World Science Festival Blog

The New York Academy of Science has just put up a podcast featuring the May 30, 2008 World Science Festival event Armitage Gone! Dance: The Elegant Universe, an artistic interpretation of black holes and string theory through the medium of dance. You can also access a slide show on the NYAS podcast homepage (look for the Jun 13, 2008 podcast).

Image: Julietta Cervantes; Dancers: Frances Chiaverini and Megumi Eda of Armitage Gone! Dance

Full house: From left to right, biochemist Paul Nurse, cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, anthropologist Ian Tattersall, embryonic-stem-cell biologist Rosa Reijo Pera, philosopher Daniel Dennett, (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…)

Oscar-nominated actor and Pulitzer-winning playwright Sam Shepard will appear at New York’s renowned storytelling collective, The Moth, in an event titled Toil and Trouble… Stories of Experiments Gone Wrong, as part of the 2008 World Science Festival.

Shepard will join best-selling author Nathan Englander, pioneering particle physicist Jim Gates, journalist Lucy Hawking, and cosmologist Michael Turner. The participants will take to the stage to tell tales of heroic failures, miscalculations, (more…)