Big Ideas (audio)

Dr. Michael Persinger, (Laurentian University - Neuroscience) winner of the 2007 Best Lecturer Competition, on Psychotropic Drugs.

Following his lecture on Post-Economic Politics in Canada, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne fields questions from the audience. This event was produced in collaboration with the Literary Review of Canada (LRC).

Chris Turner discusses his book The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy. Citing German energy policy and business examples such as Walmart, Turner explains how sustainability makes excellent business sense.

Dr. Leon Kass, Chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, examines the ethical dilemmas surrounding stem cell research. Dr. Kass addresses the philosophical question: Why not immortality?

Arthur Herman on his book "To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World".

Leroy Hood, of the Institute for Systems Biology, on Emerging Technologies and the Transformation from Reactive to Proactive Medicine.

Liam Kennedy of the School of History at Queen's University (Belfast) delivers a lecture entitled, Cry Holocaust: The Great Irish Famine and the Jewish Holocaust.

Vaclav Smil of the Faculty of Environmental Studies, University of Manitoba, discusses Energy Transitions in this lecture which was part of the Waterloo Global Science Initiative (WGSI)Equinox Summit, hosted by the Perimeter Institute.

Primatologist Jane Goodall delivers a lecture on the similarities between chimpanzee and human emotions, preserving the environment, and hope.

University of Toronto English Professor Nick Mount on Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita". The lecture was part of his Literature for Our Time series and was delivered at Innis Town Hall, University of Toronto, on Feb. 12th, 2009.

What killed the dinosaurs? And is humanity headed for a similar fate? These questions are addressed by H. Jay Melosh, a Professor of Theoretical Geophysics at the University of Arizona, in this lecture entitled, Death of the Dinos: Giant Impacts and Biological Crises. With the help of sophisticated computer simulations Melosh presents his "hot" new theory on the KT extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

Writer and academic, Ian Buruma on Death of Metropolis: Why are Some Hostile to Cities?

Natalia Toro explains how complex collision data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being digested and examined and how it may set the course for the science of the future. Her lecture was delivered at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, on September 18, 2011.

Seth Llyod is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His talk, "Programming the Universe", is about the computational power of atoms, electrons, and elementary particles.

Adam Gopnik, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, discusses W. H. Auden, William Emerson and Lewis Carroll in a lecture entitled, The Morning Star is the Evening Star: Christian Writers and Liberal Readers.

Alain de Botton discusses his book Status Anxiety which examines our fears over what others think about us and about how we are judged to be either a success or failure.

Robert Morrison, Associate Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College, on Islam, Science and the Importance of History. Morrison cites Islamic religious scholars from historical times and from the present in order to show how Islam and science are compatable.

Physicist Paul Steinhardt discusses the creation of "Impossible crystals": quasi-crystals with five-fold symmetry previously believed impossible.

National Post columnist, Andrew Coyne, presents a lecture entitled Post-Economic Politics in Canada. In Coyne's opinion, the state of the economy, contrary to popular belief, will not be the defining issue in our public policy debates. His lecture was produced in collaboration with the Literary Review of Canada and was delivered at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto on May 14th, 2012.

Simon Winchester discusses his book The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.