Alan Alda

Follow the links to the videos (Festival coverage will start after the advertisement):

• Science Rocks (June 1, 2008)
• Alan Alda Starts Science Festival (June 1, 2008)
• World Science Festival hits NYC (May 30, 2008)

If those links don’t work for you, click here and select the videos from the search results.read more

The World Science Festival has now officially started. Click on our list of events to see where tickets are still available — many events are already sold out. Here are some visual impressions from the opening and from the World Science Summit that marked the beginning of the Festival.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s opening address stressed the importance of science for politics. You can read more about it on Andrew Revkin’s blog at nytimes.com here. (Image © Getty Images)read more

 In a hurry? The earth beneath your feet is spinning at almost 800 mph

And yet you don’t feel it. In fact, the Earth itself moves around the Sun at more than 65,000 mph, and Sun revolves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at nearly 80,000 mph. This all leads to an interesting question: what kind of motion can you feel, at least in principle, and what kind is it simply impossible to feel? If you follow this question all the way to its logical conclusion, you’ll go on a journey that bumps right into some of the most interesting physics of our time: Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity.read more

Relax. There may be a parallel universe in which you caught that bus

While parallel universes sound like science fiction, they are in fact a — speculative — part of physics, and that in more than one place: quantum mechanics, our current (and incredibly precise) description of atoms and elementary particles, gives tantalizing hints of an infinity of parallel worlds. And string theory, one of the candidate theories for a unified description of physics, suggests an other kind of “landscape” of parallel universes, some that are similar to ours, and others that are mind-bogglingly different.read more

You weigh slightly less with the moon directly overhead

If you missed the show on May 16 on NBC, you can still watch Alan Alda on Conan O'Brien, talking about the World Science Festival, by going to full episodes on the show's website, and selecting May 16 (where it's Act 3).