Science straight from the source

Graham Lawton, deputy editor, New Scientist magazine

A snowy drunk-driving conundrum probes how luck influences the law (Image: Sam Burt Photography)

Future Science, Max Brockman's latest collection of essays by frontier researchers, is both thrilling and bewildering

MAX BROCKMAN clearly has designs on the family business. While his literary agent father John represents many of the big beasts of science writing - the Richard Dawkinses and Steven Pinkers of this world - Max focuses on nurturing the stars of the future.

This collection of essays follows the blueprint of 2009's What's Next?, in which 19 young scientists had a crack - often a first crack - at popularising their work for a wider audience. But while that volume was deservedly well received (New Scientist, 22 August 2009, p 45), I can't help but think that Brockman Jr has been struck by a curse known in the music business as the "difficult second album". That is not to say that Future Science is bad - just that it doesn't quite live up to expectations.

There are few ideas here that avid readers of New Scientist will not have encountered before. That is not really the point, though. This collection promises to serve up the ideas from the source, largely unmediated by the (often stifling and clich?d) conventions of science journalism. In theory that is an attractive proposition. But as any popular-science editor will tell you, it is also a risky one. When it is good, it is very, very good. When it is bad, it is horrid.

The best of the good stuff is a piece by Fiery Cushman, a psychologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He starts with a knotty thought experiment: suppose two friends meet up in a bar one wintry day and get drunk. On the way home they both lose control of their cars on the snowy roads. One skids into a tree; the other hits a young girl and kills her. Clearly one has done something much worse than the other, yet neither intended harm and their divergent fates were largely determined by luck. Should we not punish them equally? Cushman uses this as a jumping-off point for a thoughtful and well-written exploration of the neuroscience of "moral luck" and its implications for the law.

Other notable contributions come from NASA's Kevin Hand on searching for life in extraterrestrial oceans, Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University on using Flickr and other social media to probe human behaviour, and Yale's Laurie Santos on the psychology of irrational decisions.

But these slick contributions are dragged down by pieces that would not feel out of place in an academic journal. The ideas are always fascinating and deserve a wider audience, but all too often the writing is dense, didactic and, frankly, too much like hard work.

It's a shame, as Max Brockman does deliver on his promise of ideas at "the very boundaries of our knowledge". The collection tackles many of the most innovative and ground-breaking projects of recent years: the science of morality, behavioural economics, defining attractiveness, astrobiology, experimental philosophy, altruism and gene-culture interaction, to name but a few. These are, of course, all rooted in the deeper question of what it means to be human - a question that science is increasingly making its own and has arguably done more to answer than centuries of philosophical and theological noodling.

That focus on human questions leaves the collection a bit light on physical sciences, though judging by Anthony Aguirre's mind-bending piece on the cosmological meaning of infinity, perhaps that is no bad thing. Aguirre, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, pitches his tent so far up the slope it left me gasping for air. And that is perhaps my defining impression of this clever but flawed book. A great idea is a good starting point, but it takes a skilled writer to really bring it to life.

Book information:
Future Science: Essays from the cutting edge edited by Max Brockman
Vintage
$15.95

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