Warped Universe – Oct 30
The warping of space becomes noticeable near small massive objects — black holes, in particular. Beyond “noticeable,” that curvature becomes beautiful when rendered with the skilled artist’s hand and described with the poetic physicist’s verse. Lia Halloran and Kip Thorne team up to describe an odyssey through black holes, wormholes, time travel, and gravitational waves. In fact, that is the subtitle of their soon-to-be-published book, The Warped Side of Our Universe. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.”
Award-winning artist Lia Halloran is Associate Professor and Chair of the Chapman University Art Department. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Caltech. These two authors will be in conversation with the Commonwealth Club’s George Hammond.
Visit the Commonwealth Club event webpage (link below) to purchase tickets for this in-person event. During the final steps of ticket acquisition, use code WonderfestPromo for a $10 discount.
Halloween is the perfect day for a deep and magical dialogue on the supernatural! Michael Shermer is the founder of The Skeptics Society, and monthly contributor to Scientific American magazine. He has written over a dozen books, including The Moral Arc and Why People Believe Weird Things, and he has appeared on The Colbert Report, Dateline, and Charlie Rose. Jamy Ian Swiss is a world-renowned magician and skeptic. He has been featured in print in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and on television on 48 Hours, PBS’s NOVA, The Today Show, AND he was a comedy writer and chief magic consultant for Penn & Teller. Please join Shermer and Swiss as they discuss the supernatural — on Halloween — with science and skepticism in mind.
Whether you’re a NightLife regular or rookie, Wonderfest’s Cosmic NightLife is not to be missed. It features three of the most exciting and insightful space experts in the Bay Area — and perhaps on planet Earth. Here’s the schedule and line-up:
Join us for a fascinating journey through the early universe using the latest computer animations of early star formation, supernova explosions, and the build-up of the first galaxies. Dr. Abel’s work has shown that the first luminous objects in the universe were very massive stars shining one million times as brightly as our Sun. They died quickly and seeded the cosmos with the chemical elements necessary for life. One star at a time, galaxies started to assemble just one hundred million years after the Big Bang, and they are still growing now. Computer simulations of these events use the physics of dark matter, of ordinary atoms & molecules, and of expanding space to deliver remarkable insights into the early history of the cosmos.
