Fwd: EDGE 210: Neil Turok: The Cyclic Universe

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Date: 17 May 2007 21:09
Subject: EDGE 210: Neil Turok: The Cyclic Universe
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EDGE 210
May 16, 2007

(9,300 words)

This EDGE edition, at 9,300 words with video, graphics, and links, is available online at
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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THE CYCLIC UNIVERSE [5.16.07]
A Talk with Neil Turok

"In recent years, the search for the fundamental laws of nature has forced us to think about the Big Bang much more deeply. According to our best theories - string theory and M theory - all of the details of the laws of physics are actually determined by the structure of the universe; specifically, by the arrangement of tiny, curled-up extra dimensions of space. This is a very beautiful picture: particle physics itself is now just another aspect of cosmology. But if you want to understand why the extra dimensions are arranged the way they are, you have to understand the Big Bang because that's where everything came from."

Edge Video

NEIL TUROK holds the Chair of Mathematical Physics in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University. He is coauthor, with Paul Steinhardt, of ENDLESS UNIVERSE: BEYOND THE BIG BANG.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#turok
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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE [ 5.8.07]
A Leap for All Life: World's Leading Scientists Announce Creation of "Encyclopedia of Life"

IMAGINE an electronic for each species of organism on earth available everywhere by single access on command.
- E.O. Wilson

Biodiversity, Science Communities Unite Behind Epic Effort To Promote Biodiversity, Document All 1.8 Million Named Species on Planet

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.


[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#encyclopedia
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E.O. WILSON: TED PRIZE WISH: HELP BUILD THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE [5.8.07]
Chris Anderson, TED Curator

Those of us in Monterey this year watched in awe as E O Wilson unveiled his inspiring TED Prize wish to create an Encyclopedia of Life. (If you weren't there, you can see it at the link above). As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; yet we're still steadily destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), using the acronym HIPPO, and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of data from scientists and amateurs on every aspect of the biosphere.

In Washington DC this morning, the first big step in that dream came true. Five major scientific institutions, backed by a $50m funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, announced the launch of a global effort to launch the Encyclopedia. Ed Wilson described today's announcement as a
dream come true.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#ted
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SATURN BACKLIT BY THE SUN
Steven Pinker

One of these days, EDGE may want to run this photo, which planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini mission to Saturn, showed us at the TED Conference: Saturn backlit by the sun, with the Earth appearing as a tiny dot in upper left (shown in the inset blowup). It is not only perhaps the most stunning photograph ever taken, but the fact that it has not appeared on the cover of TIME, NEW YORK TIMES, etc., is a sign of our culture's indifference to science. This is truly awe-inspiring - not just visually beautiful, but a mind-boggling technical achievement, and a way to depict the finiteness and fragility of the planet in a way that we haven't experienced since the famous "Earthrise" photo from the Apollo program in the late 1960s. - Steve Pinker


[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#saturn
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TIME [ 5.3.07]
THE TIME 100

The People Who Shape Our World Here's our list of the 100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world.

SCIENTISTS & THINKERS

J. CRAIG VENTER
By Jean-Michel Cousteau

When it comes to creatures living in the oceans, I, like most people, have always been enthralled by the popular favorites such as whales, polar bears and sea otters. It takes a special person to appreciate that there is just as much wonder to be found in the ocean's smallest and humblest organic forms-the microbes, genes and proteins without which the more charismatic creatures wouldn't exist at all.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#time

