Topics: Cardinal Schonborn, Catholicism, Clash Of Cultures, Darwin, Einstein, Evolution, Galileo, God, Intelligent Design, Islam, Morality, Newton, Richard Dawkins, Two Cultures, Religion
Topics: Astronomy, Cosmology, Darwin, Evolution, George Bush, Intelligent Design, Islam, Newton, Physics, Ptolemy, War, religion, science education. Discussion: Tyson, Weinberg, Krauss, Harris & Shermer.
Topics: Astronomy, Bible, Buddhism, Cosmology, Darwin, Evolution, Francis Crick, Intelligent Design, Morality, Sexuality, gender, religion.
Topics: drugs, Hallucinogens, Kant, Mental State, Platonics, Prayer, Quantum Coherency, Quantum Mechanics, Sexuality, consciousness, neuroscience, religion
Darrin McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University. He is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment and Happiness: A History, which was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, and the Library Journal. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Daedalus, and The New Republic's "Open University."
Margaret Jacob, a professor of History at UCLA, is an authority on the scientific roots of the Enlightenment, the origins of Western cosmopolitanism, and the freemasons, freethinkers and other radicals and revolutionaries of the 18th century. Her books include Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe; The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents; and (with Larry Stewart) Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851.
Edward Slingerland is Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. His research includes Warring States Chinese thought, cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, methodologies for comparative religion, virtue ethics and the classical Chinese language. His forthcoming book, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body & Culture, argues for the relevance of the natural sciences to the humanities, and outlines an integrated, embodied approach to the study of culture.
Donald Rutherford is a member of the UCSD Philosophy Department whose main research interests are in the history of modern philosophy. Much of his work has dealt with the philosophy of Leibniz, leading to a book, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature, and to a critical edition and translation (with Brandon Look) of the Leibniz-Des Bosses correspondence. His current research focuses on the role of eudaimonistic ethical theory in the seventeenth century.
Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell; Freedom Evolves; and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.
David Sloan Wilson, Professor in the Biology and Anthropology Departments at Binghamton University, is director of EvoS, a unique campus-wide evolutionary studies program. He is known for championing the theory of multilevel selection, which has implications ranging from the origin of life to the nature of religion. His most recent book is Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.
Jonathan Haidt, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, studies the emotional basis of moral judgment and political ideology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post-doctoral research in cultural psychology at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001 and is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
Michael Shermer, a former college professor, is the founding publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine. A monthly columnist for Scientific American, he is the author of The Science of Good and Evil. His most recent book is Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, a discussion of the boundary between religion and science.
Daniel Dennett, David Sloan Wilson, Jonathan Haidt & Michael Shermer
Gregory Clark chairs the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. He is author of the recent book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, which in part details how the economic systems of the long pre-industrial era helped shape modern cultures, and perhaps even modern human preferences at the genetic level.
Deirdre McCloskey teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written fourteen books on economic theory, history, philosophy, rhetoric, and ethics. She taught for twelve years in economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself as a "postmodern freemarket quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian." Her latest books are The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism and (with Stephen Ziliak) The Cult of Statistical Significances.
Stuart Kauffman has had an unusually varied career in biological science, with forays into quantum gravity and economics. His interests are theoretical biology, origin of life, origin of agency, developmental genetics, and evolution. He has published four books: Origins of Order; At Home in the Universe; Investigations; and Reinventing the Sacred (due April 2008).
Sean Carroll is a Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He previously worked at MIT, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago. He studies topics in theoretical physics, focusing on cosmology, field theory, particle physics, and gravitation. He is currently studying the nature of dark matter and dark energy, connections between cosmology, quantum gravity, and statistical mechanics, and scenarios for the beginning of the universe. He is a contributor to the blog "Cosmic Variance".
David Albert is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the M.A. Program in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University. He studies in particular the quantum mechanical measurement problem and the problem of the direction of time. Dr. Albert has published two books, Quantum Mechanics and Experience and Time and Chance, and numerous articles on quantum mechanics.
Peter Atkins is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, Fellow of Lincoln College. He is the author of nearly 60 books, including Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science; Four Laws that Drive the Universe; and the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry. He has been a visiting professor in France, Israel, New Zealand, China, and Japan, and continues to lecture widely throughout the world.
Sir Harold Kroto, Chairman of the Board of the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that produces science programs for television, in 1996 shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for the discovery of a new form of carbon, the C60 Buckminsterfullerene. He has received the Royal Society's prestigious Michael Faraday Award, given annually to a scientist who has done the most to further public communication of science, engineering or technology in the United Kingdom.
