A mix of local Philadelphians, students and faculty gathered at tables and bar stools at World Café Live last night to turn their attention to the projector at the front of the room as physics professor Elliot Lipeles shared his findings on the Higgs boson.
The audience of approximately 50 people were there for Penn Science Café, a series of free lectures on the natural and physical sciences offered by Penn and originally started by former Sciences News Officer Greg Lester in 2007.
Lipeles, who taught a 30 minute lecture on the Higgs boson, said that his project helps explain how the universe works.
“It’s about human curiosity and fundamentally trying to understand the world around us,” Lipeles said. “It’s amazing we can produce all the phenomenon and have a theory that describes matter in such simple terms.”
The Science Café was initially started to give people not in academia a chance to learn about science from the scientists.
“Being a science person myself — the idea that people don’t generally get the chance to meet scientists is what motivated the idea,” Science Café Coordinator Evan Lerner said. “Scientists have a different perspective of what science is like.”
The cafe has a sister program, Penn Lightbulb Café, which focuses on subjects relating to social sciences, art and the humanities and is exclusively for School of Arts and Sciences professors. Lightbulb Café was started in fall of 2011.
“We want to illuminate arts, humanities and science research in the same vein as Science Café sheds light on hard sciences,” Lightbulb Café coordinator and News Officer Jacquie Posey said. “This is a way to bring soft sciences of SAS into an event, a fun night out.”
Posey explained that Lightbulb Café, like Science Café, reaches out to professors at Penn who are pursuing interesting topics and brings them to speak. The lectures are free and open to the general public.
“We want them to talk about the area of their expertise, their life’s work, so if there’s something that’s grabbing the headlines we’re going to look for folks who are able to talk about that,” Posey said.
She added that the cafes are intended to be as relevant as possible.
“We aim to keep these fresh and topical and we normally don’t plan the lectures a year in advance,” Posey said. “We’ve had talks during [the presidential] elections on religion and politics, we had a talk about the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, and we had a talk in February that was timed right after Academy Award nominations.”
Posey and Lerner plan these cafes in partnership with the School of Arts and Sciences’ External Affairs, which helps fund the lectures. In addition to presenting academic information to people that’s not readily available, the cafes help foster a connection between Penn and the wider Philadelphia community, Lerner said.
“The cafes help make relationships within the community — Penn is such a huge place and people want to know what we do,” Lerner said. “We wanted to do something to try and get knowledge out there — people might be interested in this stuff if they had a more accessible foothold.”
The cafes also give Penn professors an opportunity to engage in conversations with people they would not have engaged with in their day-to-day work lives.
“For us, it’s fascinating to see that folks are interested [in our work] because we don’t really talk to the public,” Tae Min Hong, who works with Lipeles on physics research, said.
The ultimate goal is to bring knowledge to a real-life setting.
“It’s taking science, not out of the lab, but out of the classroom and giving it a kind of warm feeling,” Posey said. “The point is to enable people to come out to a cool venue, eat good food and hear good conversation about the exciting research that’s going on at Penn in these areas.
