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书名：This Explains Everything世界因何美妙而优雅地运行

作者：John Brockman约翰·布罗克曼
出版社名称：Harper Perennial
出版时间：2013
语种：英文
ISBN：9780062230171
商品尺寸：13.5 x 2.5 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：432
★世界上聪明的网站Edge，让100位拥有伟大头脑的科学家坐在同一张桌子旁，共同解答关乎人类命运的同一个大问题，为你开启一场智识的探险，一次思想的旅行！

★带你认识当今世界聪明的科学家和思想家，了解这些“精英头脑”一年一度的思维大爆炸。
★洞悉复杂、聪明的头脑正在思考的“大问题”，从而开启你的脑力激荡。
★直达物理宇宙、生命科学、人工智能、网络趋势、认知神经和心理学等领域的前列，让你与世界聪明的头脑保持同步运转！
★财讯传媒集团首席战略官段永朝、北京大学新闻与传播学院教授胡泳、驭势科技（北京）有限公司联合创始人兼CEO吴甘沙、电子科技大学教授周涛、中国科学院国家天文台研究员授苟利军、丁香园创始人李天天、财新传媒主编王烁、清华大学社会科学学院教授刘兵、复旦大学经济学助理教授兰小欢、2016年雨果奖获得者郝景芳联袂推荐！
★《全球概览》创始人斯图尔特·布兰德、“虚拟现实之父”杰伦·拉尼尔、《纽约时报》、《卫报》、《华尔街日报》、《大西洋月刊》集体盛赞！

InThis Explains Everything, John Brockman, founder and publisher of Edge.org, asked experts in numerous fields and disciplines to come up with their favorite explanations for everyday occurrences. Why do we recognize patterns? Is there such a thing as positive stress? Are we genetically programmed to be in conflict with each other? Those are just some of the 150 questions that the world’s best scientific minds answer with elegant simplicity.
With contributions from Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Brian Eno, Steven Pinker, and more, everything is explained in fun, uncomplicated terms that make the most complex concepts easy to comprehend.

Review
“A smorgasbord of ideas.”  — Kirkus Reviews
“Offers a rare chance to discover big ideas before they hit the mainstream.” — New York Times Book Review
“Fun and inspirational. … This engaging collection can be read from cover to cover or browsed as interest dictates, but all inquisitive readers will enjoy it. Highly recommended…” — LibraryJournal
“Characteristically thought-provoking and reliably cross-disciplinary,This Explains Everything is a must-read in its entirety.”  — Brain Pickings
“A collection of essays by big thinkers answering big questions [should be] deeply satisfying. And This Explains Everything delivers.”  — New Scientist
“The most stimulating English-language reading to be had from anywhere in the world.”  — The Canberra Times
“Delivers an intellectual mélange you can dip into and savor. ... The reader gets something new at each turn of the page.”— New York Journal of Books
“A collection that reads like the best TED talks ever. It’s an absolute pleasure to read.” —FAREED ZAKARIA
“Rich in mental fodder. ... An indispensable way to sample thinking from many corners of the intellectual spectrum.”  — Pop Matters

世界因何美妙而优雅地运行？This Explains Everything《世界因何美妙而优雅地运行》编者约翰·布罗克曼召集了世界知名的科学家和思想家来回答这个“大问题”，并把他们的答案和论述集结成书。

这本书将带你认识这些“伟大的头脑”，看他们在思考什么样的问题，从而开启你的脑力激荡。他们都是各个领域的“科学明星”，包括世界进化生物学家理查德·道金斯、语言学家史蒂芬·平克、生物地理学家贾雷德·戴蒙德、互联网思想家凯文·凯利、社会网络学家克莱·舍基等。
天空为什么是蓝色的？
晶体的优雅如何体现出普遍的数学法则？
是什么让摩尔定律成为可能？
鸟类是恐龙的直接后裔吗？
为什么我们感受不到地球在运动？
在这本书中，你会找到更多让世界美妙而优雅运行的奥秘！
Drawn from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, This Explains Everything will revolutionize your understanding of the world.
What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?
This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org (“The world’s smartest website”—The Guardian), posed to the world’s most influential minds. Flowing from the horizons of physics, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and more, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most surprising and brilliant theories of the way of our minds, societies, and universe work.
Jared Diamond on biological electricity • Nassim Nicholas Taleb on positive stress • Steven Pinker on the deep genetic roots of human conflict • Richard Dawkins on pattern recognition • Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on simplicity • Lisa Randall on the Higgs mechanism • BRIAN Eno on the limits of intuition • Richard Thaler on the power of commitment • V. S. Ramachandran on the “neural code” of consciousness • Nobel Prize winner ERIC KANDEL on the power of psychotherapy • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on “Lord Acton’s Dictum” • Lawrence M. Krauss on the unification of electricity and magnetism • plus contributions by Martin J. Rees • Kevin Kelly • Clay Shirky • Daniel C. Dennett • Sherry Turkle • Philip Zimbardo • Lee Smolin • Rebecca Newberger Goldstein • Seth Lloyd • Stewart Brand • George Dyson • Matt Ridley

约翰·布罗克曼，是美国著名的文化推动者、出版人，“第三种文化”领军人；也是“世界上聪明的网站”（《卫报》赞誉）Edge的创始人。他旗下汇集了一大批世界知名的科学家和思想家，每年就同一话题进行跨学科讨论。

The publisher of the online science salon Edge.org, John Brockman is the editor of Know This,This Idea Must Die,This Explains Everything,This Will Make You Smarter, and other volumes.

Of course it has to be Darwin. Nothing else comes close. Evolution means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selection— natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science. This simple three-step algorithm explains, with one simple idea, why we live in a universe full of design. It explains not only why we are here hut why trees, kittens, Urdu, the Bank of England, Chelsea football team, and the iPhone are here.

You might wonder why, if this explanation is so simple and powerful, no one thought of it before Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace did, and why even today so many people fail to grasp it. The reason, I think, is that at its heart there seems to be a tautology. It seems as though you are saying nothing when you say that “Things that survive survive” or “Successful ideas are successful.” To turn these tautologies into power, you need to add the context of a limited world in which not everything survives and competition is rife, and also realize that this is an ever-changing world in which the rules of the competition keep shifting.
In that context, being successful is fleeting, and now the three-step algorithm can turn tautology into deep and elegant explanation. Copy the survivors many times with slight variations and let them loose in this ever-shifting world, and only those suited to the new conditions will carry on. The world fills with creatures, ideas, institutions, languages, stories, software, and machines that have all been designed by the stress of this competition.
It’s hard now to recall just how mysterious life was on the morning of February 28 and just how much that had changed by lunchtime. Look back at all the answers to the question “What is life?” from before that, and you get a taste of just how we, as a species, floundered. Life consisted of three-dimensional objects of specificity and complexity (mainly proteins). And it copied itself with accuracy. I low? I low do you set about making a copy of a three-dimensional object? How do you grow it and develop it in a predictable way? This is the one scientific question whose answer absolutely nobody came close to guessing. Erwin Schrodinger had a stab but fell back on quantum mechanics, which was irrelevant. True, he used the phrase “aperiodic crystal,” and if you are generous you can see that as a prediction of a linear code, but I think that’s stretching generosity.
Indeed, the problem had just got even more baffling, thanks to the realization that DNA played a crucial role—because DNA was monotonously simple. All the explanations of life before February 28, 1953, are handwaving waffle and might as well have spoken of protoplasm and vital sparks for all the insight they gave.