Scott Atran, Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France, has experimented extensively on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature. He currently is an organizer of a NATO working group on suicide terrorism. His publications include In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and The Native Mind: Cognition and Culture in Human Knowledge of Nature (co-authored with Douglas Medin and forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
ee Silver is Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Policy at Princeton University. He received a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard University and trained at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is the author of Challenging Nature: The Clash Between Biotechnology and Spirituality; Remaking Eden; and Mouse Genetics, and co-author of an undergraduate genetics textbook. He has published 180 articles in the fields of genetics, evolution, embryology and behavioral genetics.
Greg M. Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University, and sits on the executive committee of the 38-member interfaith corps of Harvard Chaplains. Ordained as a Humanist rabbi, Epstein holds graduate degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School. He was lead organizer of The New Humanism, an international conference held at Harvard University in April 2007, and blogs for the Washington Post/Newsweek magazine project, "On Faith."
Ronald de Sousa is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He was educated in Switzerland, Oxford, UK, and Princeton, USA. He is the author of The Rationality of Emotion and of Why Think?: Evolution and the Rational Mind. His current research interests focus on emotions, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, sex, and the puzzle of religious belief.
Patricia Churchland, who chairs the University of California, San Diego Philosophy Department, focuses also on neuroethics and attempts to understand choice, responsibility and the basis of moral norms in terms of brain function, evolution and brain-culture interactions. Her books include Brain-Wise, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain and On the Contrary, with Paul M. Churchland.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. She is the author of eight books, including the novels The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics. Her last two books were non-fiction: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel and Betraying Spinoza. She has received many awards for her fiction and scholarship, including a MacArthur, and is currently at work on a novel.
John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University, Philadelphia, is an author, public speaker, and columnist for ABCNews and the Guardian. His writings include Innumeracy, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Once Upon a Number, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market and scholarly papers on probability, logic, and the philosophy of science as well as OpEds, book reviews, and articles in publications from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Discover, The American Scholar, and the London Review of Books.
VS Ramachandran, Director for the Center of Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, co-authored Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, with Sandra Blakeslee, and is the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.
Adam Kolber is a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a law professor at the University of San Diego. He writes about the legal and ethical implications of emerging neurotechnologies, including drugs to dampen traumatic memories and brain imaging techniques to assess subjective experiences. He runs the "Neuroethics & Law Blog" and is an associate editor of the journal Neuroethics.
Jonathan Gottschall teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. His work seeks to bridge the humanities-sciences divide. He is co-editor of The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, and the author of The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer. His next book will be Literature, Science, and a New Humanities.
David Brin's bestselling novels, such as Earth and Kiln People, have been translated into more than 20 languages. The Postman was loosely Kevin Costnerized in 1998. A scientist and futurist, Brin speaks and consults widely about over-the-horizon social and technological trends. The Transparent Society won the nonfiction Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.
Robert Winter, scholar, pianist, and media author, holds the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts at UCLA. His very non-linear career has encompassed Beethoven scholarship, the evolution of the piano, several public radio series, popular culture, the history of technology, seven new media projects (starting with Beethoven's 9th) hailed as milestones in multimedia publishing, and countless appearances as an advocate for the arts in a No-Child-Left-Behind world.
Sam Harris has authored the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and Letter to a Christian Nation. His essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. He is currently researching the neural basis of religious belief while completing a doctorate in neuroscience.
Daniel Lord Smail has an abiding passion: to bring time depth back into the ways in which we teach and research history in this country. He is a history professor at Harvard University. In his book, On Deep History and the Brain, he joins other historians who seek to transcend the legacy of Judeo-Christian sacred chronology. When not otherwise pursuing a history that begins in Africa, he is a European historian who works on law and justice in late medieval Mediterranean cities.
Jeff Hawkins is the founder of two computer companies, Palm and Handspring, and the designer of many computing products including the PalmPilot and Treo Smartphone. He also founded and ran the nonprofit Redwood Neuroscience Institute (now part of UC Berkeley) and founded the for-profit Numenta, which is developing a new technology, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, based on neocortical memory architecture. Hawkins has a BSEE from Cornell University. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2003.
PZ Myers is a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris who focuses on the interplay of developmental and evolutionary processes. He is a columnist for Seed magazine and maintains a somewhat popular weblog, "Pharyngula", which takes a ruthlessly godless view of biology, evolution and the culture wars.
Anthony Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited many books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are a biography of William Hazlitt and a collection of essays. For several years he wrote the "Last Word" column for the Guardian and is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Review and the Financial Times.
