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How Does Order Arise in the Universe?
Get two Nobel laureates, put them in a room, try to shake them up, fail, and
get a lot of visionary thinking about stars, planets, living things, people
-- plausible new theories of how all this developed from the maelstrom of the
early universe.
Participants
 | | David Baltimore, Ph.D.
Nobel laureate, Medicine , President, Caltech |
| | Murray Gell-Mann , Ph.D.
Nobel laureate, Physics, Co-Chairman, Science Board, Santa Fe Institute |
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Why is Music So Significant?
Every known human culture has music, and how the brain recognizes and appreciates music -- a field known as the neurobiology of music -- reveals that there is no one 'music center' in our brain. Although specific parts of the brain are dedicated to the sense of sound, vast areas must work together to generate the complex experience we call music, including areas of working memory, forethought, movement and emotion.
Participants
| | Jeanne Bamberger Ph.D.
Musicologist MIT |
| | Robert Freeman Ph.D.
Dean, College of Fine Arts, University of Texas at Austin |
| | Mark Jude Tramo M.D., Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital |
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Will Computers Take a Quantum Leap?
As quantum engineer, Seth Lloyd blithely states, "a quantum computer is to a computer what a laser is to a light bulb. That explains a lot, and nothing."
Participants
| | David DiVincenzo Ph.D.
IBM Senior Researcher |
| | Seth Lloyd Ph.D.
Information Theorist, Professor of Engineering, MIT |
| | K. Birgitta Whaley Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry, UC, Berkeley |
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Does Psychiatry Have a Split Personality?
Mental health is a significant national issue yet psychiatry still remains suspect as a science. In fact, psychiatry is said to have a "split personality," with the traditional psychiatrists and psychologists on one side and the high-tech medical scientists also called the biomedical psychiatrists on the other side. Do these new techniques tip the scale and put psychiatry into the realm of science and take it out of the realm of philosophy?
Participants
| | Nancy C. Andreasen M,D., Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, The American Journal of Psychiatry |
| | Robert Epstein Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Psychology Today |
| | Peter Loewenberg Ph.D.
Dean, Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute |
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How Does Basic Science Defend America?
Science has always been divided between basic science, which may or may not have application to the world we live in and applied science, which directly feeds us useful products and services. But with the scientific spirit of discovery tempered by the past half-century's practicality, we've increasingly had to justify expenditures on basic science, whether by the need for national defense or other "useful" scientific endeavors.
Participants
| | Llewellyn "Doc" Dougherty Ph.D.
Defense contractor |
| | David Herrelko Ph.D.
Brig. Gen. Ret. |
| | Steven Koonin Ph.D.
Provost, Caltech |
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