The 2009 Edge Question

Posted by | January 14, 2009 | Uncategorized | One Comment

This years Edge question is: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

Biocurious has a good overview of the answers, here.

My personal favorite is Stuart Kauffman’s answer, that large parts of the universe are free of physical law. A brilliantly argued piece of true scientific heresy (although here from a biological rather than a fundamental physics perspective). This is an idea which I have a hunch may be right, placing natural selection as the creation mechanism above gods and scientific law, rather than the the artifacts which are produced by them.

One Comment

  • Paul says:

    Kauffman’s piece was certainly interesting, though I think it’s wrong. At issue: he mistakenly treats the predictability/entailment of phenomena given a set of physical laws as necessary for those laws to bind the phenomena. There are people who subscribe to this account of reductionism, but they’re a dying breed as physics comes to look increasingly indeterministic. I wrote a little bit about this here: http://www.caritj.org/2009/02/04/scientific-laws-bind-without-entailing/#more-35

    (inspired me to start a blog, in fact)