The 2009 World Science Festival kicked off its third day of festivities on Friday with a truly original and delightful event called WSF Spotlight, which stripped away the trimmings of what you might think of as “traditional” science presentations (flat lighting? a vast echoey lecture hall? dry droning delivery?), and replaced them with a dramatically lit, intimate, cabaret-style setting — the 92nd Street Y’s new location in Tribeca on Hudson Street.
Cocktails were served as the crowd took seats at the tables along the stage, giving the setting the feel of a late-night comedy club or open-mic night. And the “performers” were easily as entertaining.
It was such a treat, first of all, that frequent TEDster and philosopher-comic-writer-trickster Emily Levine was the night’s MC. She was her usual self: witty, hilarious and slightly (just slightly?) provocative. She was the perfect primer for the challenging marinade of ideas we were about to sink into — providing context and shaping some of the more complex background ideas into a palatable form by drawing analogies between them and her own observations of everyday life — in particular the way that recognition and acceptance of a contradiction can be one of the most wondrous experiences. Then there was this: “Will people like science better if we ply them with liquor?” Yes, probably.
We first heard from Dominic Johnson, a scientist in both evolutionary biology and political science. His dual background may have seemed a contradiction at first, but he showed that the two fields can be strongly related. He hopes that evolutionary-based lessons from nature can help us improve human security as it pertains to threats like climate change and terrorism. With our planet cradling somewhere between 10 and 100 million species, each with their own solutions to the unique life-threatening problems endemic to their habitat, Johnson suspects that many organisms may have solutions that map onto the sorts of threats to human safety today’s governments face. Just as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) represent an “evolving strategy” on the part of terrorists to injure governments and societies, we might consider our own society/government a sort of organism that must develop adaptations on the fly in order to meet those threats.
Kristin Baldwin‘s dry humor was the highlight of the night for many of us. (She noted that her lab students who grew up playing video games tend to be the best at completing some of the lab procedures, such as inserting nuclei into host egg cells with a sort of microscopic syringe called a pipette.) She showed how contentious issues such as cloning and stem cell research are not nearly as simple as the mainstream media — and science fiction — make them out to be — nor are they quite as ethically problematic as some would claim. Baldwin, who wants to use stem cell technology and genetic engineering to understand the brain and neurological diseases, used clips from films such as Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Harold Ramis’ Multiplicity (with Michael Keaton) to show what depictions of cloning have gotten right about the real science, and also how they diverge from it.
The grand finale was physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek, who told a funny, three-part story of quantum physics, as illustrated by the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. “Why would we want to hurt a cat,” he started, “and how might we go about doing so?” He used the interesting properties of subatomic particles to segue into a discussion about a new type of composite particle made out of “cunningly arranged components” that might be useful to research in quantum computing — because these particles only seem to be effected by the same type of particle. And finally, he surprised and delighted the crowd by suddenly calling a keyboardist to the stage and performing a seven-minute ditty called “No Wandering Atom I,” a song of an atom that falls in love with a human female.