New York festival is a Petri dish for brains

Shane Snow, contributor

Kavli prizes (Image: Craig Barritt/Getty Images for World Science Festival)

In an auditorium overlooking New York City?s Central Park, 100 people hold their breath. Brian Greene, world-renowned theoretical physicist and author of The Elegant Universe, delivers a monologue about quantum mechanics. But that?s not what?s induced the hush.

From the fringes steps Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell - said by many to be the world?s greatest player - who begins playing background music to Greene?s oration. His solo is as complex as the universe Greene?s describing. People are afraid to exhale.

As if on cue, dark clouds pour their guts onto the streets outside. Thus commences the fifth annual World Science Festival.

In the US, only 20 to 25 per cent of adults are ?scientifically savvy?, according to studies by Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. Scientific illiteracy, however, is not peculiar to this nation. The World Science Festival, a week of films, talks, experiments and performances, aims to bring science in all its facets to the attention of the global public. Co-founders Greene and Tracy Day, a four-time Emmy-winning journalist, launched the festival in 2008 and claim to have attracted 600,000 people to live events in its first four years.

Actor Alan Alda, host of the festival?s opening gala and winner of the National Science Board?s Public Service Award, calls the festival ?a Petri dish where brains can grow?. It seems to be working. The crowds are diverse - from kids to art snobs, elderly couples to young composers, and the teenager in a suit and tennis shoes to the Tibetan monk enjoying a lecture on magnetism. Witnessing the enthusiasm for such nerdiness is almost weird.

Each of the festival?s 50 events aims to expose laypeople to a new scientific frontier - and many of the events focus on technology as the way in. At the Museum Of The Moving Image in Queens, British computer-aided film directors "Al and Al" premiere their latest work, The Creator: Alan Turing and the future of thinking machines, a tribute to the late computer scientist. ?He is the seed of every computer in the world,? says Al Holmes.

A show of hands reveals just over half the audience know Turing?s story. Though the film?s bizarre cinematography causes a degree of nausea among some, attention is rapt. The film focuses on Turing?s predictions of artificial intelligence, set against the backdrop of the final days before his suicide. For much of the crowd, it is both a new experience and a good story. A panel discussion about creating AI follows the screening: should we try to recreate human brains with computer hardware, or is teaching software programs the best way to make a thinking machine?

?That thing is gonna murder me in my sleep,? says Frank, a cantankerous old man, as his son gives him a robot butler in the film Robot & Frank: The future of computerized companions, which screens the next evening. The dramatic comedy about ageing, AI and burglary induces hoots of laughter. Frank?s aversion to his robot gives way to friendly companionship, and the audience walks away pondering life - which is what science is all about.

Talks on water and evolution, street fair exhibits that let kids control computers with their brains and panel discussions on identifying ancient painters punctuate the week.

WSF also hosts the prestigious Kavli prizes - an awards ceremony giving $1 million to leading researchers in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. This year?s winners include Michael Brown, the man whose work got Pluto demoted from planet status, and Mildred Dresselhaus, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been working on carbon nanotubes for the better part of 50 years.

Prizes like these help bring awareness of scientific progress to the public, and WSF turns the Kavli awards into an opportunity to connect with the science-curious. After the ceremony, scientists file on stage and the floor opens for audience questions about anything and everything.

One person asks: ?Science literacy seems to be at an all-time low in the US and yet scientific research seems to be strong. How can you account for that discrepancy??

Biophysicist Thomas Jessell of Columbia University, New York, a 2008 Kavli prizewinner, boils it down to early education. ?We do a poor job at communicating the intrigue and interest of science when people are still kids and malleable and receptive.?

The World Science Festival is trying to change that. In a world where children know of no existence without the Internet, perhaps the mainstreaming of technology is starting to make science accessible, cool even, to young and old.

Back at the opening gala, the final notes of the musical Wicked?s Defying Gravity - as performed by Broadway star Teal Wicks - die out, and Alda bids gala-goers goodnight. As the audience shuffles to the door, an elderly man complains to his wife, ?It was a little too Broadway for me.? Clearly, he was there for the science.

The World Science Festival took place from 31 May to 3 June in New York. You can catch up with video of the highlights on the World Science Festival website.

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