LISA RANDALL
By Julie Rawe

Lisa Randall's nonphysicist friends knew she was onto something big when she presented her work at a conference and Stephen Hawking saved her a seat at the banquet afterward. As the first female theoretical physicist to gain tenure at Harvard, Randall, 44, has not only been invited to sit with the boys but has also been leading the conversation because of her ideas about extra dimensions beyond the three that we can see and feel. She's not the first person to theorize that the universe has hidden dimensions, but she revolutionized the field by suggesting that an extra dimension could be infinitely large and that we might be living in a 3-D sinkhole in a higher-dimensional universe. Far from posing idle brain teasers, her research might solve one of physics' great mysteries-namely, why gravity is so weak in contrast to electromagnetism and other forces. (Note how a small magnet can pluck up a paper clip despite the gravitational pull of the entire planet.) After doing some mind-blowing math, she thinks the warped geometry of space-time could mean gravity is weak here and strong elsewhere.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#time

RICHARD DAWKINS
By Michael Behe

Of Richard Dawkins' nine books, none caused as much controversy or sold as well as last year's THE GOD DELUSION. The central idea-popular among readers and deeply unsettling among proponents of intelligent design like myself-is that religion is a so-called virus of the mind, a simple artifact of cultural evolution, no more or less meaningful than eye color or height.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#time

CHRIS ANDERSON
By Malcolm Gladwell

All writers are in search of the Big Idea. A Big Idea has to matter. But you can have only one of them. Your Big Idea can't be that there are, say, 89 Rules of Power. E=mc(2) was, technically speaking, a Big Idea. But not really, because the best Big Ideas are also transparent. Truly Big Ideas are the rarest of phenomena, and when I first came upon Chris Anderson's THE LONG TAIL last year, I knew this was one.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#time

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EDGE BOOKS
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WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
With an Introduction by STEVEN PINKER and an Afterword by RICHARD DAWKINS
Edited By JOHN BROCKMAN

Harper Perennial, US
Free Press, UK

"A selection of the most explosive ideas of our age."- SUNDAY HERALD

"Provocative" - THE INDEPENDENT

"Challenging notions put forward by some of the world's sharpest minds"-
SUNDAY TIMES

"A titillating compilation" - THE GUARDIAN

"Danger - brilliant minds at work...A brilliant book: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling." _ THE EVENING STANDARD (London)


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WHAT WE BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PROVE
Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
With an Introduction by IAN MCEWAN
Edited By JOHN BROCKMAN

Harper Perennial, US
Pocket Books, UK

"...This collection, mostly written by working scientists, does not represent the antithesis of science. These are not simply the unbuttoned musings of professionals on their day off. The contributions, ranging across many disparate fields, express the spirit of a scientific consciousness at its best - informed guesswork" - Ian McEwan, from the Introduction,in THE TELEGRAPH

"An unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing short of an oracle - a book to be dog-eared and debated." - SEED

"Scientific pipedreams at their very best." - THE GUARDIAN

"Astounding reading." - BOSTON GLOBE

"Fantastically stimulating." - BBC RADIO 4

"Intellectual and creative magnificence." THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

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THIRD CULTURE NEWS
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THE GUARDIAN
May 16, 2007

Search for happiness scoops science prize

By Alok Jha

A search for the scientific basis for happiness has beaten the tale of the world's most famous tortoise and the history of humans in Britain to be named this year's best science book.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert received the prestigious Royal Society Prize for STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS, which questions the idea that any of us know what happiness actually is, never mind how to achieve or maintain it. He received a £10,000 cheque from the Royal Society's president, Martin Rees, at a ceremony in London this evening. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#guardian
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THE BOSTON GLOBE
May 13, 2007

Unbelievable
That's what religion is, says Christopher Hitchens in his profoundly
skeptical manifesto

By Daniel C. Dennett

In earlier ages reliable information was rather hard to get, and in general people could be excused for taking the founding myths of their religions on faith. These were the "facts" that "everyone knew," and anybody who had a skeptical itch could check it out with the local priest or rabbi or imam, or other religious authority. Today, there is really no excuse for such ignorance. It may not be your fault if you don't know the facts about the history and tenets of your own religion, but it is somebody's fault. Or more charitably, perhaps we have all been victimized by an accumulation of tradition that strongly enjoins us to lapse into a polite lack of curiosity about these facts, for fear of causing offense. It is rude, after all, to point out somebody's ignorance or gullibility. Besides, if you start calling attention to the frankly incredible creeds and deeds of other religions, they may retaliate and expose some of the embarrassing signs of all-too-human tampering with the heroic tales and traditions of your own tribe.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#globe
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NEW YORKER
May 7, 2007

