If you don’t know about Edge.org, now’s the time to start reading it. Every year, John Brockman asks a provocative question. And 2007 is the year of recognizing optimism:
As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put.
Here are a few of my favorite selections:
“My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them.” –Stephen Pinker
“Things could always be worse. Is this a cause for optimism?” –Robert Provine
“I wish I could say that I was optimistic that the problem of wrongful convictions will virtually disappear, sort of like polio. I can’t. But I am optimistic that the problem of wrongful convictions will become smaller than it once was.” –Elizabeth Loftus
“Some may throw up their hands at this increase in autism and feel despair and pessimism. They may feel that the future is bleak for all of these newly diagnosed cases of autism. But I remain optimistic that for a good proportion of them, it has never been a better time to have autism.” – Simon Baron-Cohen
“Being built under the Jura on the border of Switzerland and France the Large Hadron Collider is a serious reason of optimism for experimental science. It is the first time that the human exploration and technology will offer reproducible “hand-made” 14 TeV collisions of protons with protons.” – Maria Spiropulu
“I am optimistic that I will be dead wrong again. As I have frequently been in the past. Being a philosopher, I was strongly opposed to marriage–on strictly theoretical grounds of course! And about the only thing I always agreed on with Nietzschewas that married philosophers basically are clowns, as he put it: people who belong in a comedy play. Real life proved me wrong (at least I think so), and I am glad it did.” – Thomas Metzinger