Know This

Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments

By: John Brockman

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, Dan John Miller

The latest volume in the best-selling series from Edge.org - dubbed "the world's smartest website" by The Guardian - brings together 175 of the world's most innovative and brilliant thinkers to discuss recent scientific breakthroughs that will shape the future.

Scientific developments radically alter our understanding of the world. Whether it's technology, climate change, health research, or the latest revelations of neuroscience, physics, or psychology, science has, as Edge editor John Brockman says, "become a big story, if not the big story". In that spirit this new addition to Edge.org's fascinating series asks a powerful and provocative question: What do you consider the most interesting and important recent scientific news?

Contributors include the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond, on the best way to understand complex problems; the author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli, on the mystery of black holes; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the quantification of human progress; TED conferences curator Chris J. Anderson on the growth of the global brain; Harvard physicist Lisa Randall on the true measure of breakthrough discoveries; Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on why the 21st century will be shaped by our mastery of the laws of matter; music legend Peter Gabriel on tearing down the barriers between imagination and reality; and Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson on the surprising ability of small (and cheap) upstarts to compete with billion-dollar projects. Plus Nobel laureate John C. Mather, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer, Genome author Matt Ridley, Harvard geneticist George Church, and many more.

©2017 Edge Foundation, Inc. (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers

A collection of articles

Some of the articles were amazing. Some ridiculous. Extremely high variance. Nonetheless I would recommend it. But feel no shame for fast forwarding to the next of the 199 articles.

Consequences of Jeremy Englands idea

If you could sum up Know This in three words, what would they be?

Backbreaking News

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no

Any additional comments?

Chapter 4: One interesting consequence of Jeremy's theory is that the humans should stop blaming each other for destroying their own environment because we were made exactly for that job. It is like members of the own team blame the best players in a win game for defeating the opponent./ake eckervall

Thought-provoking, fascinating, sometimes funny.

Worth the time, but not always easy to understand. Truly a good cross-section of topics.

very insightful

covers a wide array of topics in an objective and very palatable way. I learned a lot from this.

Fascinating, exciting, confusing, dull

a compendium of 199 essays from Edge Magazine on a multitude of cultural and scientific topics. You'll find your favorites. And gee, I actually understood most of them... except those on theoretical physics. dah!

Great Listen

Very informative, wide spectrum of topics covered including those that I thought were outside of engineering and science.

Lots of wasted time

Each topic is only a few minutes long and is based on the work of a different professor, author, etc.
Which is okay...
The problem is that they spend half of these few minutes reciting the credentials of the author.
For example (I made this up): "John Doe, professor emeritus and holder of the cosmos chair of astronomy at Princeton University and author of the book "XYX" ... etc. It quickly becomes very annoying.

very interesting, very repetitive

many contributors mention the same topics. very interesting, very repetitive very interesting, very repetitive very interesting, very repetitive very interesting, very repetitive.

Not for everyone but AMAZING for Science People

It's very heavy. I could only really read one or two chapters at a time because quite honestly it's such mind blowing stuff. At the end of the day it's very inspirational, by now it's a bit old because many of these discovers have matured and are in the middle of playing out right now, which is really cool stuff. Great for people who want a landscape of the craziest scientific discoveries of our times.

Everything You Feared About the Future in One Book

We've given up standing on the shoulders of our Giants as we now stand on the platforms of our machines.