LIfe's Struggle to Survive - Leverhulme Lecture

International Centre for Mathematical Sciences

Join ICMS for this Leverhulme Lecture with John Baez

The Bayes Centre, The University of Edinburgh

Join us in-person for this Leverhulme Lecure with John Baez, University of California, RiversideThis event will be in G.03 on the ground floor of the Bayes Centre, 47 Potterrow, Edinburgh EH8 9BT.Tea and coffee will be served after the lecture. When pondering our future amid global warming, it is worth remembering how we got here. Even after it got started, the success of life on Earth was not a foregone conclusion! In this talk John Baez recounts some thrilling, chilling episodes from the history of our planet. For example: our collision with the planet Theia, the "snowball Earth events" when most of the oceans froze over, and the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs. Some are well-documented, others only theorized, but pondering them may give us some optimism about the ability of life to survive crises.ICMS acknowledge the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust.About the speaker:John Baez is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside. He has worked on spin foams in loop quantum gravity, applications of higher categories to physics, and applied category theory.Baez is the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, an irregular column on the internet featuring mathematical exposition and criticism. He started This Week's Finds in 1993 for the Usenet community, and it now has a following in its new form, the blog "<a href="https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Azimuth</a>".