he'll take your calls, e miles and -- e-mails and tweets on a variety of topics. his best-selling books include "on paradise drive," and his latest, "the social animal." dade brooks in depth live this sunday at noon eastern on book the on c-span2. ..

and, a space of spirituality to give dr. chopra little bit of an edge in tonight's discussion, but i am confident it will be even-handed at the end of the day. the building has gone through a number of iterations. it was originally the second home of the congregation for 50 years. it with the home of the turner memorial ame church for like 40 years and it has been the sixth and i synagogue going on for seven years in tonight's event is very typical of the type events we try to do, great people, very interesting topics and things that people are interested in. always wants me to announce when i do this upcoming event and generally i don't. but i have to tell you this. i look 55 next august -- but we have bill bryson coming, justice

stephen breyer, justice john paul stevens and diane keaton, so we really, she does give some great stuff and i have to thanked thank jackie for that. [applause] tonight, we are honored to have.or deepak chopra who is the author of more than 60 books including numerous "new york times" bestsellers and among his many distinctions he is a fellow of the american college of physicians. "time" magazine named him one of the 100 heroes and icons of our century. pretty impressive. dr. leonard mlodinow is also not going to be a pushover. he will soon be teaching at caltech. he is a renowned physicist, author of several books including the drunkard's walk, how randomness rules our lives,

very interesting subject which is on "the new york times" bestseller list. he is also a writing collaborated with stephen hawkins. the moderator tonight is timothy shriver. we are very lucky to have him tonight. he is the chairman and ceo of the special olympics. he is a social leader, educator, activist, filmmaker and entrepreneur and i found out tonight he only lives one street over for me so we are very very connected. we are going to have questions tonight from the audience. they will be on index cards and at around 7:15 we will have someone pick them up. after tonight's talk we are going to have a -- downstairs sponsored by the smith foundation and we certainly thank them for that. it should be an interesting moment because we will hear interesting things tonight from our guests and we can carry on this conversation downstairs, so please join me now in welcoming the three gentlemen, dr. chopra,

mlodinow and tim shriver. thank you very much. [applause] >> good evening. thank you. good evening. i would like to add my welcome to everyone here and say right at the outset that i feel i have been in many many distinguished environments in my life but i have never been as out of my league sim tonight. [laughter] have any of you read the book? >> on this. okay, good. so that means that the fact that it took me three times reading it to understand it doesn't make

me feel bad because none of you have anything over me. at least i have tried. >> it makes me feel bad. [laughter] >> it actually an extraordinary book and i hope you all get copies tonight or in the near future. its title as you all know, "war of the worldviews," and my only gripe with the book is the word war. i would like, and i don't think frankly, i don't think, i don't think tonight we are going to have a war, at least i hope not. i think we are going to have an extraordinarily rich discussion with two people who have arguably as good of insight and the world as any two people in the world. what are my credentials tonight? i pray that i would be the shortstop for the boston red sox. [laughter]

it did not come true. then i prayed that i would win wimbledon and that didn't happen either so i have a lot of experience with frustration in religion. [laughter] and i read the book, going 600 miles an hour and six miles above the earth when you can't help but remember you know, and drinking a cup of coffee as most of you have done in an airplane. so i'm on top of the ocean. you can't help but be reminded everywhere we go today of the extraordinary, just unbelievable achievements in science, so we stand in a world that is hungry for the spirit, fascinated by science and conflicted about where those two ideas lead. so without any further talking for me i'm going to turn it over to the experts and i'm going to start just by asking a very broad question which is to

deepak and then leonard to say first, it looks really good about science deepak and what is really good? what is really good about spirituality? [laughter] >> why did you laugh when you talk about science? >> what is very good about science is life would be impossible today. we are here because of jet planes that tim was talking about. we have eliminated a number of dynamics of disease. we have social networks that instantly are connecting us. in fact science and technology, we have the capacity today to rewire the total brain and really create planetary solution -- civilization for the first time. i could go on and on about what

is good about science, but what is really good for science, about science, is that it in riches the possibility and the magnificence and the awesomeness of god. that is really good about science. why? imagine creating a universe in an instant instead of taking seven days to do it. [laughter] and imagine creating a big bang that simultaneously appears everywhere. you know the big dang wasn't in a particular location of space in time because before the big bang there was neither space or time so it appears everywhere and we know that. cosmic radiation, background radiation comes to us from all sides. that is on the presence. imagine taking a dot smaller than the period of the end of the sentence announced dredging at a cross billions of light

