TED on TEDx, with Searle, Smoot, and Ig Nobel Thoughts

The TED blog previews tomorrow’s TEDx CERN talks. The preview begins:

6 reasons to watch TEDxCERN this Friday

You have probably heard of CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator that is longer than the island of Manhattan. CERN and LHC are famous for their role in the recent discovery of what very likely is the Higgs boson, a particle crucial to the standard model of physics. But now, CERN will house another exciting first: their first TEDx event.

This Friday, May 3, CERN will bring together thinkers of all kinds to examine our universe and provide insight into why studying it matters. And lucky for you, you don’t have to go to Switzerland to watch in real time. The program will stream live online at the TEDxCERN website from 13:45  to 20:00 (CEST).

So why should you tune in?

1. Because of the incredible speaker lineup. CERN has invited 23 great speakers and performers to the stage. Some highlights of the lineup:

Philosopher John Searle, the winner of the 2004 National Humanities Award
Astrophysicist George Smoot, cosmologist and Nobel Prize laureate
Chris Lintott, the head of Zooniverse at Oxford University and co-presenter of the BBC’s Sky at Night program
Marc Abrahams, MC of the Ig Nobel Awards and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research
18-year-old Britney Wegner, grand prize winner of the 2012 Google Science Fair
Sergio Bertolucci, director for research and scientific computing at CERN…

BONUS SECOND EVENT: And if you are or will be in Geneva next week, come to the big Ig Nobel show we’ll do that evening at the University of Geneva on May 7.