The Third Culture - Definition and Overview

The Third Culture is the title of a book by John Brockman which discusses the work of several well-known thinkers who are directly communicating their new, sometimes provocative, ideas to the general public.

The title of the book refers to Charles Percy Snow's 1959 work The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which described the conflict between the cultures of the humanities and science.

Twenty-three people were included in the book:

• physicist Paul Davies
• biologist Richard Dawkins
• philosopher Daniel Dennett
• paleontologist Niles Eldredge
• chaos theorist J. Doyne Farmer
• theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann
• biologist Brian Goodwin
• geologist/biologist Stephen Jay Gould
• physicist Alan Guth
• inventor W. Daniel Hillis
• theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
• geneticist Steve Jones
• biologist Stuart Kauffman
• complex systems specialist Christopher Langton
• biologist Lynn Margulis
• mathematician and computer scientist Marvin Minsky
• mathematical physicist Roger Penrose
• cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
• theoretical astrophysicist Martin Rees
• cognitive scientist Roger Schank
• theoretical physicist Lee Smolin
• biologist Francisco Varela
• evolutionary biologist George C. Williams

References

• John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Simon & Schuster: 1995 ISBN 0684823446

External links

• 3rd Culture at EDGE (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/)