Skeptic Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech |
Hosted by the Skeptics Society, (publishers of Skeptic magazine), and MC'd by its director, Dr. Michael Shermer, these lectures feature speakers from all reaches of skepticism and the cutting edge of science and philosophy. Past speakers have included Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Julia Sweeney, Eugenie Scott, James "The Amazing" Randi, Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait, Susan Blackmore, Stephen Quartz, Victor J. Stenger, Bjorn Lomborg, David Brin, Gregory Benford, Robert Zubrin, and John Horgan.
The lectures are normally held in the Baxter Lecture Hall on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, and are usually at 2pm on a Sunday. The lectures are not regularly scheduled, but average about one per month between September and May.
Dinner at Burger Continental after the lecture is a grand tradition, and will often be attended by the speaker.
Directions and admission prices are available on the Skeptic Society webpage. Previous lectures are available on videotape and DVD from the Skeptics Society.
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The Environmental Wars The Science Behind the Politics Speakers include:
June 2nd-4th - Pasadena, CA. - Beckman Auditorium on the Caltech campus See Skeptics website for more details. |
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Upcoming Lectures See the Skeptics Society website for more lectures and information. |
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Dr. Jared Diamond Crisis Management by People and Nations: How Individuals and Societies in Crisis Do (or Don't) Reappraise Core Values Sunday, January 22nd, 2pm at Beckman Auditorium, Caltech, Pasadena How do we as individuals respond when precipitated into a crisis by the break-up of a relationship, a job loss or setback, or just growing dissatisfaction with ourselves? Experience shows that we can tolerate putting our failed old ways up for grabs for about six weeks, within which time we either work out new coping skills or else revert to our old ways. Similar issues arise on a slower time scale for societies or groups responding to a crisis. Meiji Japan, the modern Navajo, and post-World-War-2 western Europe did set about to recast themselves, while the Greenland Norse didn't, and it remains to be seen if the U.S. of today will. What can we learn from individuals and societies that did embrace new values? Dr. Diamond is a professor of geography at UCLA and the author of The Third Chimpanzee, Why Sex is Fun, and Guns, Germs, and Steel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a National Geographic documentary. His latest book is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which was a New York Times bestseller. Note: This lecture will be held in Beckman Auditorium and has special ticket prices of $10 for Skeptics Society members and $15 for the general public. |
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Dr. Lisa Randall Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions Sunday, February 12th, 2pm at Baxter Lecture Hall, Caltech, Pasadena The concept of additional spatial dimensions is as far from intuitive as any idea can be. In this lecture based on her new book, Dr. Randall employs creative analogies to explain how our universe may have many unseen dimensions. Randall works hard to make her astoundingly complex material understandable, providing a great deal of background for recent advances in string and supersymmetry theory. As coauthor of the two most important scientific papers on this topic, she's ideally suited to explain these ideas. Although physicists do not yet know if there are extra dimensions a fraction of a millimeter in size, dimensions of infinite size, or only the dimensions we see, Randall shows how these theories will be tested in coming years. Dr. Randall is a professor of physics at Harvard University and one of the leading theoretical physicists in the world today who works on string theory, particle physics, and cosmology. |
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