What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 336 pages
• Published by: Harper Perennial March 13, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0061214957
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0061214950
• Book Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 8 ounces

Product Description


From Copernicus to Darwin, to current-day thinkers, scientists have always promoted theories and unveiled discoveries that challenge everything society holds dear; ideas with both positive and dire consequences. Many thoughts that resonate today are dangerous not because they are assumed to be false, but because they might turn out to be true.

What do the world's leading scientists and thinkers consider to be their most dangerous idea? Through the leading online forum Edge (www.edge.org), the call went out, and this compelling and easily digestible volume collects the answers. From using medication to permanently alter our personalities to contemplating a universe in which we are utterly alone, to the idea that the universe might be fundamentally inexplicable, What Is Your Dangerous Idea? takes an unflinching look at the daring, breathtaking, sometimes terrifying thoughts that could forever alter our world and the way we live in it.

Reader Reviews
First, this is a really fun and interesting book. A quick and very stimulating read. The ideas themselves are all over the map, as they should be, and I won't spoil your pleasure in discovering them, especially since they could all be listed (minus defending verbiage) on a page or two. But I will say that ultimately, there is really only one dangerous idea out there. You see, we humans live entirely embedded in self-generated illusions and delusions. Victor Hugo put it kindly when he said "Man lives by affirmation more than by bread." In other words, man lives by lies. And why all the lies? One reason: to assert MEANING. Attempts to assert meaning can be all over the map, religion, science, emotion and art, whatever. The point is, everybody wants it like a drug. So the only really truly dangerous idea, to which all other dangerous ideas can ultimately be reduced, is simply that absolutely nothing means anything. Everything, without exception, is a completely empty lie and scam from A to Z. That is the single idea that everybody would attack because it threatens everyone at their root. From Ecclesiastes to Sartre it's been said many times many ways - all is vanity under the sun. But most of the self-proclaimed daring thinkers in this book can't go quite that far into "depressive realism". They lack the stomach to go all the way. But I salute their highly entertaining efforts, and actually a few of them dance dangerously close to the final flame of nothingness. But if they all did, there'd be no book. No matter what, even if everything is totally meaningless, it seems our bodies still need to get up each day and "do" something. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "Each day a river that must be swum, on pain of shame or death." This book offer some great ideas on how to get through it all. But 19th century poet Matthew Arnold stated the most dangerous ideas best: For the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.