Quirks and Quarks and Q & A
Wednesday, March 5, 2008 @ 7:30pm FREE
Innis Town Hall
(2 Sussex Ave.)
An evening of conversation with
Jim Lebans, award-winning producer at Quirks and Quarks, and author of the book,
and
Bob McDonald, CBC’s science reporter, author, and Quirks and Quarks host.
A Question and Answer period with the audience will follow the interview.
For everyone who’s curious about what’s new under (and over and around) the stars. Douglas Adams famously pronounced in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the answer to life, the universe, and everything was 42. Quirks & Quarks, whose approach to science owes almost as much to Adams as it does to Newton or Einstein or Hawking, have flipped that notion through a gap in the space-time continuum (or something like that) and come up with answers to the 42 essential questions about space. Much about the universe is very hard for most of us to grasp, and if anyone can explain these mind-bending aspects of the heavens above, it’s the Quirks & Quarks producers, who have been bringing Canadians understandable science, with trademark humour, for more than thirty years. In their Space Book, they answer such pressing questions as Where does space begin? Why is most of the universe missing? Is there intelligent life in the universe? And the real puzzler: What came before the Big Bang? They also answer questions we wish we’d thought to ask, such as Can you surf a gravity wave? and Why is the universe’s temperature on my TV? There are answers as well to far more practical questions, like What happens when you fall into a black hole? and How will the universe end? The answers, which have been vetted by a team of astronomers, are witty, authoritative, in-depth, accurate, up-to-date astronomically, and, of course, quirky.
Jim Lebans Every week, Quirks & Quarks presents the people behind the latest scientific discoveries, and examines the political, social, environmental, and ethical implications of new developments in science and technology. Over its lifetime, the program has won more than forty national and international awards for science journalism. Jim Lebans is a producer and the resident space expert at Q&Q.
Bob McDonald Besides being the host of Quirks & Quarks, Bob McDonald is the CBC’s science reporter and the author of two books based on the program, Wonderstruck I and Wonderstruck II. He is also the author of the memoir Measuring the Earth with a Stick: Science As I’ve Seen It.
