Conversations

Sir Roger Penrose was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his remarkable contributions to mathematics and physics. He is one of only twenty-two living recipients of the honor Order of Merit. Sir Roger, as he is fondly known to other physicists, is a relentlessly creative genius. He has made profound contributions to an understanding of the structure of spacetime and geometry, black holes, the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity, and the origin of our universe. His radical ideas on consciousness have provoked controversy and fascination, while his playful geometric tilings were thought to be impossible in reality. Though intuition defying, Penrose tilings ignited the imaginations of filmmakers and artists and ultimately were discovered in nature. Join Pioneer Works Director of Sciences Janna Levin as she hosts Sir Roger Penrose in a conversation that will stretch across the universe, theories of consciousness, and infinity.

Pioneer Works is thrilled to host Richard Dawkins in conversation with our Director of Sciences, Janna Levin. Need we say more? We’ll say more anyway. 2016 marks the 40th anniversary of The Selfish Gene, the 30th anniversary of The Blind Watchmaker, the 20th anniversary of Climbing Mount Improbable, the 10th anniversary of The God Delusion, the year of the second edition of The Ancestor’s Tale, and the year of the paperback edition of Brief Candle in the Dark. Tune in for a special conversation with the prolific and influential biologist and author, Richard Dawkins, emeritus fellow of New College Oxford and founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

Rai Weiss, co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, is a principal architect of the greatest recording device in human history, LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), which captured the first recorded sounds from space. These first recorded sounds were the ringing of spacetime from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago. Read the article: https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/5-ways-black-holes-changed-our-reality-this-century/