TED Blog

TED2011 report — Session 1: Monumental

It’s time for TED! Photo: TED / Robert Leslie

Astronaut Cady Coleman talks to the audience newly assembled in Long Beach, Palm Springs and all over the world, from her home in zero-gravity on the International Space Station. Watch her talk.

Then Gregory Groover Jr., from TED2011’s house band, the Berklee City Music All-Stars, played us on.

Physicist Janna Levin: “I want to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack, and that soundtrack is played on space itself.” (Listen to the soundtrack of the universe.)

Chris Anderson talks to Sarah Marquis, who’s walking from Siberia to Antarctica, alone. She told him: “I don’t want people to get into nature. I want to get nature back into our lives.”

David Brooks: “Over the past few years, we’ve been given a deeper view of human nature, of who we are. Not from theology, but from brain science.” (Read HuffPo’s report on this talk.)

Composer and conductor Eric Whitaker describes his first time hearing Mozart: “My entire life I had seen in black and white, and suddenly everything was in shocking technicolor.”

Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, spoke to this extraordinary moment in the Arab world. He said: “The democratic revolution sweeping the Arab world is the best chance to see peace. Let us embrace it.”

Photos: TED / James Duncan Davidson, except photo 1: TED / Robert Leslie.