7:00pm-8:00pm on Wednesday 20 March
Times shown are in GMT (UTC +0) up to the 26th March. For events on or after 27th March times are in BST (UTC +1).
Cambridge University Press Bookshop , 1-2 Trinity St, Cambridge, CB2 1SZ
Are we alone, or is there other life in the universe? How did life start on Earth, and what might that tell us about life elsewhere? Cambridge scholars stand at the heart of efforts to answer those questions.
Until the 1990s, no one knew whether planets are common or extraordinarily rare. That changed with the discovery of a first planet around another sun, by Cambridge’s own Didier Queloz. We now know that there are planets everywhere. The universe is strewn with potential cradles for life. But what conditions do you need? What paths take us from inert matter to living stuff? And if there is life elsewhere, how would we spot it?
The Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe was founded in the University of Cambridge in 2022, to address just such topics. The international Origins Federation followed a year later, with three other top-ranked universities joining Cambridge as the spearhead of work on the origins of life. One unique Cambridge contribution to that Federation is the place of arts and humanities in the thinking, an emphasis driven by our Starbridge Professor of Theology and Natural Sciences, Andrew Davison.
In this talk, Andrew, author of the recently published book Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, will tell the centuries-long story of the human quest to understand how life got going. He will explore the current state of scientific thinking: what Cambridge chemist John Sutherland has called at least “the end of the beginning” of the journey to understand how some of the matter on Earth – and perhaps elsewhere – has the remarkable quality of being alive.
Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe is out now to buy in hardback at: https://www.cambridge.org/ie/universitypress/subjects/religion/theology/...
More information about the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe is available at: https://www.lclu.cam.ac.uk/#:~:text=Leverhulme%20Centre%20for%20Life%20i...
