Here are a few images from Sunday’s World Science Festival events.
String theory pioneer Leonard Susskind, historian of science Peter Galison, and moderator (and Nobel Laureate in medicine) Paul Nurse in Beyond Einstein: In Search of the Ultimate Explanation. (Image: Getty Images) (more…)
Follow the links to the videos (Festival coverage will start after the advertisement):
If those links don’t work for you, click here and select the videos from the search results.
The World Science Festival has now officially started. Click on our list of events to see where tickets are still available — many events are already sold out. Here are some visual impressions from the opening and from the World Science Summit that marked the beginning of the Festival.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s opening address stressed the importance of science for politics. You can read more about it on Andrew Revkin’s blog at nytimes.com (more…)
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…)
In a simulcast linking New York with Oslo, the winners of the inaugural Kavli Prizes have been announced at the World Science Summit. The three $1,000,000 Kavli Prizes, a partnership between the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The Kavli Foundation, and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, recognize exceptional achievements in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.
The winners of the astrophysics prize are Maarten Schmidt (Caltech) and (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.
Check out Alan Alda’s take on the World Science Festival in this excerpt from an interview by Allan Hunkin:
The interview is part of Elegant Solutions with Allan Hunkin, hosted on the Awareness and Action Channel.
If you missed the show on May 16 on NBC, you can still watch Alan Alda on Conan O’Brien, talking about the World Science Festival, by going to full episodes on the show’s website, and selecting May 16 (where it’s Act 3).
Alan Alda has a featured blog post in today’s Huffington Post entitled, What is Beauty, Anyway? Alda, who is a member of the World Science Festival Board of Directors and Advisory Board, explores how beauty can be approached from both artistic and scientific viewpoints, and argues passionately that the two are not mutually exclusive:
“I didn’t always understand this. When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of that crazy idea that if you’re interested in the arts you can’t be interested in science. (more…)
