Science that Transforms

Feb. 17: Darwin's Strange Inversion of Reasoning Daniel Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher professor of philosophy at Tufts University. Before Charles Darwin wrote "Origin of the Species," people assumed that living organisms were built according to a pre-existing plan. When Darwin showed that species change because they inherit traits that ensure their better chances at survival, critics lashed out at Darwin for his "strange inversion of reasoning." Dennett argues that evolution can explain some of the content-producing features of consciousness, that researchers can observe and understand Darwin's reasoning in terms of "trillions of tiny robotic agencies called cells, that know nothing of the role they are playing, yet work together to compose the human minds that are able to discover this very fact."

March 10: Really Intelligent Computers Paul Cohen, the UA computer science department head, will talk about developing really intelligent computers. Really intelligent computers will do more than current artificial intelligence, which has delivered cars that drive themselves, airline reservation systems you can talk to, and search engines for the Web. Current artificial intelligence is no match for the general, flexible, adaptive mind of a two-year-old child. The stage is being set for next-generation artificial intelligence systems.

March 3: Visualizing Human Thought Elena Plante heads up the UA's speech, language and hearing sciences department. Throughout most of medical history, the human brain's ability to think and communicate thoughts could only be understood in terms of behavior following brain damage. But new tools for non-invasive studies of the normal brain are beginning to revolutionize what's known about brain function, allowing researchers for the first time to visualize human thought. "And we are only just beginning," Plante says.

Feb. 10: A Great Leap for Bioresearch Vicki Chandler is a Regents' Professor of molecular and cellular biology and director of the BIO5 Institute. Understanding plants – from their most minute cellular processes to their roles in ecosystems – is critical to sustain life on Earth. Chandler is part of the UA-based iPlant Collaborative, a project administered by BIO5 and funded through a $50 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The iPlant Collaborative brings together leading world scientists from many fields, providing a "cyberinfrastructure" for researchers tackling some of the toughest problems on the planet.

Feb. 3: Unlocking the Mystery of Matter Elliott Cheu, UA professor of physics, is involved in historic experiments just beginning at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which is a 17-mile ring tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border. The tunnel was built to smash protons as they travel at 99.999999 percent the speed of light, enabling researchers to observe the most fundamental particles of matter and the processes that occurred during the first second after the Big Bang, the moment the universe is believed to have begun.

Jan. 27: An Enormous Picture of the Universe John Schaefer, UA President Emeritus and President of the LSST Corp., will talk about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescopes, or LSST. Now under construction, the LSST will be the world's largest, most powerful wide-angle survey telescope when it starts operating in 2015. It will provide time-lapse digital imaging across the entire available night sky every three days, enabling astronomers anywhere simultaneous access to study supernovae, planet-approaching asteroids or comets and other dynamic celestial chance events, and explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy.