Gheorghe Curelet-Balan Blog

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

My favorite Q2C Festival moments.

Waterloo's Q2C Festival is over but its echoes will reverberate for quite some time.

Below is an improved version of my yesterday tweets on my favorite Q2C Festival moments:

1 .Witnessing great mankind thought provoking issues presented & debated in the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas, among which I'll list the ones I've attended:
- festival's opening event "What keeps physicists up at night"
- Harnessing Quantum Physics, panel discussion on quantum computation
- Sean M. Caroll's lecture The origin of the Universe and the arrow of time"
- Craig Caplan's lecture on the fascinating world of pattens, symmetry and origami
- Stewart Brand deep thoughts on climate change, urbanization, energy and biotechnoogy
- Robert Spekkens' insights into the mysteries of quantum foundations
- Fotini Markopoulou intriguing view of spacetime.

2. The great events at The Princess Twin cinema like:
- the funny Art of Guesstimation
- all ages debates incited by the innocent physics adventures of Alice & Bob in Wonderland
- thought provoking presentations "The Mystery of Dark Matter" & "The Physics of Innovation"
- the excellent movie selection of Q2C film festival's first night
- Quantum world revealed by the entertaining PI movie The Quantum Tamers

3. Great insightful & dynamic TVO TheAgenda shows on robotics revolution, our belief in science and other issues that I still need to watch online

4. All the engaging Science in the Pub events where ideas were stirred, brewed and consumed.

5.The marvelous Physica Phantastica tent exhibits (Mars Rover, 2 qbits quantum computer), demos (of superconductivity train, cosmic ray detection, light polarization) & 3D Universe exploration movie narrated by Stephen Hawking.

What a great 10th anniversary celebration of a theoretical physics institute whose visionary founder, Mike Lazaridis, believes that
"The road to today's technological advancements was based on yesterday's ground-breaking theoretical physics".

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