Morality 2012

The social and cultural psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks with Henry Finder about the five foundations of morality, and why liberals often fail to get their message across. From "2012: Stories from the Near Future," the 2007 NEW YORKER Conference.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#newyorker
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NEW YORKER
May 7, 2007

ATHEISTS WITH ATTITUDE
Why do they hate Him?

By Anthony Gottlieb

...Since all the arguments against belief have been widely publicized for a long time, today's militant atheists mus sometimes wonder why religion persists. Hitchens says that it is born of fear and probably ineradicable. Harris holds that there are genuine spiritual experiences; having kicked sand in the faces of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam he dives headlong into the surf of Eastern spirituality, encouraging readers to try Buddhist techniques of meditation instead of dangerous creeds. Dawkins devotes a chapter, and Dennett most of his book, to evolutionary accounts of how religion may have arisen and how its ideas spread. It's thin stuff, and Dennett stresses that these are early days for biological account of religion. It may, however, be too late for one. If a propensity toward religious belief is "hard-wired" in the brain, as it is sometimes said to be, the wiring has evidently become frayed. This is especially true in rich countries, nearly all of which-Ireland and America are exceptions-have relatively high rates of unbelief.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#newyorker
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PROSPECT
MAY 2007

Why Home Doesn't Matter

The BBC series "Child of Our Time" assumes that studying children with their parents will help us understand how their personalities develop. But this is a mistake: parents influence their children mainly by passing on their genes. The biggest environmental influences on personality are those that occur outside the home

By Judith Rich Harris

During much of the 20th century, it was considered impolite and unscientific to say that genes play any role in determining people's personalities, talents or intelligence. But we're in the 21st century now, the era of the genome. So when Robert Winston informs us, at the opening of each episode of the BBC1 documentary series Child of Our Time, that we're going to "find out what makes us who we are," we know he's going to say that people are the way they are partly for genetic reasons. (In case you've missed it, Child of Our Time is a project tracking the lives of 25 children for their first 20 years, returning to them each year to assess their progress. This year's series-the seventh-is being screened in three episodes, starting on Sunday 6th May.)

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#prospect
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
April 28, 2007

Authors Shine at LA Times Book Prizes
By Bridget Kinsella

...Eric R. Kandel, who has also won the Nobel Prize, joked about the difference between Stockholm verses Los Angeles, where he won the Science prize for IN SEARCH OF MEMORY: THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW SCIENCE OF MIND ( W.W. Norton). "When you go to Stockholm, you know you've got the prize," he said. The LAT doesn't tell the winners ahead of time. ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#PW
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THE NATION
May 28, 2007

Among the Disbelievers
By Daniel Lazare

...For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of evil and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian evolution. As a consequence, religion now looks nearly as bad as royalism did in the late eighteenth century. But while united in their resolve to throw the bum out--God, that is--the antireligious forces appear to have given little thought to what to replace Him with should He go. They may not face the guillotine as a consequence. But they could end up making even bigger fools of themselves than the theologians they criticize.

Richard Dawkins is a case in point. It is no surprise that, along with Sam Harris, author of THE END OF FAITH and LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION, and Daniel Dennett, author of BREAKING THE SPELL: RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON, he has emerged at the head of a growing intellectual movement aimed at relegating religion to the proverbial scrapheap of history (which by this point must be filled to overflowing). ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#nation
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THE TIMES
May 12, 2007

How dare you call me a fundamentalist
The right to criticise 'faith-heads'

By Richard Dawkins

...Several critics began with the ominous phrase, "I'm an atheist, BUT . . ." So here is my brief rebuttal to criticisms originating from this "belief in belief" school.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#times
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 13, 2007
BUSINESS

LANDING IN PRINCETON Back from his space travels, Charles Simonyi, a multimillionaire and a former executive at Microsoft, is taking up a new challenge: serving as chairman of the trustees at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Albert Einstein was a longtime faculty member at the theoretical research institute, where he sought to gain greater knowledge of the physical universe.

