What are You Optimistic About? [Paperback]

Cheer up! These people are right - despite everything that's wrong in the world, the average human life is getting better and better. And because the average life is getting longer and longer, you'll have plenty of time to enjoy it!

Feeling in need of a pick-me-up in this doom-laden world I chanced upon this volume. It kind of did the job. It gives a page or two to a couple of hundred of the world's finest brains and they speak about their own area of specialisation and why we have reasons to be hopeful of a better future.
Much of it does indeed fill you with hope, but you sometimes wonder whether these guys are being OVER optimistic. When I see what happens in the capital of England's schools and police stations and job centres I'm not sure I can share their optimism.
The book expounds science and reason; yet the growth in the last 50 years of the numbers of Muslims in Europe - people who mostly reject science and reason and liberal democracy - to many, many million, does not exactly give me a surfeit of hope for Europe. I hope I'm wrong and I hope these people throw off their stone-age beliefs and embrace secular western liberalism. I hope.
The subjects the brains discuss neatly interlink, and one section concerns man-made global warming. I'm no scientist but I understand that a lot of scientists do not attribute global warming to man-made causes. Are we sure the guys here are correct?
I enjoyed the book but it is best read in small chunks. You just couldn't read it all in a few very long sittings - the shining optimism would drive you crazy. Well done to the editor for pulling together all these fine names for a project that's brimming with the ambitious driving spirit of the best of the human race.

It is amazing that in a public forum with royalties to collect "scientists can be so open minded.
The truth is that Scientists in general and in reality shy away from almost every opportunity not driven by financial returns i.e. medical and computer,to further knowledge and instead, belittle and dismiss any advance.
The scientific community hid all of quantum theory for almost 60 years with a establishment led fear of the unknown and condemned generations of bright students to a life of adding one more decimal point to the Carnot Cycle.
Cold fusion was strangled before taking a single breath.
Only with the advent of a challenge to current cryptography methods by mathematician was the quantum let loose, for the world to learn that nothing is as it seems.

"Scientists" that are cocooned in an academia and fully supported by the establishment have been allowed to maintain a status quo of science that is outdated, limited and plainly wrong.
Reductionist, mechanistic flat earthers have been free to promote a "science" that is but a shadow of reality, neo darwinism, Darwinism, the shortfalls of which where clearly seen by Darwin and totally discredited by the modern research, that has managed to escape the Censor.
Their are even now "scientists" who in the highest positions of our University's promote a, selfish Gene, condemning more generations to classical endeavorers.
The Quantum will change everything from, "Mind" to "Magic" once set free of the chains of determinism, reductionism and scientific mediocrity.

Their are even reductionist "scientist" who with a seeming complete unawareness of any scientific method try to advocate the absence of an intelligent creator.
No scientific method can say something does not exist, when the research is at such a basic level that backward science does not even investigate NDE, OOBE,
Jung's synchronicity, Grof's altered states of consciousness, etc. etc.
If one uses, one of the favorite tools of the reductionist, Occam's razor, then it clearly chooses a creator over Everett's many worlds or Anthropic principles, weak or otherwise.
If these authors had used the opportunity of this publication to highlight the faults and deficiency's of the present and passed scientific paradigm, then some benefit may have ensued, but as a "we are all jolly good fellows" promotion I find it very little use to anybody.