Café Scientifique
Café Culturel

Next Monday’s café Sci is an experiment with the usual format of the evening.

The ideas collider at Muse operates in much the same fashion as its counterpart at Cern. That is to say, an elementary particle – in this case, an idea – is accelerated by being passed around in (something vaguely resembling) a circle.

At any point in the process, a new idea may be introduced – possibly more than one, in real time – and these two or more ideas continue to circulate until eventually they simply smash into each other, so generating an amount of energy, and any number of sub-particles, previously unknown to science*.

After about 20 minutes the whole process is then shut down for repairs. But, as with all “café sci” sessions, we resume after only 20 minutes, and give it another go.

Alternative metaphors for this process of thinking together include the “open mike session”; or “pass the parcel”. Any similarity to “Mornington Crescent” is purely co-incidental, and exempt from copyright.

*NB: This may or may not include the hypothesized but elusive God particle.

The instant 'new' conventional wisdom is that the banking system needs better regulation. After virtually every financial crisis since the Dutch Tulip bubble this has been the call. But what difference did these regulations make? Another crisis always came along eventually. In any case the situation is not the same as in the 1930s. We have reached the limits to economic growth and a more radical reform is needed - otherwise governments will be shovelling tax payers money into a black hole that will get bigger and bigger over the next two decades. Since the economy will not grow any more and/or cannot be allowed to grow we need to take from the banks the right to create money when they lend it into circulation, expecting an interest payment. 97% of money is created by the banks when they lend. This presupposes a continued growth of production that bankers can share in, to get their interest payments paid - but growth has been based on climate-toxic fossil energy and is destroying the global eco system. It is probably no longer possible after peak oil and gas. Now is the time to create a non-debt-based money system.

This talk looks at some of the ways the notion of time has been represented pictorially by both artists and scientists. It considers the diverse range of pictorial methods on offer in order to assess whether some methods, such as Minkowski space-time maps, are more truthful than others. This issue of pictorial truth is also an interesting one because there are many who would argue that concepts such as a four dimensional 'space-time' cannot be truly represented in any merely pictorial way

Dr Anthony Crabbe is Reader in Design at Nottingham Trent University. Given the requirement for design drawings to communicate information exactly and unequivocally, he has been working on questions about pictorial truth for most of his career. He is currently close to completing the first draft of a book "Pictures of Time", which provides some of the topics for this talk about the various pictorial means of representing the idea of time.

Following the cancellation of the water on Mars talk, we propose therefore to re-run the Hadron ideas collider. This time, however, we will seed the event with two pre-identified thoughts; and let others emerge (so you may like to think about all these ideas in advance).

The suggested thought germs are:-

8.00 – 8.50pm
“The contemporary audit and regulation culture has stifled creativity and made the world a less safe place.”
And
9.15 – 10pm
“The discovery of neural plasticity will re-write the fundamental paradigms of both science and philosophy for the 21st Century”

The development of sustainable approaches to the management of diseases transmitted between domestic animals and wildlife is a major global challenge. Success in this endeavour will require advances in our understanding of the impact of management interventions on wildlife populations. There is a growing body of evidence on the potentially profound effects of demographic processes, social structure and behaviour of wildlife populations on disease dynamics and management outcomes. In the UK Eurasian badgers (Meles meles) are a source of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) infection in cattle. Consequently, badgers have been culled under a variety of strategies in the past, whilst infection in cattle has persisted. The results of several observational field studies of badger behaviour and a large-scale field experiment suggest that the disturbance of badger population structure and behaviour caused by culling may in some cases have counter-productive epidemiological consequences. Such effects may be expected in other wildlife populations where disease control interventions could elicit similar behavioural responses. Alternative options for the management of bTB transmission to cattle include vaccinating badgers, and using changes to cattle husbandry practices to minimise interactions.