What role will science and scientific culture in general play in determining the future between utopian aspirations and the reality already in progress? What will be the discoveries and inventions that will change human life and the planet – from health to nutrition, from technology to space exploration? What seemed like science fiction became reality, and what today looks like science fiction will one day become a reality? How does science help us and how will it help us confront the tangible dangers facing humanity and the planet? These and many other questions that the CICAP Festival will aim to answer during the 2022 edition, discuss the social, political and cultural aspects of science, necessary to prepare society for scientific developments and direct science in a direction consistent with what citizens want for their future.
Massimo Polidoro, Festival Director, explains: “This year we decided to dedicate the CICAP Festival to trying to understand and imagine the ‘science of the world to come’. “With a world changing faster and faster, in fact much of our knowledge is at risk of becoming very outdated very soon, and therefore, we will ask ourselves how science, with its ability to explain reality, can help us keep pace with the evolution of society. Of course, we will also discuss discoveries potentially disruptive sciences that create fear and debate, such as artificial intelligence, some technologies for energy production or genetic modifications.”
“We will also ask ourselves how citizens can give their fingerprint, or simply their opinions, to scientific progress,” explains Daniela Ovadia, Scientific Coordinator of CICAP Fest. “Scientific citizenship, along with citizen science, or participatory science, seems to offer the possibility of direct participation of citizens in research, but it also assumes that citizens are invited to discuss scientific issues and have their own space for training and debate: see how the community itself, therefore, can It contributes to the advancement of scientific research, and thus to the improvement of everyone’s life.”
“Science navigates in uncertainty and often makes unexpected discoveries, yet it sometimes manages to make reliable predictions and above all to warn us of the dangers we face,” says Professor Telmo Pivani, Delegate for Communication and Scientific Publishing at the University of Padua. Climate change models have long predicted what is happening today. The epidemic was predicted in detail ten years ago, but we do not pay enough attention to this data. CICAP Fest 2022 returns with wonderful guests, in a special edition to mark the 800th anniversary of the University of Padua, to talk about the future, a future read through the lenses of science, rationality and curiosity.”
As every year, CICAP Fest will pledge to dismantle the hoaxes and pseudoscientific hoaxes that pollute the public debate, with the consistent goal of sharing tools and best practices to help everyone distinguish between truth and lies, and to address serious issues through approaches only of the lightest appearance. . This year, in particular, bearing in mind the notion of “time travel” we will question the future of yesterday in order to understand it tomorrow. In the first half of the twentieth century, an era full of tensions and struggles, when we thought about the future we imagined it as exciting and full of stimulating prospects; However, not only have the promises of science fiction been kept, but we also seem to have lost enthusiasm for an extraordinary future: what happened along the way?
Encouraged by CICAP, in cooperation with the University, the Municipality and the Province of Padua, the CICAP Festival will, as always, offer face-to-face meetings with some of the most beautiful names in science, publishing and culture, Italian and international. , which addresses the most diverse topics: from the environmental crisis to climate change, from artificial intelligence to space exploration, from the search for drugs and vaccines to health inequalities.
The usual attention of schools and educators will be devoted to a schedule entirely dedicated to them: CICAP Fest EDU, which in the previous edition included more than 6000 girls and boys, which this year anticipates the actual festival: four days of streaming meetings, from April 26 to 29, dedicated to female high school students From all over Italy. Tuesday, April 26, A journey through the lens of a microscope to discover the “invisible world” that medical research workers have to deal with every day, in collaboration with the AIRC Foundation; Wednesday 27, with the famous chemist Silvano Fosso, we will talk about the concept of “naturalness” in agriculture, chemistry and cosmetics, while Agnese Collino, famous and scientific supervisor of the Veronesi Foundation, will analyze the epidemic of the past, polio, to understand the lessons we can draw from it in the present; Thursday 28, meteorologist Elisa Balsey will address the issue of climate change, while astrophysicist Luca Perry will explain the risks of the pandemic and the importance of a decisive approach in dealing with the many data and information we target every day; Friday 29th Scientific guides Alessandro Vitali and David Palai will present “Escape Smoke”, an entirely new escape room on the topic of smoking by the Umberto Veronesi Foundation in collaboration with the Museum of the History of Medicine in Padua, and a meeting with Fabiana Zollo, computer researcher, on the phenomenon of computational disinformation will take place .
The complete calendar of this year’s meetings, free and open to all, is now available at cicapfest.it/edu and registration is already open.
“Infuriatingly humble social media buff. Twitter advocate. Writer. Internet nerd.”
