The first public event of the World Science Festival took place yesterday afternoon, hosted by the City University of New York. To start reconnecting the public with science, the organizers decided to start with the young, and aimed the program at high school students—a large group of them occupied the back third of the auditorium. Some of the gifted students attending city schools served as a panel that launched questions at two distinguished scientists: Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winning physicist and former head of Fermi Lab, and Cynthia Breazeal, who works towards developing social robots at MIT. In a further nod to youth, the discussion was moderated by MTV News' SuChin Pak.
Although those asking questions seemed a bit nervous at times, the scientists involved were exactly what science needs to improve its public image: personable, interested, funny, and absolutely passionate about their work. Lederman did a great job of explaining how, as the student put it, he earned his prize. He described science as constructing a monument comprised of mankind's total knowledge, and scientists as making small parts of it. Sometimes, he said, people recognize that some small part is exactly what's needed to build higher; he just happened to provide one of those.
His love of science came out almost constantly as he talked to the students. "Nature works in beautiful ways," he said, describing it as, "a marvelous thing." Science is essential because, "it's important for humans to know as much about the world that we can possibly know," and "humans innately want to explore." Having retired from Fermi, Lederman told the students that he's now working on science education, which he suggested was trapped in an out-of-date system that dates from the 1800s. The Nobel Prize, he said, "gets you into offices."
Breazeal described her fascination with robots as arising from a pretty familiar source: the droids of Star Wars. After a roundabout path, she wound up in MIT's robotics lab, where she has been working on sociable robots, ones that can interpret human gestures and facial expressions and respond in kind.
If she had a message for the audience, it was that science often runs counter to our expectations. She pointed out that the social cues we respond to seem like common sense but are actually incredibly hard to describe in mathematical terms. The same counterintuitiveness showed up in terms of the gap between results and goals in research. Breazeal mentioned that the artificial intelligence work of decades past had a lot of big goals, but wound up being put into practice on things we think of as mundane, like automated voice-recognition systems. AI is now all around us; it just isn't the AI we were expecting. In the same way, she suggested the kids might not wind up with the robots they were expecting, as limited robotic assistants were more likely than full human companions or substitutes in the near future.
This wasn't the intense or challenging science that showed up in a number of the other programs, but getting students face time with smart, personable scientists seemed like a great way to kick things off. Although the discussion did delve deeply into technical aspects of science, it covered issues that, to the public, were probably more important: who are the people doing science, why do they put so much of their lives into it, and how their work will change society.