; author, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions The word “science” itself might be the best answer to this year’s Edge Question. The idea that we can systematically understand certain aspects of the...

For rational people, dismissing the silliness around the supposed end of the world on May 21 is all too easy. The fascination with our demise isn’t limited to deluded zealots. Remember predictions of Y2K? Of Malthusian food shortages because of overpopulation? Of life-choking...

Carlo Rovelli, Physicist, Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; author, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy There is a widely held notion that does plenty of damage: the notion of “scientifically proved.” Nearly an oxymoron. The very foundation of science is to keep...

How Many Sailors Does it Take to Recover an Astronaut? Images of splashdowns have become iconic of the space race era; an Apollo command module suspended under its three red and white parachutes as it hits the Pacific Ocean have the power to invoke feelings of pride with an epic American...

Modern day science is unable to describe an entire universe that scientists might want to study. While the most sophisticated mathematic formula and physics law only explain some of the concepts that models part of this ever expanding universe, scientist are constantly looking for simple, yet...