This Idea Must Die

Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

By: John Brockman

Narrated by: David Colacci, Susan Ericksen

Each year John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, challenges some of the world's greatest scientists, artists, and philosophers to answer a provocative question crucial to our time. In 2014 he asked 175 brilliant minds to ponder: What scientific idea needs to be put aside in order to make room for new ideas to advance? The answers are as surprising as they are illuminating.

In This Idea Must Die:

• Steven Pinker dismantles the working theory of human behavior
• Sherry Turkle reevaluates our expectations of artificial intelligence
• Andrei Linde suggests that our universe and its laws may not be as unique as we think
• Martin Rees explains why scientific understanding is a limitless goal
• Nina Jablonski argues to rid ourselves of the concept of race
• And much more.

Profound, engaging, thoughtful, and groundbreaking, This Idea Must Die will change your perceptions and understanding of our world today...and tomorrow.

©2015 Edge Foundation, Inc. (P)2015 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Physics, statistics, robotics, linguistics, medicine--all are zestfully scrutinized in this exuberant, mind-blowing gathering of innovative thinkers." ( Booklist)

Too much wheat not enough chaff

This book was a lot like the TED conferences. While you're watching them you think they're the most brilliant thing you've ever seen and just wonder why you didn't come up with thinking about the problem that way on your own. But, when it's over you start to think maybe that wasn't worth my time after all. This book was fun while doing it, but I strongly suspect it wasn't worth my time.

Some essays were very good. I really liked Alan Alda's on why true and false should not be how we look at things. Richard Dawkin's (and a host of others) also thinks Essentianism should be retired. It just muddles our way of thinking since nature doesn't always fall into neat categories (Darwin dances around what a species is for a very good reason). When the theme of the essay was on the real nature of science being particular to the data available, and contingent to the current understanding of nature that we have and science is never absolute (back to Alan Alda's essay, e.g.), the essay would work nicely and would fit into an overall narrative.

Overall, I would recommend skipping this book and reading Marcelo Gleiser's "Island of Knowledge", who did give the second essay presented in this book and will give the listener a more coherent sense on the limitations of science than this book does.

Awesome

Everything's big I expected iiy to be. The talks were informative on any number of issues. They had great contributions from various sides of a position. And it was fascinating.

95% spot on

Good book with through coverage of most of science. I especially liked sections on " best practices" in medicine. Disliked the doges acceptance of evolutionary theory.

Good Idea....not meant for audiobook

What did you like best about This Idea Must Die? What did you like least?

There's some ok ideas in this. Some of them are not that new though and anyone who keeps even mildly up to date with science will have already heard several of these. Overall it wasn't a good implementation of an audiobook...maybe it just wasn't meant to be one.

What didn’t you like about David Colacci and Susan Ericksen ’s performance?

Voices are fine and production quality is ok (not noisy or anything). There are several mispronunciations that I think are inexcusable....For a book about science, it is not permissible to pronounce the equation "F=ma" as "Eff equals maaaa". How did that get past editors or whoever quality controls this? There are a few other mispronunciations that really jarred me too throughout, though they weren't science-specific...just general word pronunciations. "Disservice" with emphasis on the last syllable which totally threw me off and I had to re-listen in order to get at what was trying to be said. It is almost as if it wasn't edited or they didn't have time to go back and check for these.

Plenty to Chew on for Critical Thinkers

The range of topics covered by this book is vast. Learning about the chinks in the seemingly impenetrable facade of science certainly has given me plenty to mull over.