Alan Alda on the World Science Festival

Alan Alda has a featured blog post in today's Huffington Post entitled, What is Beauty, Anyway? Alda, who is a member of the World Science Festival Board of Directors and Advisory Board, explores how beauty can be approached from both artistic and scientific viewpoints, and argues passionately that the two are not mutually exclusive:

"I didn't always understand this. When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of that crazy idea that if you're interested in the arts you can't be interested in science. I heard the romantic poets' siren songs and didn't know that the beauty they saw in a host of golden daffodils was confined to those flowers' thin exteriors. They never dreamed of the infinity of universes beneath the petals.

That's why I've been devoting myself to the World Science Festival. During each day, scientists will talk in plain language to New Yorkers in 20 venues all over the city, and in the evening musicians, dancers and actors will stage performances that are based on science and after which artists, scientists and audiences will join in stimulating discussions. In halls and theaters and even in parks and street fairs, New York will have a chance to watch beauty bloom."

You can catch Alda at the World Science Festival on Saturday, May 31st where he will be revisiting his role as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in a dramatic reading of Peter Parnell's play, QED. Also, the Festival will premiere a new play written by Alda: Dear Albert, based on letters by Albert Einstein, starring Anthony LaPaglia, and directed by Daniel Sullivan, on June 1.