The dream of flight fired the imag­i­na­tion of Leonard da Vin­ci in the ear­ly six­teenth cen­tu­ry. In design­ing his famous fly­ing machines, the painter, sculp­tor, archi­tect, math­e­mati­cian, engi­neer, inven­tor, anatomist  — ah heck, let’s just call him a Renais­sance man — close­ly stud­ied the mechan­ics of birds in flight, not­ing the ele­gant ways in which they turn and glide. Cen­turies lat­er the Wright Broth­ers got us off the ground, but nev­er with equal grace. It has tak­en a long time, but final­ly engi­neers at the Ger­man com­pa­ny, Fes­to, have found a way to mechan­i­cal­ly repro­duce the beau­ty of birds in flight. They call their robot the Smart­Bird, and they showed it off last year at TED.

It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annu­al ques­tion to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2012 edi­tion asks the ques­tion, “What is Your Favorite Deep, Ele­gant, or Beau­ti­ful Expla­na­tion?” And the replies — 190 in total — fea­ture thoughts by Sher­ry Turkle, Robert Sapol­sky, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Den­nett, plus the ones excerpt­ed below. If you’re will­ing to ven­ture down the rab­bit hole, you can access the com­plete col­lec­tion of respons­es here.

Where did we come from? I find the expla­na­tion that we were made in stars [that we are all star­dust] to be deep, ele­gant, and beau­ti­ful. This expla­na­tion says that every atom in each of our bod­ies was built up out of small­er par­ti­cles pro­duced in the fur­naces of long-gone stars. We are the byprod­ucts of nuclear fusion. The intense pres­sures and tem­per­a­tures of these giant stoves thick­ened col­laps­ing clouds of tiny ele­men­tal bits into heav­ier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the fur­nace died. The heav­i­est atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star fur­naces to fat­ten up. Uncount­able num­bers of built-up atoms con­gealed into a plan­et, and a strange dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um called life swept up a sub­set of those atoms into our mor­tal shells. We are all col­lect­ed star­dust. And by a most ele­gant and remark­able trans­for­ma­tion, our starstuff is capa­ble of look­ing into the night sky to per­ceive oth­er stars shin­ing. They seem remote and dis­tant, but we are real­ly very close to them no mat­ter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each oth­er was born in a star. How beau­ti­ful is that?

Kevin Kel­ly, Wired co-founderhere and don’t miss Susskind’s com­plete physics lec­tures here].

Leonard Susskind, Physics Pro­fes­sor, Stan­ford.

[T]here is one ele­gant and deep state­ment (which, alas, is not quite an “expla­na­tion”) … that I find very use­ful as well as beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple.

I refer to the well-known lines Lord Acton wrote in a let­ter from Naples in 1887 to the effect that: “Pow­er tends to cor­rupt, and absolute pow­er cor­rupts absolute­ly.” At least one philoso­pher of sci­ence has writ­ten that on this sen­tence an entire sci­ence of human beings could be built.

I find that the sen­tence offers the basis for explain­ing how a failed painter like Adolph Hitler and a failed sem­i­nar­i­an like Joseph Stal­in could end up with the blood of mil­lions on their hands; or how the Chi­nese emper­ors, the Roman popes, or the French aris­toc­ra­cy failed to resist the allure of pow­er. When a reli­gion or ide­ol­o­gy becomes dom­i­nant, the lack of con­trols will result in widen­ing spi­rals of license lead­ing to degra­da­tion and cor­rup­tion. [More here].

Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi; Psy­chol­o­gist

You can dive into the full col­lec­tion at Edge.org. The pho­to above was tak­en by Mar­co Bel­luc­ci.

Sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery is an engine of eco­nom­ic and mil­i­tary pow­er, and Amer­i­ca has long prid­ed itself on its lead­er­ship in research. But as astro­physi­cist Neil deGrasse Tyson points out in this video, there are some dark clouds on the hori­zon.

When you look at the trend­line, Tyson says, sci­en­tif­ic research in Amer­i­ca is clear­ly in a state of decline com­pared to oth­er regions, like Asia and West­ern Europe. “As every­one else under­stands the val­ue of inno­v­a­tive invest­ments in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in ways that we do not,” says Tyson, “we slow­ly fade.”

The maps Tyson uses are from Worldmapper.org. The one that he says rep­re­sents change from “2000 to 2010” actu­al­ly depicts growth in sci­en­tif­ic research from 1990 to 2001. Dan­ny Dor­ling, pro­fes­sor of  Human Geog­ra­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sheffield and part of the team that cre­at­ed Worldmap­per, con­firmed Tyson’s error but said, “I think Neil’s got it rough­ly right. He should just have said ‘this is the trend to 2001 and it is not just like­ly it has con­tin­ued, but it has prob­a­bly accel­er­at­ed.’ ”

Tyson’s com­ments are from a talk he gave in May at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton enti­tled, “Adven­tures of an Astro­physi­cist.” For a clos­er look at the maps he uses, see below.

The col­or-cod­ed world map above can be used for ref­er­ence when study­ing the maps below.

The map above rep­re­sents ter­ri­to­ry sizes in pro­por­tion to the num­ber of papers pub­lished in 2001 that were writ­ten by sci­en­tists liv­ing there. The num­ber of sci­en­tif­ic papers pub­lished by researchers liv­ing in Amer­i­ca was more than three times greater than the num­ber pub­lished in the sec­ond-high­est-pub­lish­ing coun­try, Japan. For more infor­ma­tion, includ­ing per capi­ta data, see Worldmap­per’s PDF poster.

The map above rep­re­sents the growth in sci­en­tif­ic research between 1990 and 2001. Ter­ri­to­ry sizes are pro­por­tion­al to the increase in sci­en­tif­ic papers by authors work­ing in those coun­tries in 2001 com­pared to 1990. If there was no increase dur­ing that peri­od, the coun­try has no area on the map.

Despite the fact that the Unit­ed States had the most pub­lished research in 2001 and a net increase in research betwen 1990 and 2001, its size is small­er on the map because of a sig­nif­i­cant­ly greater growth rate by coun­tries like Japan, the Repub­lic of Korea, Sin­ga­pore, Chi­na and Ger­many. Although the data behind the maps are now a decade old, Dor­ling sug­gests that a cur­rent map might look sim­i­lar. “If I had to guess,” he said, “it would look worse for the USA giv­en the mas­sive cuts in fund­ing in Cal­i­for­nia to some of the major state Uni­ver­si­ties there.”

You can find more on this map, includ­ing a print­able PDF poster with per capi­ta data by coun­try, along with infor­ma­tion on the sources and method­ol­o­gy behind its cre­ation, by vis­it­ing Worldmap­per.

Maps © Copy­right SASI Group (Uni­ver­si­ty of Sheffield) and Mark New­man (Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan)