The wisdom of knowing what to ask [1]

[ Fri. Jan. 29. 2016 ]

Here’s a question for you:

“What is information and where does it ultimately originate?”

And another:

“Is the universe a great mechanism, a great computation, a great symmetry, a great accident or a great thought?”

The first question was posed by the physicist and writer Paul Davies, the second by John Barrow, a cosmologist, theoretical physicist and mathematician. Both were posted online nearly two decades ago at Edge.org [4], then a fledgling website created by John Brockman, an author and literary agent for science writers.

Writing back then about Edge [4] and its World Question Center, I concluded: “If a few of those questions don’t get the wheels in the brain spinning, sending some thoughts flying out of the box, nothing will.”

Not long ago I returned to Edge [4] after a few years’ absence and was happy to find it alive and well. The site’s mission remains unchanged: “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.”

One of the site’s top recurring features is the Annual Question [5]. Over the years, scientists and thinkers in a range of disciplines have responded to queries such as these: “What is the most important invention of the last 2,000 years?” (1999); “What questions have disappeared?” (2001); “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” (2005); “What should we be worried about?” (2013); and “What do you think about machines that think?” (2015).

The question for 2016—“What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?”—already has drawn nearly 200 responses from contributors ranging from 2004 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek to musician Peter Gabriel. ...

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