Findings

What is life? That was the first question at my last festival event of the weekend--which was sold out, like every other event I attended. However you measure it, the festival looked like a hit: packed halls, riveting speakers, belly laughs, probing questions, subtle answers, and diverse crowds of audience members blocking the sidewalks afterward as they continued the debates.

Anyway, what is life? If you believe Steven Benner, a synthetic biologist, it’s a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist, thinks it’s all about information reproduction and processing: “No system other then life or a product of life processes complex information,” he says. And astrobiologist Margaret Turnbull is impatient with the very question. “As soon as we make a definition, it’s only a matter of time before it’s proved limited. I would much rather get out there and look for it and see what it’s like,” she says.

Throughout this weekend, I've seen droves of people, young and old, mobbing panelists at the end of each event. A regular among them has been Richard Diener, a 66-year-old former history teacher from Brooklyn whose camera is now loaded with pictures of many scientific icons who have spoken at the festival.

When I walked into the NYU auditorium this afternoon to listen to physicists talk about the quest for a unified theory of the universe, I saw that Diener had already staked out an aisle seat in the fourth row, with his camera slung over his shoulder. Diener is a large, round man who wears thick glasses. He moves very nimbly for a man of his size, which is an asset given his primary obsession besides travelling the world -- meeting celebrity scientists and opera singers at events and having his picture taken with them.

Yesterday, he grabbed me by the shoulder and asked me to click a photo of him with Francis Collins. I took a horizontal shot. "Now a vertical," he yelled out cheerfully. Collins looked at the camera with the measured smile that celebrities perfect over years of public appearances.

Today, Diener's target was Leonard Susskind (left), one of the pioneers of string theory. As the event ended, Diener leaped out of his chair, much as reporters do in order to buttonhole people for interviews, and got to the edge of the stage in a matter of seconds. A little later, as a swarm of audience members grew around him, I marvelled at how strategic his move had been. Nobody has quite as good an access to Susskind, who was still chatting with his fellow panelists while walking off the stage.

Okay, so the environment is going to hell in a hand basket (see “Are We Doomed?” below). But is there anything we can do to change the basket’s direction? That’s what seven scientists and environmental activists got together to discuss yesterday evening before a high-energy audience at New York University.

Scientists have known for decades that the carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere is warming the planet, said science writer Andrew Revkin, the moderator. So why is it taking us so long to stop it? After all, we quickly passed legislation banning chlorofluorocarbons after scientists--including panelist Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who won a Nobel Prize for the work--showed the connection between the chemicals and the hole in the atmospheric ozone layer.

Rowland pointed out that while chlorofluorocarbons were used mainly in affluent countries, the whole world burns CO2-producing fossil fuels (or would, if it could afford them). And carbon dioxide, added inventor Saul Griffith of Makani Power, “lives a very long time in the atmosphere. You can stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere, you can shut off the tap, but it’s very hard to make the existing CO2 go away.”

Are scientists who say they are agnostic about the existence of God simply being polite? Are they afraid to admit in public that they are atheists? 

Paul Bloom (second from right), a Yale psychologist who studies the biological basis for religiosity, raised the question yesterday at a discussion on science and faith. As you may have guessed, Bloom is an atheist. Bloom's question may have been directed at a fellow panelist -- William Phillips (right), a Nobel Prize winning physicist who calls himself a "serious scientist who seriously believes in God."

To Phillips, the more important question was whether Bloom's atheism was really based on evidence. His own view was that it was not.