years of space and time. that his omnipotence. imagine precise laws, so precise that if they were off by even a fraction of, we would not have a universe. i think we have done god's great injustice by squeezing god into the volume of a body, the span of a lifetime, giving him a mere identity and putting him you know somewhere in an ethnic that ground and saying, this god is the creator of the universe. god is much more awesome, and thanks to science. [laughter] >> so when you ask about what is it about spirituality, there are two levels to answer that

question. one level is the spirituality in general and i think it's very important people's lives to be spiritual and if you are a scientist it's very important i hope that people realize that eating a scientist doesn't mean you you are not a spiritual person. the other level, the question is deepak's spirituality and i admire deepak's spirituality as it relates to the human condition. treating other people with respect and meditating. i like to meditate. i think it's very good for you and i recommend it. i also agree with deepak or the converse i guess that spirituality, being a spiritual person and being able to appreciate the human condition and your place in the world makes science all the although much more awesome. so there is a great complementarity there to use a quantum mechanical term. >> great. so leonard lets start with

science. you argue in the book that science is rooted in the idea of having no bias, that the can have no precondition, nothing that is outside of measurability, nothing that you can't see, touch, feel and measure is real and anything [inaudible] >> the end correct me, seems to pretty clear that most religion distortions in it. biased. it moves toward that which cannot be proven to be true and be except it. >> well, talk about science as a way of looking and understanding the physical world and when you try to understand the physical world, you exclude subjectivity and science is a way of understanding the world as it is without interference the way we

would like it to be. thousands of years ago, people have always had the same questions they have today. why is the world the way it is? what is behind it? why are wire their earthquakes and floods? what are those lights in the sky and thousands of years ago people would just make up stories, the wolf coming across this guy chasing another wolf in blocking the sun and then for a while we developed the philosophy which is a way of approaching the same questions through logic. but the last few hundred years we have developed science as another method of understanding these issues and the thing that science has is testability so when you have a theory of science you don't just say, you don't just give an opinion but we require the theories to make addictions and they be testable, falsifiable and understanding the way the world that is, the last few centuries based on that

idea has been enormous. it is much more progress than we have made in all the thousands of years before that. but, sciences not to answer all the questions of life. science does not explain the meaning of life. science does not explain why you feel love. science doesn't explain why human beings are here and science shouldn't be required to do that. on the other hand, spirituality which tells the chances of other questions, often not just deepak's spirituality but often gives answers to physical questions and those answers often contradict what we observe so in the book i argue about that. why would you believe that creation story in the bible? religions can offer something to people but when they talk about the physical world, they say things that are clearly not right and people tend to -- i always wonder. i mean here is someone who believes literally in the bible. the bible says that should be

killed, that children, or the parent should be killed so we have no one left. let you know people who talk about creationism and taking the bible literally tend to ignore that. i don't know how they get around ignoring that, get around those passages in the bible but then they take the other part, the part that talks about the physical universe literally. i don't understand that. i think they should recognize that in some ways. the bible is outdated in the way it looks at the physical universe. >> so, deepak when leonard writes about the mind, the brain, he makes a pretty powerful case that science has unlocked the secrets that are or beyond anybody's imagination even a couple of hundred years ago. how the brain functions, how the universe is exploding with this extraordinary pace, we know how it started and we know how it will end. you are suggesting that

consciousness is this concept that you can't asher, you can't see, you can't touch, you can't get a microscope around it but it's there. everybody knows it's there but nobody can measure it. it seems kind of fanciful. >> you stated that the limber -- dilemma very accurately and that is what is so difficult to talk about consciousness because consciousness is what we are talking about right now. if i was not a conscious being i could not articulate what i'm saying and you wouldn't be able to listen to me or understand what i am saying. we are conscious links and the mistakes science is making about consciousness and science by the way as leonard says towards the end of the book, science does not explain consciousness but he also adds, for now. >> for now, soon enough.

[laughter] >> for now but here is the big problem. okay, and this is an accepted problem. it's a hard problem and consciousness. here is the hard problem and it's illustrated. imagine -- in the ocean. can you all see it? can you see a picture? >> i can. >> a red rose, the face of your mother. if i went inside your brain, there is no picture. there is electrochemical activity, and you are having the subjective experience. now as you can see the correlation between the picture and the electromagnetic activity, there is no way of explaining science doesn't even have a modem to explain how that electro- chemical activity creates the object of experience, which is what life is about. you say i'm in love.