Mr. Simonyi spent $25 million getting closer to the universe on a 14-day trip on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft last month.

He has also spent $25 million donating money to the institute, where he has been a trustee since 1997.

The Hungarian-born Mr. Simonyi, 58, will take over his new post from James D. Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president, who is retiring after 21 years as the institute's chairman. ELIZABETH OLSEN

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#nyt
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 11, 2007; Page B1
SCIENCE JOURNAL

Scientists Draw Link Between Morality And Brain's Wiring
By Robert Lee Hotz

Most of us feel a rush of righteous certainty in the face of a moral challenge, an intuitive sense of right or wrong hard to ignore yet difficult to articulate.

A provocative medical experiment conducted recently by neuroscientists at Harvard, Caltech and the University of Southern California strongly suggests these impulsive convictions come not from conscious principles but from the brain trying to make its emotional judgment felt.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#wsj
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THE COLBERT REPORT
May 8, 2007

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes we create stories to convince ourselves that the future is predictable
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#colbert
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THE BOSTON GLOBE
May 8, 2007

Cataloguing every species on earth
By Colin Nickerson

Spurred by fears that thousands of animals, plants, and microbes will disappear from the planet before scientists can properly study them, a consortium of world-famous research institutions and funding foundations tomorrow will launch an effort to compile an enormous, computer-based "Encyclopedia of Life" to catalog every species known or found. ...

... Our ignorance is dangerous," said Edward O. Wilson, a pioneering researcher of global biodiversity, professor emeritus of entomology at Harvard, and long-time crusader for creation of an accessible encyclopedia of all life. "Life forms with which we've shared the planet are going extinct at an alarming rate -- usually before we even determine what they are and what role they play in the ecosystem. "Our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered." ...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#globe2
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THE GUARDIAN
May 7, 2007

The New Atheists loathe religion far too much to plausibly challenge it

Anti-faith proselytising is a growth industry. But its increasingly hysterical flag-bearers are heading for a spectacular failure

By Madeleine Bunting
It's an extraordinary publishing phenomenon - atheism sells. Any philosopher, professional polemicist or scientist with worries about their pension plan must now be feverishly working on a book proposal. Richard Dawkins has been in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since THE GOD DELUSION came out last autumn following Daniel Dennett's success with BREAKING THE SPELL. Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscience graduate, has now clocked up two bestsellers, THE END OF FAITH and LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION. Last week, Christopher Hitchens' GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING was published in the US. The science writer, Matt Ridley, recently commented that on one day at Princeton he met no fewer than three intellectual luminaries hard at work on their God books.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#guardian2
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THE PRESS
(Christchurch, New Zealand)
May 5, 2007

"WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?" Edited By John Brockman
By Howard Williams

I enjoy dipping into a book of an evening and I can certainly recommend this one. The sometimes but by no means always outrageous ideas proposed by the 108 contributors to this book cover a wide range of science, economics, philosophy, politics, religion and the cosmos. This book is written to provoke, and it succeeds. It will, without doubt, annoy and stimulate many readers. That is what books are for. Having just enjoyed Richard Dawkins' book about religion and delusion - he writes a postscript to this book - it was comforting to see how many other thinkers are of the same mind: that life has no meaning, we are here by evolutionary accident, we are alone in the universe. For those who are not rationalists, mind that blood pressure.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#nz
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DE GROENE AMSTERDAMMER
April 20, 2007

Dawkins: God als misvatting (The God Delusion)

