Orange Alert

Science and the Dalai Lama focus of 2013 Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences and Humanities

Physicist Arthur Zajonc, president of the Mind and Life Institute is guest speaker

March 19, 2013, by Judy Holmes

Arthur Zajonc with the Dalai Lama
Arthur Zajonc with the Dalai Lama
Physicist Arthur Zajonc, president of the Mind and Life Institute in Hadley, Mass., will present “Conversing with the Dalai Lama: 25 Years of Dialogue with Science” at 5 p.m. Tuesday, March 26 in Syracuse University’s Huntington Beard Crouse Gifford Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU’s paid lots.

Zajonc’s lecture is presented by the Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences and Humanities, the Department of Physics, and the SU Humanities Center, all housed in The College of Arts and Sciences.

Zajonc is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Physics Emeritus at Amherst College, where he taught from 1978 to 2012. Since 1997, Zajonc has also served as scientific coordinator for the Mind and Life dialogue with the Dalai Lama, whose meetings have been published as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama (Oxford 2004) and The Dalai Lama at MIT (Harvard UP, 2006).

Zajonc’s research has included studies in parity violation in atoms, the experimental foundations of quantum physics, and the relationship between sciences, the humanities, and meditation. He has fostered the use of contemplative practice in college and university classrooms, and he continues to speak around the world on the importance of contemplative pedagogy. Out of this work and his long-standing meditative practice, Zajonc has authored Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love (2008)

Zajonc’s other books include, author of Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (1995); co-author of The Quantum Challenge (2005); and co-editor of Goethe’s Way of Science. He was a visiting professor and research scientist at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, and a Fulbright professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

About the Kameshwar C. Wali lecture series
Kameshwar C. Wali, distinguished research professor emeritus in the Department of Physics, is internationally recognized for his scholarship in the symmetry properties of fundamental particles and their interactions, and for his work on the physics of music.

The endowed Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences and Humanities was established by Wali’s daughters, Alaka, Achala, and Monona, as an expression of their admiration and gratitude for his vision, leadership, and dedication to SU and the community.

About the SU Humanities Center
The SU Humanities Center, founded in 2008, fosters public engagement in the humanities, and is home to the Central New York Humanities Corridor; the Watson Visiting Collaborator and Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professorship programs; the HC Mini-Seminar and Syracuse Symposium Seminar series; and other research initiatives, annual fellowships and public programming.


Media Contact

Judy Holmes