World Science Festival Blog

And yet you don’t feel it. In fact, the Earth itself moves around the Sun at more than 65,000 mph, and Sun revolves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at nearly 80,000 mph. This all leads to an interesting question: what kind of motion can you feel, at least in principle, and what kind is it simply impossible to feel? If you follow this question all the way to its logical conclusion, (more…)

While parallel universes sound like science fiction, they are in fact a — speculative — part of physics, and that in more than one place: quantum mechanics, our current (and incredibly precise) description of atoms and elementary particles, gives tantalizing hints of an infinity of parallel worlds. And string theory, one of the candidate theories for a unified description of physics, suggests an other kind of “landscape” of parallel universes, some that are similar to (more…)

The reason there’s no moon diet is that the difference is very, very slight. Too small to measure, really, but readily found by a calculation using no more than high-school math. The inspiring point is that science allows hidden features and layers of reality to be revealed.

At the Festival, a number of programs will highlight breathtaking aspects of reality that science has brought to light, but which you’d never expect based on ordinary perception.

Echoes from the Beginning, featuring leading cosmologists Paul Steinhardt, Lyman Page, and Lawrence Krauss, and moderated by Ira Flatow, will show how, through mathematics and observation, science has peered back to a tiny fraction of a second after the beginning of cosmic history. In Invisible Reality, with Brian Greene, Alan Alda, and Nobel Laureate William Phillips, journey through the strange world of quantum theory. In Looking for the Laws of Life with synthetic biologist Steven Benner, and astrobiologists Paul Davies and Maggie Turnbull, consider the probability of life as we don’t know it. And in Illuminating Genius, join choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones, actor Michael York, artist Matthew Ritchie and inventor Saul Griffith as they explore the roots of creativity with neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran, Nancy C. Andreasen, and David Eagleman.

Science is ambitious. And among its most ambitious goals is seeking to understand the origin and evolution of the entire universe. All the more impressive is that, (more…)

Repeating an action 37 times doesn’t sound like much. But once doubling is involved, as happens with folding a paper in half again and again, things can get out of hand very quickly. If you could fold typical sheet of printer paper, a tenth of a milimeter thick, in half 37 consecutive times, you’d end up with folded paper thicker than the diameter of the Earth. Mind you, the (more…)