Check out this op-ed by World Science Festival co-founder Brian Greene in the New York Times: The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course, on the recent commissioning of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator: the Large Hadron Collider.
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…)
Check out Brian Greene talking about the World Science Festival on Tuesday’s Colbert Report:
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.
On Tuesday, May 27, at 11:30 PM, Brian Greene will join Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report (Comedy Central). To whet your appetite, here is Brian’s previous appearance on that show:
On Thursday at 12 PM, you can catch Brian on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show.
Here’s another interview with Brian about the Festival, this time on TreeHugger.
5-4-3-2-1-Jump: World Science Festival co-founder Brian Greene and a hundred high school students from the NEST+m School on the Lower East Side at the jump-off for the 2008 World Science Festival. As Brian and the students figured out, while they are airborne during their jump, the Earth (more…)
Check out this interview with Festival co-founders Brian Greene and Tracy Day on New York Magazine’s Daily Intel blog! P.S.: We are reliably informed that there will be some balloons at the World Science Festival’s Street Fair. And liquid nitrogen.
In an article that has just appeared on the ABC News website, World Science Festival co-founder and string theorist, Brian Greene, and advisory board member and theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, argue there is a science renaissance in the making:
Indeed, Greene contends that now more than ever, there’s a need to keep science in the forefront. From stem cells to space travel, from global climate change to urban agriculture and the personalization of health care, “it’s just an endless list of things that we need to address or deal with or make use of that all have science at their core,” he said.
The article goes on to say that (more…)
