For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about an enlightening event that delved into the profound mysteries of science and the universe.
Washington, D.C. — Science is an incredible engine of discovery — but when scientists talk to the public, they often emphasize the results more than the humbling process of exploration and experimentation that leads to discovery. That was one of the take-aways from “Beyond Science: Exploring the Unknown,” a wide-ranging conversation sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation that took place September 26 as part of the closing evening of the three-day Atlantic Festival in downtown Washington, D.C.
Ross Andersen, a science journalist and deputy editor at The Atlantic magazine, moderated the discussion between two astrophysicists — Harvard’s Avi Loeb and Yale’s Priyamvada Natarajan — and genetic anthropologist Jada Benn Torres of Vanderbilt University. The common thread of the three scientists’ fields of work is the question of origins, on both the universal and the human scale. Why is there something rather than nothing, and when and how did humanity as we know it come to be?