Edge 2012 Question: What is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant or Beautiful Explanation?

Every year, Edge.org asks the same question to about 100-150 scientists, philosophers, public intellectuals (and alas in a few cases, cranks) and publishes them. It makes the rounds on the interwebs every year and with good reason: often it’s fascinating reading. Last year I blogged about the 1998 question and hope to have more from their gargantuan archives soon. In the meantime, here are some nuggets from this year’s question.

It’s very interesting to see several people converge on the same answer independently. This happened this year on two answers. The first is “Everything Is The Way It Is Because It Got That Way”. From PZ Myers:

[...]I went through twelve years of education without once hearing any mention of the ‘controversial’ E word. We dissected cats, we memorized globs of taxonomy[...]but we were not given any framework to make sense of it all[...]D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and his classic book, On Growth and Form[...]provided my favorite aphorism for a scientific view of the universe, “Everything is the way it is because it got that way”—it’s a subtle way of emphasizing the importance of process and history in understanding why everything is the way it is. You simply cannot grasp the concepts of science if your approach is to dissect the details in a static snapshot of its current state; your only hope is to understand the underlying mechanisms that generate that state, and how it came to be.

From Paul Bloom:

I saw this quoted first in an Edge discussion by Daniel Dennett, who made the point that this insight applies to explanation more generally—all sciences are, to at least some extent, historical sciences. I think it’s a perfect motto for my own field of developmental psychology. Every adult mind has two histories. There is evolution[...]And there is development—how our minds unfold over time, the processes of maturation and learning.

The second idea that was quoted twice was the Pigeonhole principle. This is a concept in maths/comp sci that if you have more pigeons than pigeonholes (or items than categories) then at least one pigeonhole will have two pigeons in it. It’s simple enough to be bleedingly obvious. And yet, some very profound results can be deduced from it. Jon Kleinberg uses it to prove that your family tree has had an incestuous loop within the last 4000 years. Charles Seife uses it to show that you can’t do universal compression (ie. find a way to compress any file into a smaller file) and therefore any of the dozens who claim to have found a way to do this are cranks. He also shows that in an infinite universe the Pigeonhole Principle requires there to be an infinite number of copies of our earth.

I’ll also share my favourites and other pleasantly-surprising answers. Brian Eno (composer, artist and producer for U2 and Talking Heads), shows the fallibility of our intuitions with some great examples including one that bears on artificial intelligence. Frank Tipler gives a mostly good explanation of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Although he loses it completely when he starts spouting silliness about the implications for evolutionary theory. (He’s actually a bit of a crank anyway, with respect to the anthropic principle, but he stays off that hobby-horse.) Frank Wilczek chooses the very idea of simplicity, especially as a rigorously-defined one. There is also a good description of the profound nature of understanding the Turing Machine as well as our musical tuning system.

Check it out!