The Last Unknowns

by John Brockman

First published 2019

John Brockman poses a single challenge to over 250 leading minds: What is your last question, the one for which you will be remembered? Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman provides the foreword to this collection of responses from an extraordinary range of thinkers. Contributors include Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, neuroscientist Sam Harris, philosopher Daniel Dennett, Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan, and physicist Carlo Rovelli. The questions span cosmology, consciousness, human nature, and civilization's deepest mysteries. Nobel laureates Richard Thaler, Frank Wilczek, and John Mather offer their perspectives alongside MIT theorist Sherry Turkle, genome decoder Craig Venter, and Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson. The book presents only questions without answers, creating a map of what obsesses our greatest contemporary minds. These riddles address the secrets of existence, meaning, and our place in the universe.

Genres: science, science-fiction, philosophy, non-fiction, biography-memoir, academic

Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking

Tropes: intimate, thought-provoking

348 pages · Kindle Edition · William Morrow Paperbacks

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