8:00 PM. It’s the first evening of the 2008 World Science Festival, a constellation of events about science scattered across New York City’s cultural institutions. There are so many tempting ones happening at once that it’s painful to choose. West of Central Park, at Symphony Space, a group of scientists--along with the storytelling collective The Moth and Stephen Hawking’s daughter Lucy Hawking--is
spinning tales of heroic failures and experiments gone wrong. Across the East River in Long Island City, behavioral economist Dan Ariely is regaling his audience with games and experiments designed to show them just how irrational they really are. Elsewhere in the city there’s a stage adaptation of “Einstein’s Dreams,” a panel discussion about bioart in the age of terrorism, and a cosmological debate.
It was hard to pass those up, but I decided to come to the 92nd Street Y to hear (from right to left, above) neuroethicist Patricia Churchland of the University of California, San Diego; neuroscientist Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California; philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University; evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser of Harvard; and moderator Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s managing editor, discuss the science of right and wrong.
