One of the great things about the internet in general, and open access
research in particular, is how accessible the frontiers of human knowledge have
become. The website edge.org demonstrates this
with a thought-provoking set of 165 short essays from
leading neuroscientists, physicists, technologists, philosophers and other
thinkers, in response to the following question:

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How
have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

A small selection of highlights:

• Roger Shank, one of the
  founding fathers of AI, notes his fading hopes for
  superhuman AI in his own lifetime: "I am a lot older and we are
  barely closer to creating smart machines."
• Bart Kosko, fuzzy logic
  pioneer, says why he now thinks the sample mean isn’t
  all its cracked up to be (he’d take the median).
• Neuroscientist Joseph
  Ledoux discusses the surprising evidence that memories are altered by
  the act of remembering them, so that in fact, "your memory about
  something is only as good as your last memory about it".
• Terry Sejnowski questions
  the conventional reliance on the average
  firing rates of neurons as the primary statistical variable, noting
  that increasing evidence suggests that the exact timing may after all
  encode important information.
• Stanislas Dehean speculates
  as to whether we may be getting close metaphorically speaking, to finding
  a Schrödinger
  equation for the brain.
• Physicist Lee Smolin
  relates his changing views on the concept of time.

It is stimulating stuff, and thanks to the combination of Wikipedia and open access research literature,
these essays provide 165 accessible starting points that can be used by anyone
who is curious to explore some of farthest reaches of our knowledge (and
ignorance) about the world around us.