Profs and Pints Online presents: “Our Lives in a Sci-Fi World,” an in-depth look at how the literary imagination drives scientific discovery and our response to it, with Anastasia Klimchynskaya, instructor at the University of Chicago and postdoctoral fellow at its Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

We often hear science fiction evoked by those discussing and explaining new technologies and scientific discoveries. Think, for example, of NASA’s announcement that its researchers are on the way to enabling spacecraft to switch to the “warp drive” familiar to fans of Star Trek. Moreover, there’s certainly no shortage of innovations inspired by science fiction. The helicopter, for example, was invented by Victor Sikorsky after he’d read a Jules Verne description of such a device.

But there’s much more to this relationship between science fiction and science fact. Human beings are “storytelling animals” that make sense of the unknown by placing new information in familiar categories, and it is often our fictions that furnish these. That’s especially the case with technoscientific novelties, which are by definition unknowns when we first encounter them.

Gain a deep understanding of the many connections between science and science fiction with this talk by Anastasia Klimchynskaya, a scholar of science fiction and its relationship with real-world science and technology.

You’ll become familiar with the “psychology of fiction” and how humans have evolved to use fiction as “patterns” for making sense of the world. You’ll discover why the Industrial Revolution was so significant in reshaping the relationship between humans and their environment, and why science fiction was so crucial to this process. And you’ll learn about how science fiction is being used today to envision solutions to problems such as climate change and to allow scientists in pursuit of research funding demonstrate the viability of their innovations in fictional contexts. Examples include the gestural interface technology of Minority Report to a near-future mission to Mars in Netflix's Away.

Both scientists and fans of science fiction will emerge with an expanded view of their world.

Profs & Pints Online: Our Lives in a Sci-Fi World