The Penultimate Curiosity. How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions
Roger Wagner and Andrew Briggs
Launch at the BUENOS AIRES International book fair
April 28, 2018, 6.00 PM, Sala VICTORIA OCAMPO, PABELLÓN BLANCO
When young children first begin to ask ‘why?’ they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of the world as a whole is an ultimate curiosity that lies at the root of all human religions. It has, in many cultures, shaped and motivated a more down to earth scientific interest in the physical world, which could therefore be described as penultimate curiosity.
These two manifestations of curiosityhave a history of connection that goes back deep into the human past. Tracing that history all the way from cave painting to quantum physics, this book (a collaboration between an artist and a scientist) sets put to explain the nature of the long entanglement between religion and science: the ultimate and the penultimate curiosity.
Andrew Briggs, one of the authors of the book, will be the main speaker. See the promotional video.
ANDREW BRIGGS was elected in 2002 to be the first holder of the newly created Chair in Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. He has published over 575 papers and articles, the majority in internationally reviewed scholarly journals. After stufying physics at Oxford he gained a PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, followed by a degree in Theology, winning the Chase Prize for Greek. In 1980 he returned to Oxford, where he has been successively Royal Society Research Fellow, University Lecturer, Reader, and Professor, and Director of the UK Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Quantum Information Processing. His scientific curiosity focuses on materials and techniques for quantum superposition and entanglement.
