There are dozens of reasons why you need to know about Edge.org. Here are three:
1. I know of no other single online resource that offers more content of superior quality and greater intellectual value than does Edge.org.
2. Its associates are among the world’s most highly admired experts on all the most important challenges that the human race now faces. They include Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Daniel C. Dennett, George Dyson, Howard Gardner, Alison Gopnik, Gary Klein, Steven Pinker, Peter Schwartz, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
3. They have contributed information, insights, and counsel to a series of paperback books, edited by Edge founder, John Brockman, and published by Harper Perennial.
According to Brockman, “Edge is different from the Algonquin Roundtable or Bloomsbury Group, but it offers the same quality of intellectual adventure. Closer resemblances are the early seventeenth-century Invisible College, a precursor to the Royal Society. Its members consisted of scientists such as Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Robert Hooke. The Society’s common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Another inspiration is The Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age — James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly, and Benjamin Franklin.
“The online salon at Edge.org is a living document of millions of words charting the Edge conversation over the past fifteen years wherever it has gone. It is available, gratis, to the general public.
“Edge.org was launched in 1996 as the online version of ‘The Reality Club,’ an informal gathering of intellectuals that met from 1981-1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, the Board Rooms of Rockefeller University, the New York Academy of Sciences, and investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms, and elsewhere. Though the venue is now in cyberspace, the spirit of the Reality Club lives on in the lively back-and-forth discussions on the hot-button ideas driving the discussion today.
“In the words of the novelist Ian McEwan, Edge.org offers “open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful … an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world … an ongoing and thrilling colloquium.”
2013 : What should we be worried about?
Note: This volume will be published on February 11, 2014.
These are the questions that generated responses now available in paperbound volumes for 2008-2012.
2012 : What is your deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?
2011 : What scientific concept would improve everyone’s cognitive toolkit?
2010 : How is the Internet changing the way you think?
2009 : What will change everything?
2008 : What have you changed your mind about? Why?
Let’s let John Brockman have the last word: “As the late artist James Lee Byars and I once wrote: ‘To accomplish the extraordinary, you must seek extraordinary people.’ At the center of every Edge publication and event are remarkable people and remarkable minds. Edge, at its core, consists of the scientists, artists, philosophers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who are at the center of today’s intellectual, technological, and scientific landscape.”