HarperCollins, New York 2013

Every year John Brockman, president of the Edge Foundation, an exclusive club of scientists, presents his members with a task to solve. Here it is to describe the most beautiful, deep and elegant theory of how the world works. Nearly a hundred scientists around the world answered to the challenge.

The good thing is that they had to do so in two to three pages, so the reader is not overwhelmed by their theses. Read in small bits, this survey can open a world of scientific insight, among them “A system that makes no errors is not intelligent” (Gerd Gigerenzer p.58)

“...led Alfred Wegener to propose to the German Geological Society in 1912 that the continents had once formed a single landmass. His beautiful theory was greeted with catcalls and scientific brickbats..... Three decades after Wegener´s death, the mechanism of plate tectonics emerged with breathtaking clarity”. (Paul Saffo p. 127/128)

I could go on quoting!