...Initially Dawkins seemed to be afraid of his own neoplatonism, but he could not let go of the idea and was more and more passionately looking for unexpected connections between genetic and cultural evolution. He became one of the most prominent representatives of the Third Culture, a group of scientists who aspired to take over the role of traditional intellectuals (philosophers, writers and academics of the arts and humanities) in society.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#amsterdammer
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TIME
May 3, 2007

The TIME 100

Paul Allen
By Steven Pinker

Paul Allen is the world's most obscure celebrity, its hippest geek, its most flamboyant introvert. He is also one of its most successful dropouts.  The other is Bill Gates, Allen's Seattle high school chum, with whom he founded a company called Microsoft in 1975.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#time2
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TIME
May 3, 2007

The TIME 100

Svante Pääbo
By J. Craig Venter

Even after 148 years, many people still argue about whether Charles Darwin's theory on human evolution is correct. Svante Pääbo has done more than argue, conducting some of the most exacting work ever attempted on the DNA of human and nonhuman primates, including his spectacular 2006 announcement that he had decoded fragments of DNA from remains of Neanderthals. In so doing, he is replacing speculation with scientific fact.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#time3
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THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
May 4, 2007

Toward a Unified Theory of Einstein's Life
By John Horgan

In 1921, during a seemingly endless reception in his honor in Washington, Albert Einstein said to the diplomat next to him, "I've just developed a new theory of eternity." That quip came to mind after two new Einstein biographies, which together total more than 1,000 pages, thudded on my doorstep.

Walter Isaacson, a biographer and former executive at CNN and Time, and Jürgen Neffe, a German science journalist, resemble guests who show up, clutching Champagne bottles, for a party that has just ended. At least a dozen books on Einstein were published in 2005, the 100th anniversary of his five revolutionary papers on relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics. Einstein's "miraculous year" was also celebrated in countless conferences, museum exhibits, and articles in magazines, journals, and newspapers. I contributed a couple of essays to THE NEW YORK TIMES and spoke at an event about relativity at my institution.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#chronicle2
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FRESH AIR WITH TERRY GROSS
May 1, 2007

'Lucifer Effect' Asks Why Good People Go Bad

Best known for the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment - in which student volunteers in a mock prison transformed with startling speed into sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners - Philip Zimbardo has written a book on the psychology of the unspeakable. It's called THE LUCIFER EFFECT: UNDERSTANDING HOW GOOD PEOPLE TURN EVIL.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#npr
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THE WASHINGTON POST
April 30, 2007

When Seeing Is Disbelieving
By Shankar Vedantam

...Nor are U.S. presidents alone when it comes to deluding themselves: Successful politicians may just be more skilled at self-deception than the rest of us. Most people, perhaps all, seem hard-wired to be able to interpret reality to suit their ends.

Self-deception has been uncovered in a wide range of situations, says Robert L. Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University who has studied the phenomenon. Before the Challenger explosion, for example, NASA engineers noticed that one of the O-rings on the space shuttle had been eaten a third of the way through. Since the shuttle had flown and returned to Earth, the engineers concluded that it was not a problem. Surveys show that four in five high school seniors believe they have exceptional leadership ability, and nearly every single professor in the country believes he or she is above average.

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#wapo
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AERO-NEWS.NET
April 30, 2007
Dreamlike... Flying With Professor Stephen Hawking

A Brief History Of A Day In The Life Of An 'Amazing' Man

by ANN Editor-In-Chief and Zero-G Photographer Jim Campbell Driving back from the Shuttle Landing Facility aboard a NASA crew bus, I watched an amazing man form his first cohesive words, following a triumphant, albeit temporary, release from the clutches of gravity...

[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html#aero
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This EDGE edition, at 9,300 words with video, graphics, and links, is
available online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge210.html
----------------------------------------------------
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EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Copyright (c) 2007 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

EDGE Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private  operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of  the Internal Revenue Code.
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