This Explains Everything

ed. John Brockman

-"Edge.org presents original ideas by Todays Leading Thinkers." Q: What is your fave deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? This was fun to read! I picked it up at the library, then ended up reading it all the way through. The order of essays sometimes let's you picture them nested within each other in beautiful ways, for which I guess we can thank John Brockman. Many of the answers are versions of Darwin: adaptive systems, emerging complexity from simplicity, even within physics and mathematics, no surprise -- but the way they all play off each other is a real head trip. I have nothing negative to say. It ends with "empiricism" itself as a sort of ultimate self-adapting system. At some level of abstraction I suppose you just end up back with "us" as the explanation for everything, a hall of mirrors?