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Featuring a foreword by DANIEL KAHNEMAN, Nobel Prize-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
THIS IS A LITTLE BOOK OF PROFOUND QUESTIONS—unknowns that address the secrets of our world, our civilization, the meaning of life. Here are the deepest riddles that have fascinated, obsessed, and haunted the greatest thinkers of our time, including Nobel laureates, cosmologists, philosophers, economists, prize-winning novelists, religious scholars, and more than 250 leading scientists, artists, and theorists. In The Last Unknowns, John Brockman asks innovative thinkers: "What is ‘The Last Question,’ your last question, the question for which you will be remembered?"
Featuring the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel JARED DIAMOND • Nobel Prize-winning economist RICHARD THALER • Harvard psychologist STEVEN PINKER • religion scholar ELAINE PAGELS • author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics CARLO ROVELLI • Booker Prize–winning novelist IAN McEWAN • neuroscientist SAM HARRIS • philosopher DANIEL C. DENNETT • MIT theorist SHERRY TURKLE • decoder of the human genome J. CRAIG VENTER • Nobel Prize-winning physicist FRANK WILCZEK • New York Times columnist CARL ZIMMER • Whole Earth founder STEWART BRAND • economist TYLER COWEN • Wired founding editor KEVIN KELLY • Princeton physicist FREEMAN DYSON • musician BRIAN ENO • Duke economist DAN ARIELY • Harvard cosmologist LISA RANDALL, and more than 200 others.
352 pages, Paperback
First published June 4, 2019
For the 50th anniversary of "The World Question Center," and for the finale to the twenty years of Edge Questions, I turned it over to the Edgies:
"Ask 'The Last Question', your last question, the question for which you will be remembered."
– John Brockman, Editor, Edge
David Christian (Director, Big History Institute, and Distinguished Professor in History, Macquarie University):
Will we pass our audition as planetary managers?
Rolph Dobelli (Founder, Zurich Minds):
Does this question exist in a parallel universe?
Laura Betzig (Anthropologist, historian):
Will we ever live together in a hive?
George Dyson (Science Historian):
Why are there no trees in the ocean?
Lorraine Justice (Dean emerita and professor of industrial design, Rochester Institute of Technology):
What might the last fully biological human's statement be at their last supper?
Barnaby Marsh (Evolutionary dynamics scholar, Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University):
How much of what we call “reality” is ultimately grounded and instantiated in convincing communication and storytelling?
Bart Kosko (Information scientist and professor of electrical engineering and law, University of Southern California):
What is the bumpiest and highest-dimensional cost surface that our best computers will be able to search and still find the deepest cost well?
Alexander Wissner-Gross (Scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, investor):
Can general-purpose computers be constructed out of pure gravity?
Max Tegmark (Physicist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; researcher, Precision Cosmology; scientific director, Foundational Questions Institute; president, Future of Life Institute):
What will be the literally last question that will preoccupy future superintelligent cosmic life for as long as the laws of physics permit?