Nobel Prize-winning chemist Harry Kroto speaks about carbon nanotechnology and its implications for the future. // David J. Eicher
The wonderful Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands rolled along on Wednesday, September 24, with another full slate. In the morning, we had a “meet and greet” with the speakers — lots of signings and photos snapped with many dozens of the delegates among the invited guests and VIPs. Immediately following that session, the organizers held a massive book signing for the Starmus book, with Editors Garik Israelian, Brian May, and me, and all the current speakers, signing copies of the newly released book, which contains all the talks from the first Starmus Festival in 2011. I had the fortune of sitting next to Brian during that session, and for an hour we frantically signed uncountable copies and had lots of fun chatting about this and that.
Then we were ready for the day’s regular sessions to begin. My great friend Garik ran up to me right beforehand and asked, “Has anyone talked to you? You’re chairing the session today!” This was news to me. And then he said, “And the translators aren’t here yet, so please just get up and talk for about 10 minutes!” So I delivered an impromptu philosophical talk about what we were learning, the Apollo program, the mammoth cosmic distance scale, and how we need to take great care of our valuable planet Earth and its inhabitants, which seemed to go over quite well.
And then the scheduled talks began. We had fantastic presentations, first by Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke, who described his experiences on the Moon, which held the audience in absolute amazement. Then a huge crowd favorite followed, Nobel Prize- winning chemist Harry Kroto, who described his work on carbon nanochemistry and the discovery of buckminsterfullerene, peppered with lots of amazing anecdotes and interesting stories, leading to a standing ovation from the audience.
Following a coffee break, we then heard from Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunningham, who told us about his experiences in the Apollo program and also a great deal on the lack of an adventurous, risk-taking culture in our present world, which is sad and prevents the kinds of challenges and missions we ought to be doing now. It was another marvelous talk. And then the last presentation of the day came from the great theoretical physicist John Ellis, who described his particle physics work at CERN, the Higgs boson, the Big Bang, and the future of the universe. It was mesmerizing!
We were all left with an incredible feeling of another mind-bending set of talks, and this was only added to for my wife, Lynda, and I by joining our great friend Glenn Smith of SkySkan, one of the planetarium world’s greatest minds, in a wonderful and quite fancy dinner. As we were assembling, we were joined by the great evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and so the four of us talked over astronomy, biology, the meaning of life, and even Monty Python with one of science’s greatest minds over a wonderful outdoor restaurant near the sea. Wow. What a day, and today we journey to La Palma to the largest optical telescope in the world.
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Starmus begins with Wilson, Eicher, Dawkins, and Harvati Starmus Day 2: Hawking, May, 51 Degrees North film