Analog SFF, April 2010 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: TAKEN ON FAITH by Jeffery D. Kooistra

I bought this book a few years ago: What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty. It is edited by John Brockman and available from Harper Perennial (ISBN-10: 0-06-084181-8, copyright 2006). I don't recall exactly why I bought it, although I am fairly certain that I thought I might discuss it in an Alternate View. Otherwise, any subtitle that tells me the book contains the musings of “today's leading thinkers” puts up a big red flag. Our leading thinkers? Who selected these people and why are they considered “leading thinkers"? There being no formal, recognized operational definition of the breed, it is simply a matter of opinion as to which people qualify. And you all know how fond I am of other people's opinions.

That having been said, I do recognize the need for rhetorical flourish in subtitles. The book contains musings from 109 contributors, one of whom also wrote the introduction, and the editor. I was pretty confident I'd find something inside that I'd have an alternate view about, or that one of the writers would have an alternate view of his own that I could present.

Just flipping through the pages, of which there are about 260, one finds that the typical contributor took about a page and a half to tell us what he believed but could not prove. Some took a few more, and several took much less. Personally, I have a bit of a problem with accepting someone as a “leading thinker” when he can't conjure up even one page on the subject at hand.

I confess that most of the names were completely unfamiliar to me. No offense Terrence Sejnowski, but I've never heard of you. I can see in the little bio that precedes each contribution that you're a computational neuroscientist and the coauthor of a book called The Computational Brain, but I must have missed that one. Christine Finn, archaeologist and journalist, author of two books, same deal.

However, there are plenty of names that I did recognize, among them genuinely famous scientists (leading thinkers or not) that I'm sure most of the Analog audience has heard of, and several science fiction writers as well, some of whom have appeared in these very pages. There are names like Ray Kurzweil, Richard Dawkins, P. C. W. Davies, Michael Shermer, Bruce Stirling, Freeman Dyson (a leading thinker in anyone's book!), Daniel C. Dennett, Lawrence M. Krauss (The Physics of Star Trek author), Lee Smolin (I wrote about his book a few columns ago), Gregory Benford, Rudy Rucker, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Okay, I admit it, I had never heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, but I liked his contribution and thought it made for a fitting concluding essay.)

I've selected a few of the essays to discuss below. This should give you a good feel for what you'll find in the book, but I'll tell you right now that I think it is worth a read.

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