Is Anyone Out There?
A conversation about why we yearn to find intelligent life in the universe.
Please join us for a Pre-Show Saturday Symposium with MIT Professor Sara Seager as we discuss our natural human curiosity about intelligent life in the universe.
Professor Sara Seager is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist. She has been a pioneer in the vast and unknown world of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the sun. Her ground-breaking research ranges from the detection of exoplanet atmospheres to innovative theories about life on other worlds to development of novel space mission concepts. Now, dubbed an “astronomical Indiana Jones”, she’s on a quest after the field’s holy grail, the discovery of a true Earth twin. Dr. Seager earned her PhD from Harvard University and is now the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Seager is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and was named in Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential in Space in 2012.
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A Post-Show Conversation with Professor Stephon Alexander
Please join us for a Post-Show Conversation with Dartmouth Professor Stephon Alexander!
Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist specializing in the interface between cosmology, particle physics and quantum gravity (String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity). He is currently the Ernest Everett Just 1907 Professor of Natural Sciences at Dartmouth University. He received his BSc (1993) from Haverford College and PhD (2000) from Brown University. He held postdoctoral fellowships at Imperial College, London and The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He previously held faculty positions at Penn State and Haverford College.
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The Creator’s Responsibility for Creation – Is Mr g responsible for his creation?
Join us for our Post-Show Scholar Social with Dr. Lisa Sowle Cahill as we discuss the role of the Creator in creation – is Mr g responsible? Should the Creator interfere? What is the reason for the existence of “good” and “evil”?
Lisa Sowle Cahill is currently the J. Donald Monan, S.J. Professor at Boston College. Dr. Cahill is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and the Society of Christian Ethics, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her works include Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics, Theological Bioethics: Justice, Participation, and Change, Bioethics and the Common Good, Family: A Christian Social Perspective, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics; and ‘Love Your Enemies’: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory. Dr. Cahill received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago Divinity School. http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/theology/faculty/lcahill.html
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From Page to Stage: Exploring the adaptation of the novel, Mr g: A Novel about the Creation, for the stage
Please join us for a Pre-Show Saturday Symposium with Dramaturg Sara Bookin-Weiner and Scientist Alan Lightman, author of the novel Mr g !
Sara Bookin-Weiner is a Boston-based dramaturg who works as the Manager of Outreach at the New Center for Arts and Culture, a nonprofit that explores the Jewish imagination through its programs (www.newcenterboston.org). Sara also serves on the Stage Source Gender Parity Task Force, the One Boston Initiative steering committee, and as a member-at-large on the board of the Association for Jewish Theater. She earned her MFA in dramaturgy from the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University in 2011.
Alan Lightman, a Mass Humanities Scholars for Mr g, received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University in 1970, Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, and his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1974. He has received four honorary degrees. From 1974 to 1976, Mr. Lightman was a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell. During this period, he began publishing poetry in small literary magazines. He was an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard from 1976 to 1979 and from 1979 to 1989 a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1989, Mr. Lightman was appointed professor of science and writing, and senior lecturer in physics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. In 2004, Mr. Lightman cofounded the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, which is a collaboration between MIT and the Underground Railway Theater (one of the resident companies at Central Square Theater). Mr. Lightman’s novel international bestseller, Einstein’s Dreams, spawned more than two dozen independent theatrical and musical productions, including a production by the Catalyst Collaborative and Underground Railway Theater in Cambridge in April 2007, which, like Mr g, was adapted and directed by Wesley Savick.
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A Post-Show Conversation with Dr. J.L.A. Garcia
Please join us for a post-show discussion with Dr. J.L.A. Garcia as we discuss the philosophical side of Mr g.
After receiving his doctorate from Yale in 1980, Dr. J.L.A. Garcia, a Mass Humanities Scholar for Mr g, taught in the philosophy departments of Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Rutgers universities before Boston College; in 2007 he was Visiting Professor in MIT’s Department of Linguistics & Philosophy. A past member of the Boards of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Prof. Garcia was a member of the Executive Committee of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, on whose Committee on Hispanics he earlier served and whose Committee on Blacks he has chaired, as well as the Boards of University Faculty for Life and the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. He is currently President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
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