This allows a fascinating peek into debates
BACK when the scientific method was a radical new idea, and when science was the preserve of wealthy (or well-sponsored) gentleman amateurs, it was just about possible for a single person to know everything about it. Years of study, and then a lifetime spent keeping abreast of new developments, allowed one to be fluent in physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy and the rest of the disciplines that made up the sum of humanity’s empirical knowledge.
But those days are long gone. Modern scientific papers can have dozens of specialised authors, and reaching the cutting edge in some fields can require apprenticeships of a decade or more. New fields of inquiry spring up like weeds, watered by papers that fall like rain: one group of researchers reckon that 1.3m articles were published in scientific journals in 2006 alone. The best that can be hoped for is to keep abreast of the big developments in a few important fields.
That is the aim of “Future Science”, a collection of essays written by practising scientists who aim to give the interested amateur a sense of what is new and exciting in their respective areas. The essay format allows the reader to hear directly from the researchers, most of whom are young, and therefore probably at the peak of their scientific creativity, without the interpretations layered on by science journalists or other middlemen. This allows a fascinating peek into debates about whether life may be more common on frozen planets than earthlike ones, how mining the web for information can let us probe social trends, the evolutionary origins of altruism and more.
Max Brockman has managed to resist the temptation to over-edit the submissions, even if the result is that the essays are of uneven quality. A few of the contributors seem to be born writers, but a couple seem happier to stick with the jargon and densely packed prose that plagues most papers in scientific journals.
Bookmark this page for “The future of science” and check back regularly as these articles update on a very frequent basis. The view is set to “news”. Try clicking on “video” and “2” for more articles.