Public Events
Public Events
The Nature of Space and Time: An evening of speculation, Cambridge
Along with the then-Oxford philosopher Jeremy Butterfield, I organised a panel discussion on the Nature of Space and time featuring Roger Penrose, Alain Connes, John Polkinghorne, Michael Heller and myself on the panel, with Jeremy as chair. This was a packed out event held at Emmanuel College (my former undergraduate college, so it was a pleasure) and Steven Hawking was kind enough to attend from the floor to add to the excitement. Roger Penrose of course well-known in mathematical physics, Alain Connes is a top mathematician (a Fields medalist), John Polkinghorne a top anglican theologian (a Templeton Prize winner) and Michael Heller a catholic priest and cosmologist-philosopher who got the Templeton a couple of years later. I played the quantum gravity and Buddhism angle. The idea was to have dialogue!
The panelists gave short presentations followed by questions from the floor but somehow I felt that people were only beginning to let their hair down and get stuck in just when we ran out of time. The arrow of time was a popular theme of course. The event was later turned into a book On Space and Time in which we could expound our views in depth.
This was an outreach event for the more technical Workshop on Noncommutative Geometry that I was running that week at the Isaac Newton Institute and jointly sponsored by them and the Templeton Foundation.
This Workshop in turn was part of a 6-month Programme on Noncommutative Geometry that I was running along with Alain Connes and Albert Schwarz at the time, you can see our Final Report.
There was a publicity piece about the event in Plus Magazine
7th September 2006