Sonja Lyubomirsky is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Her honors include a Faculty of the Year Award, Faculty Mentor of the Year Award, a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize, and a million-dollar grant from NIMH to conduct research on the possibility of permanently increasing happiness. Her book, The How of Happiness, was released in January 2008 by Penguin Press and translated into 15 languages.
Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He also holds appointments in Psychology and Neurobiology and is a Faculty Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience. In 1998, he was recipient of the Romanell National Phi Beta Kappa award, given annually to one American philosopher for distinguished contributions to philosophy and the public understanding of philosophy. He has written several books; the most recent is The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World.
Güven Güzeldere is Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and of Neurobiology at Duke University. He has published articles on philosophy of mind, history and philosophy of psychology, and artificial intelligence. He is a founder of Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, a founding associate editor of Psyche: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness, and a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
George F. Koob is a Professor and Chair of the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders at The Scripps Research Institute and Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, and Adjunct Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego. Dr. Koob's research interests are directed at the neurobiology of drug addiction, with a focus on the theoretical constructs of reward and stress.
With Sonja Lyubomirsky, Owen Flanagan, Güven Güzeldere, Anthony Grayling, and George Koob Moderated by Roger Bingham
Naomi Oreskes is Provost of Sixth College, Professor of History and Science Studies and Adjunct Professor of Geosciences at UC San Diego and one of the nation's leading experts on the history of the earth and environmental science. Her work came to public attention in 2004 with the publication of "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" in Science and was featured in Vice President Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Her forthcoming book is FIGHTING FACTS: How a Handful of Scientists Have Muddied the Waters on Environmental Issues From Tobacco to Global Warming.
Sheril Kirshenbaum is co-author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future with Chris Mooney describing the growing disconnect between science and society. She has worked in the Senate on energy, climate, and ocean policy and helped found ScienceDebate2008. A former pop radio disc jockey and musician, Sheril is now a science writer and Seed blogger based at Duke University. Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress, senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine and author of two books - the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He also writes “The Intersection” blog with Sheril Kirshenbaum.
Tony Haymet is the tenth director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Haymet also serves as UC San Diego's Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences and Dean of the Graduate School of Marine Sciences, and is a Professor of Oceanography at Scripps and Chemistry at UC San Diego. Tony is a founder and currently Vice-Chair of CleanTech San Diego, a business development organization dedicated to the practical response to climate change issues.
With Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and Tony Haymet. Moderated by Roger Bingham
Peter Turchin is Professor of Ecology and Mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of more than 100 articles including ten in Nature and Science. He has written five books, the latest of which is War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations, Pi Press. Much of his work concerns a new field known as cliodynamics, which attempts to discover general principles that explain the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.
Sally Satel is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in The New York Times, New Republic, Commentary, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and Wall Street Journal. Dr. Satel is the author of PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine; Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion; and coauthor of One Nation Under Therapy.
V.S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at UC San Diego. A former BBC Reith Lecturer, he co-authored Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, with Sandra Blakeslee, and is the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness and a forthcoming book on human uniqueness.
With Peter Turchin, Sally Satel, and V.S. Ramachandran. Moderated by Roger Bingham
Jonathan Haidt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He studies the emotional and intuitive foundations of morality. His current work is based on the idea that morality is a team sport and that political liberals don't understand the game the other side is playing. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and is currently writing The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Sam Harris is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and Letter to a Christian Nation. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. He is currently researching the neural basis of religious belief while completing a doctorate in neuroscience. He is also a Co-Founder and Chairman of The Reason Project.
Jonathan Glover is Professor at the Centre of Medical Law & Ethics at King's College London, as well as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. His books include Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, What Sort of People Should There Be? and Causing Death and Saving Lives, the first philosophical study of the then futuristic issues of genetic engineering and of neuroethics. He is currently interested in a number of issues in global ethics and ethical issues in psychiatry.
Marco Iacoboni is Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. He is also a member of the Brain Research Institute and of the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. Iacoboni studies the neural mechanisms of imitation and social cognition in humans, and he is author of the recent book on mirror neurons entitled Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others.
Patricia Smith Churchland, UC President's Professor of Philosophy, UC San Diego, focuses on neuroethics and attempts to understand choice, responsibility and the basis of moral norms in terms of brain function, evolution and brain-culture interactions. Her books include Brain-Wise, Neurophilosophy: Towrds a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain and On the Contrary, with Paul M. Churchland.
With Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Jonathan Glover, Marco Iacoboni, and Patricia Churchland. Moderated by Roger Bingham
Brian Knutson is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford University. His laboratory uses multiple methods (e.g., psychometrics, psychophysiology, brain imaging, and pharmacology) to investigate neural mechanisms that support emotional experience, and explores implications for clinical disorders of affect and addiction, as well as for economic decision-making. He has received Young Investigator Awards from the American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research.
Paul J. Zak is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Zak also serves as Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and is a Senior Researcher at UCLA. Zak is credited with the first published use of the term “neuroeconomics” and has been a vanguard in this new discipline. He organized and administers the first doctoral program in neuroeconomics in the world.
Terrence Sejnowski is an HHMI investigator, the Francis Crick Professor and Director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology at the Salk Institute. He is author of several books including The Computational Brain and Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are.
Philip Zimbardo is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and is internationally recognized as a leading "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment. He is the author of over 300 professional publications and 50 books including the oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life, and The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
With Brian Knutson, Paul Zak, Terry Sejnowski, and Philip Zimbardo. Moderated by Roger Bingham
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Professor of Philosophy and the Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College, as well as the Co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project. His research interests include ethics, philosophy of law, epistemology, and informal logic. Currently he is working on moral psychology and brain science, and the uses and implications of neuroscience for legal systems. He has recently edited three volumes on the evolution, cognitive science and neuroscience of morality.
Amanda Pustilnik conducts research and teaches in the area of law and neuroscience at Harvard Law School. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, practiced litigation at Sullivan & Cromwell and Covington & Burling, and has served as a visiting scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in History of Science. She is also counsel to the Board of Network 20/20, a foreign policy not-for-profit organization.
Nita Farahany researches and writes about the intersection of criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. She does so with an interdisciplinary background in Genetics from Dartmouth College, a master's degree concentrating in biology, from Harvard University, and a J.D., M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy of biology and philosophy of law from Duke University. She is the editor of forthcoming volume Genes and Justice: The Impact of Behavioral Genetics and Neuroscience on Criminal Law.
Adam Kolber is a law professor at the University of San Diego who recently completed a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. He writes about legal and ethical implications of emerging neurotechnologies. Most recently, he has written about methods of measuring pain and punishment. He runs the "Neuroethics & Law Blog" and is an associate editor of the journal Neuroethics.
Erin O'Hara is Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Director of the Law and Human Behavior Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. One of Erin’s primary research interests involves conciliation: the effort to integrate theoretical and empirical insights from multiple academic fields, including economics, positive political theory, cognitive psychology, behavioral biology, and neuroscience, to more effectively formulate legal policies that regulate human behavior.
With Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Erin O'Hara, Amanda Pustilnik, Adam Kolber, and Nita Farahany. Moderated by Roger Bingham
Lawrence M. Krauss is Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Physics Department, Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative and Inaugural Director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. He is an internationally known theoretical physicist with wide research interests, including the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, where his studies include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics.
Beatrice Golomb is Associate Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego, best known for her work on Gulf War Illness (she has testified before Congress, her RAND reports have changed US policy, and she served as Scientific Director and Chief Scientist for the Department of Veterans Affairs Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses). She also heads the UC San Diego Statin Study group. Her work has engendered broad media interest, from The New York Times to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.
Sir Harold Kroto is Francis Eppes Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State University. In 1996, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of C60 Buckminsterfullerene. In 1995, he inaugurated the Vega Science Trust, and in 2007, he started the Global Education Outreach in Science, Engineering and Technology (GEOSET) at FSU. He has received many scientific awards including the Royal Society's prestigious Michael Faraday Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007.
Sheril Kirshenbaum is co-author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future with Chris Mooney describing the growing disconnect between science and society. She has worked in the Senate on energy, climate, and ocean policy and helped found ScienceDebate2008. A former pop radio disc jockey and musician, Sheril is now a science writer and Seed blogger based at Duke University. Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress, senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine and author of two books - The New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He also writes “The Intersection” blog with Sheril Kirshenbaum.
Leon Lederman is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois and Professor of Science at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998. He has also served as President and Chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received numerous awards including the Nobel Prize in Physics (1988).
Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. His most recent book on evolutionary economics is The Mind of the Market. He is also the author of Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design and How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God.
With Lawrence Krauss, Leon Lederman, Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Michael Shermer, Beatrice Golomb, and Harold Kroto. Moderated by Roger Bingham
Peter Atkins was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford from 1965 until his retirement in 2007. He is the author of over 60 books including Four Laws That Drive the Universe; Galileo's Fingers: The Ten Great Ideas of Science; and the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry. He is involved in a variety of international activities including chairing the Committee on Chemistry Education of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and organizing the Malta series of conferences.
