November Events
Coming this Month
Harvard Science Book Talks welcomes the latest three speakers in our series—Carl Safina, Kip Thorne, and Joshua Winn.
All events in November take place at the Harvard Science Center, and you can register using the links provided below.
Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe
Date: Tuesday, November 7, 2023, 6pm
When ecologist Carl Safina and his wife, Patricia, took in a near-death baby owl, they expected that, like other wild orphans they’d rescued, she’d be a temporary presence. But Alfie’s feathers were not growing correctly, requiring prolonged care. As Alfie grew and gained strength, she became a part of the family, joining a menagerie of dogs and chickens and making a home for herself in the backyard. Carl and Patricia began to realize that the healing was mutual; Alfie had been braided into their world, and was now pulling them into hers.
Alfie & Me is the story of the remarkable impact this little owl would have on their lives. The continuing bond of trust following her freedom―and her raising of her own wild brood―coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a year in which Carl and Patricia were forced to spend time at home without the normal obligations of work and travel. Witnessing all the fine details of their feathered friend’s life offered Carl and Patricia a view of existence from Alfie’s perspective.
One can travel the world and go nowhere; one can be stuck keeping the faith at home and discover a new world. Safina’s relationship with an owl made him want to better understand how people have viewed humanity’s relationship with nature across cultures and throughout history. Interwoven with Safina’s keen observations, insight, and reflections, Alfie & Me is a work of profound beauties and magical timing harbored within one upended year.
Carl Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University. He has a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Carl's books include Voyage of the Turtle, Becoming Wild, and The View From Lazy Point.
Joseph Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson Universityand Master Teacher in the Forestry and Environmental Conservation Department. He was an inaugural fellow of the Audubon-Toyota Together Green Initiative and is an Advisory Council member of the North American Association for Environmental Education. Lanham is the poet laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina, and the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts (2021). He has published in a variety of leading journals and media platforms, including Audubon, Orion, Vanity Fair, Forest Ecology and Management, and Oxford American.
Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran, The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves
Date: Wednesday, November 8, 2023, 6pm
Nearly two decades in the making, The Warped Side of Our Universe marks the historic collaboration of Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and award-winning artist Lia Halloran. It brings to vivid life the wonders and wildness of our universe’s “Warped Side”—objects and phenomena made from warped space and time, from colliding black holes and collapsing wormholes to twisting space vortices and down-cascading time.
Through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings, the authors explicate Thorne’s and colleagues’ astrophysical discoveries and speculations with an epic narrative that asks: How did the universe begin? Can anything travel backward in time? And what weird and marvelous phenomena inhabit the Warped Side?
Featuring more than 100 paintings, including a soaring Stephen Hawking, this one-of-a-kind volume, with its multiple gatefolds, takes us on an Odyssean voyage into and through the Warped Side of Our Universe.
Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, is the author of the best-selling books Black Holes and Time Warps and The Science of Interstellar.
Lia Halloran, an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely in galleries and museums, is an associate professor and chair of the art department at Chapman University and represented by the gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Alan Lightman worked for many years as a theoretical physicist and is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. He's the author of seven novels, a memoir, collections of essays, and several books on science, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams, as well as The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award.
Joshua Winn, The Little Book of Exoplanets
Date: Thursday, November 19, 2023, 6pm
For centuries, people have speculated about the possibility of planets orbiting distant stars, but only since the 1990s has technology allowed astronomers to detect them. At this point, more than five thousand such exoplanets have been identified, with the pace of discovery accelerating after the launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the Webb Space Telescope. In The Little Book of Exoplanets, Princeton astrophysicist Joshua Winn offers a brief and engaging introduction to the search for exoplanets and the cutting-edge science behind recent findings. In doing so, he chronicles the dawn of a new age of discovery—one that has rapidly transformed astronomy and our broader understanding of the universe.
Scientists now know that many Sun-like stars host their own systems of planets, some of which may resemble our solar system and include planets similar to the Earth. But, Winn tells us, the most remarkable discoveries so far have been of planets with unexpected and decidedly un-Earth-like properties, which have upended what we thought we knew about the origins of planetary systems. Winn provides an inside view of the sophisticated detective work astronomers perform as they find and study exoplanets and describes the surprising—sometimes downright bizarre—planets and systems they have found. He explains how these discoveries are revolutionizing astronomy, and he explores the current status and possible future of the search for another Earth. Finally, drawing on his own and other scientists’ work, he considers how the discovery of exoplanets and their faraway solar systems changes our perspectives on the universe and our place in it.
Joshua N. Winn is professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University and a coinvestigator in NASA’s ongoing Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission.