This weekend in Philadelphia, I attended a lecture at PhACT, the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, in which physicist Paul Halpern, author of Edge of the Universe: A Voyage to the Cosmic Horizon and Beyond, spoke about how cosmology has become both more precise in what it can say and more uncertain about the even-bigger picture.
I was there because that subject is fascinating but also because I'll be presenting the monthly PhACT lecture two months down the road (Nov. 17) with the rather different focus of "Politics vs. Science." I'll be discussing whether one side of the political spectrum is more prone to deny, distort and disparage science than is the other, offering some historical background on the relationship between politics and science and making a post-election assessment of where things go from there.
The lecture will be free and open to the public and I'll have more info as the date approaches.
