SCIENCE AT THE EDGE is a compilation of summarized interviews edited by John Brockman, author of THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS: SCIENCE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. His emphasis is on cooperation between traditional scientists such as physicists and cosmologists with more humanistic scientists such as psychologists and philosophers.

The above may have been his intent, but the various essays tend to address artificial intelligence and possible theories unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. The most jaw-dropping essay is one done with Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and entrepreneur who belongs to the U.S. Patent Office’s National Inventors Hall of Fame. Kurzweil is high on artificial intelligence. He says “We’ll make 20,000 years of progress in the twenty-first century, which is about 1,000 times more technical change than we saw in the twentieth century.” He maintains artificial intelligence is increasing exponentially and that by mid century we ought to be able to create a human-like robot much more intelligent than we are. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and musician, studying advanced applications for Internet 2, is much less impressed with the potential for artificial intelligence. He agrees the hardware is getting smarter, but he doubts we will be able to create software to run these machines. He bases this opinion on the bugginess and unreliability of current software. It’s always breaking down oe freezing, and is prone to viruses and malware. After the recent Sony event one might side with Lanier.

The second battle of the minds involves the two theories concerning a unification theory of gravity and quantum theory. Paul Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science and a professor in both the Departments of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton. He’s more of a string theory guy with a twist. Steinhardt believes the universe is infinite and other galaxies and clusters are racing away from us at a tremendous rate of speed; hence inflationary universe. In Steinhardt’s theory, all known matter sits on something called a “brane,” short for membrane. There are two of them, but we can only see one. When the brane is completely barren of matter and radiation it bounces off the other brane, creating another “bang” and we start all over again. This happens every couple of trillion years or so. There’s another dimension or dimensions between the two branes, but Steinhardt doesn’t go into that much in this summary.

Lee Smolin is the founder of something called Loop Quantum Gravity. I’m sure you’ve heard it mentioned on “The Big Bang Theory”. Smolin doesn’t disagree with string theory. He even trades information with scientists who work in the field. Smolin is more concerned with unifying proven science. We have evidence relativity and quantum theory exists, but you can’t do experiments with something you can’t see, and you can’t see the extra dimensions predicted with string theory. He gets a little snarky at times, claiming string theorists are too concerned with “pretty” mathematics. String theorists have formulas that predict the extra dimensions.

Smolin and most of the other scientist in this book were interviewed prior to the opening of the Hadron Super Collider, which produced evidence that the Higgs boson particle exists, and that it degrades into even smaller particles, so that may have opened a new kettle of fish.