Hmmm, so it seems that I keep running into my colleague KC Cole this week. While settling down to drink my morning coffee after a couple of hours of battling dust around the house and leaves outside the house, I found myself looking at the LA Times' Book Review section, and saw that KC wrote a review of the book entitled "What We Believe but Cannot Prove", edited by John Brockman. The subtitle of the book is "Today's leading thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty". (Note to self: Figure out when this "Age of Certainty" thing took place and find out why I did not get the memo.) It seems that the book is supposed to be a collection of essays about things scientists believe but cannot prove.... KC deconstructs this notion a bit, and I'll let you go and read the article (which can be found here) yourself, since instead of blogging I'm actually supposed to be running around buying a wedding present and then getting ready to head north to Santa Barbara to attend the actual wedding later today..... She obviously does not think that this book is as good as it could be, largely because of the brevity of several of the contributions, which "either state the obvious or cut off just as things get interesting, random bursts of intellectualizing designed for compulsive channel surfers". She likens this to blogging, by the way. (Ahem!) She also says:
Fans (and I count myself among them) of such contributors as Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Sir Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett and Howard Gardner would be better off sticking to their wonderful books.
She has a number of positive observations, such as:
The essays worth reading take pains to put beliefs in context: Psychologist Irene Pepperberg studies how gray parrots talk and think (compared with apes, marine mammals and children). She believes birds are the best model for understanding human language. But before making her argument, she offers a highly informative backgrounder on bird song. So, by the time she proposes that the "missing link" between learned and unlearned vocalizing may be found in a recently discovered flycatcher that learns its songs, you're ready to go along.
There's also this:
Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind uses a parable to explain that all proof is ultimately based on probability. He can't prove that a coin flipped a million times won't come up consistently heads. But he'd bet his life, soul (and even his salary) on it. Mathematician Devlin admits that he believes Andrew Wiles' 1994 proof of Fermat's last theorem only because "experts in that branch of mathematics tell me they do."
(Hmmm. *All* proof? I'm not sure I would go as far as Lenny in that statement, but maybe I'm being a bit picky. I like the rest of the paragraph quite a lot.) There are a number of other interesting things about the book, and about the review, but why not go have a look at the site and have a read? Fulfilling KC's observation about blogging, I'll cut off my thoughts on this at this point..... because I have to dash out to the shops! -cvj
