What do you believe but can­not prove? This is the intrigu­ing ques­tion posed by John Brock­man at Edge.org. The “bril­liant minds” he asked to respond are all mem­bers of Brock­man’s so-called “third cul­ture”, by which he means sci­en­tists and “thinkers in the empir­i­cal world”. So pre­sum­ably wool­ly-head­ed philoso­phers and oth­er arts-based thinkers not trained in the sci­ences need not apply.

Despite this Ian McE­wan some­how snuck beneath the wire and even gets to write the intro­duc­tion to Brock­man’s book. As McE­wan right­ly says the con­tri­bu­tions do indeed express “the spir­it of a sci­en­tif­ic con­scious­ness at its best”.

One con­trib­u­tor claims rather dark­ly that “we are sim­ply over­ad­vanced fun­gi and bac­te­ria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, mean­ing­less space” — a com­ment that prob­a­bly illus­trates the dan­gers of post­ing com­ments while suf­fer­ing from a bad hang­over (be warned blog­gers).

But gen­er­al­ly there is an empha­sis on pos­i­tive pre­dic­tions: we are not alone in the uni­verse (Paul Davies); we will cir­cum­vent the speed of light (Ray Kurzweil); “there is a future much bet­ter, in terms of reduced human suf­fer­ing and increased human poten­tial than the present”. The lat­ter, inspir­ing­ly upbeat pre­dic­tion comes from Oliv­er Mor­ton, author of the excel­lent Map­ping Mars.

It’s a great book for read­ing on the tube, as its bite-sized con­tri­bu­tions are ide­al for short jour­neys. My own favourite is from math­e­mati­cian Ver­e­na Huber-Dyson: “most of what I believe I can­not prove, sim­ply for lack of time and ener­gy.” I know the feel­ing. Back to the edit­ing then…

So what do you believe but can­not prove? Let me know!

[orig­i­nal­ly on MySpace]