March Events
Coming This Month
Harvard Science Book Talks welcomes the latest three speakers in our series— Felix Flicker, Bethany Brookshire, and Bruce Schneier.
Join us as we uncover the “Magick” that fuels our everyday lives, debunk the cultural divide between “pet” & “pest,” and reveal the subversive implications of “hacking” the world around us.
Tickets are required for each event and can be purchased using the links provided below.
Felix Flicker, The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life
Date: Friday, March 10, 2023, 5pm
If you were to present the feats of modern science to someone from the past, those feats would surely be considered magic. Theoretical physicist Felix Flicker proves that they are indeed magic—just familiar magic. The name for this magic is “condensed matter physics.” Most people haven’t heard of the field, yet more than a third of physicists identify as condensed matter researchers, making it the most active area in the subject—with good reason. Condensed matter is the solids, liquids, and gasses that surround us—and the more exotic matters—which dictate every aspect of our present existence, and hold the keys to a brighter future, from quantum computing to real-life invisibility cloaks.
Flicker teases out the magical threads that run through our daily lives. Condensed matter physics allows you to create anything abiding by the laws of reality—and often, we find that those laws can be bent. Flicker explains how to create new particles which never existed before, how to make crystals shoot out such intense light they can cut through metal, how to separate the poles of a magnet. And more.
The book’s endearing conceit is that you, the reader, are an aspiring wizard whose ability to cast spells (i.e. to do science) is dependent on your grasp of the fundamentals of our universe. This book contains no equations or charts—instead, it’s full of owls and mountains and infinite libraries, and staffs and wands, and martial arts and mythical islands ruled by sage knot-makers. Part of the book’s magic is that, for all these fanciful trappings, it still feels practical and applicable. The Magick of Physics will open your eyes to the miracles that surround us.
Felix Flicker is a lecturer at Cardiff University in its School of Physics and Astronomy. He holds an MPhys in physics from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and received his PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Bristol in 2015. He won The Neville Robinson Prize for Best Academic Performance in the Final Honours School in his third and fourth years. He has published in both Nature and Science, and has delivered talks at the Royal Institution. Felix has also delivered talks on the mathematics, physics, magic, and superstition of knots.
Norman Y. Yao earned both his undergraduate degree (2009) and his Ph.D. (2014) from Harvard. Following a Miller postdoctoral fellowship, he joined the UC Berkeley physics faculty in 2017 and Harvard in 2022. He says he is excited to be returning to Harvard as a professor of physics.
Bethany Brookshire, Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains
Date: Monday, March 20, 2023, 6pm
A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don’t expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It’s no longer an animal. It’s a pest.
At the intersection of science, history, and narrative journalism, Pests is not a simple call to look closer at our urban ecosystem. It’s not a natural history of the animals we hate. Instead, this book is about us. It’s about what calling an animal a pest says about people, how we live, and what we want. It’s a story about human nature, and how we categorize the animals in our midst, including bears and coyotes, sparrows and snakes. Pet or pest? In many cases, it’s entirely a question of perspective.
Bethany Brookshire’s deeply researched and entirely entertaining book will show readers what there is to venerate in vermin, and help them appreciate how these animals have clawed their way to success as we did everything we could to ensure their failure. In the process, we will learn how the pests that annoy us tell us far more about humanity than they do about the animals themselves.
Bethany Brookshire is an award-winning freelance science journalist and author. She writes on human-animal conflict, ecology, environmental science, and neuroscience. She is fascinated by the way humans perceive the environment and their place in it. Brookshire is a podcast host on the podcast Science for the People, and her work has appeared in Science News, Science News for Students, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, The Atlantic and other outlets. She is based in Washington, D.C.
Bruce Schneier, A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
Date: Friday, March 31, 2023, 6pm
A hack is any means of subverting a system’s rules in unintended ways. The tax code isn’t computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them “loopholes.” We call exploits “tax avoidance strategies.” And there is an entire industry of “black hat” hackers intent on finding exploitable loopholes in the tax code. We call them accountants and tax attorneys.
In A Hacker’s Mind, Bruce Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyze the systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. He reveals an array of powerful actors whose hacks bend our economic, political, and legal systems to their advantage, at the expense of everyone else.
Once you learn how to notice hacks, you’ll start seeing them everywhere―and you’ll never look at the world the same way again. Almost all systems have loopholes, and this is by design. Because if you can take advantage of them, the rules no longer apply to you.
Unchecked, these hacks threaten to upend our financial markets, weaken our democracy, and even affect the way we think. And when artificial intelligence starts thinking like a hacker―at inhuman speed and scale―the results could be catastrophic.
But for those who would don the “white hat,” we can understand the hacking mindset and rebuild our economic, political, and legal systems to counter those who would exploit our society. And we can harness artificial intelligence to improve existing systems, predict and defend against hacks, and realize a more equitable world.
Bruce Schneier is a renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by the Economist. He has written more than one dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Data and Goliath (2014) and Click Here to Kill Everybody (2018). He teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hiawatha Bray Hiawatha Bray is a technology columnist for The Boston Globe business section. He has contributed to a number of newspapers and magazines including Wired, Fast Company and Black Enterprise. He received an Overseas Press Club award for his series on the Internet in Africa.
A Return to In-Person Events
To ensure the safety and comfort of everyone in attendance, the following Covid-19 safety protocols will be in place at all of our Sanders Theatre events until further notice:
All attendees are encouraged to wear masks. Performers may be unmasked.
All attendees must attest to their current health status (e.g., no current infection, symptoms or recent exposure to others with COVID-19)
All attendees must self-attest to the following:
- I am fully vaccinated against COVID-19 using a vaccine authorized by the FDA or WHO and have received my booster (if eligible), or
I qualify for exemption based upon age, a medical contraindication, or firmly held religious belief.
- I also agree to immediately share with Harvard University Health Services any proof of my vaccination status if I am identified as an exposed person through public health contact tracing efforts.
- If not fully vaccinated, I have received a negative COVID-19 PCR or antigen test result in the last 24 hours.Hosted in collaboration with the Harvard University Division of Science, Cabot Science Library, and Harvard Book Store, our series features lectures by, and conversations with, authors of recently published books on science-related topics, written with a non-specialist audience in mind.