you don't say i have so many units of oxytocin, because love is an experience. color is an experience. the taste of red wine is an experience. so all experience comes from our consciousness and science -- by looking at the brain. the reason he can't find it is consciousness is doing the looking. okay so how do you find something that is already a observed in the object of observation? >> look in the mirror. >> that's it. so all scientific validation of consciousness is looking in the mirror. the only experience of consciousness is self-awareness. that's it, so because consciousness is the self. the self can know itself only by looking at itself. so right now as you were listening to me, try this

please. i want you to have a reef experience. as you are listening to me, just turn your attention to me. as you are listening to me, turned your attention to who is listening. that awareness that you experience right now, that is consciousness. though while you were experiencing that awareness, you were saying, what the heck is that disturbance, that siren? i wish i had gone to the bathroom before this exercise. [laughter] that is your mind, but that experience is your consciousness. this is what all spirit children editions have said and in this is not what david charmer, the scientifically based philosopher says and leonard and other people accept that.

it is a hard problem because we are looking for consciousness there and it's doing the looking. so, leonard when deepak talks that way, i was thinking -- [laughter] >> i told you you really have to work hard up here. i was struck and remember the quote from the great scientist from the early revolution pascal which says the heart has reason and reason doesn't know. i thought to myself at some level it seems that pascal is just saying, he was a great scientist. one of the important scientists at this time. just saying there is more than one way of knowing. that the way in which science knows might be complemented by completely different way of knowing. is that possible? >> i believe that and i said earlier there is a way of knowing yourself and there's a way of knowing the physical world. but you have to be careful

because sometimes the physical world has an overlap, so deepak believes that the mind is separate from the brain and there are some other -- [laughter] there are some other around that he can talk about, that everything is connected. [laughter] and i believe that consciousness, whatever it is, the human mind and scientist believe comes from the brain. there is a lot of evidence that the human mind comes from the brain and it stimulates parts of the brain to get people to have thoughts, memories or experience the color and you know we are beginning to learn where emotions come from and how the brain works. now i'm not saying that by doing that we are learning the meaning of life or learning about ourselves as human beings. >> is there meaningful life in science? >> science does not address the

meaning of life. sciences just issues of the physical world. sciences about -- here is the universe, here is the situation and i will tell you what will happen a second or a minute later and i'm going to tell you how this operates. it does not address the question of meaning and i don't know why there should be required of science. to me it is just -- you can come up to me and say -- macrocooking is very important. white is an athletics address cooking? it's a separate issue and a separate problem and i think when we get into problems and we get into difficulties when you try to make science something that it's not and i don't know to what and. >> he says explicitly in the book, despite what he said just now, that science cannot explain consciousness. >> i didn't say science can explain consciousness. i said the mind in and the body are not --

i'm sorry, the mind and the body -- >> no brain science can tell you right now how we have -- in fact in the previous book he has denied stephen hawkins, the existence of it. i think we all have here. no brain science can tell you the mechanics of creativity or imagination and as we have been corresponding today with a geneticist and a narrow scientist at harvard, who is actually the joseph p. kennedy professor, who explicitly says today that he is a narrow scientist and all the narrow scientist, where and how is memory and after a little bit of hemming and hawing, we all say

we don't know. >> is that spirituality? is spirituality just finding what science doesn't know in saying -- >> no, spirituality is also being yourself. what is the meaning and purpose of my existence? why am i here? do i have the sole? does god exist? what is the meaning of that? if god exists, does he or she or it or the great mystery care about me? >> can i jump in now? >> sorry, go ahead. >> i think there's one thing that i want to make clear. sciences not explain everything yet and it may never. the human mind might not even be capable of understanding everything okay? but think back 1000 years ago. people did not understand what caused in the clips and then people came along, we don't understand what it is. it must be wolves jumping across the sky and i'm saying just because we don't understand

consciousness or every aspect of human beings right now we shouldn't just grab onto an explanation like wolf stroud ring across the sky. assigns the explanation? science leave blanks in our understanding of the physical world but it doesn't mean we are free to fill in those blanks with any answers that we want. unknowns and there are the science has a different frontier there are levels of realities that will never be accessible to us. >> i did not hear him say that. >> you where does -- come from? >> science can never answer that because you answer that with how would you answer where these laws came from? then you say where did those

laws come from? physics by definition starts with some laws are some principles and the consequences so physics can never asked the question where did those laws come from? and what created those laws? physics. >> vaidya physics than not acknowledge that there is a first cause? >> is first cause of the universe? >> of the laws of anything? >> stephen hawking and i specifically said that physics can't explain it and if you want to call that god we have no objection to that. means god is the creator >> we also talked about the laws of physics. >> thomas aquinas and aristotle, first cause, first mover. >> what we are saying is that we moved a board but that is not the same thing as saying that

the universe, they cannot explain the creation of the universe. the universe and the laws of physics are two separate things. i don't think thomas aquinas was talking about that. >> we can also ask ourselves what we gain by saying okay that's god, that's fine. >> it gets us into humility and reverence. it gets us -- >> you quote einstein. >> there are things that einstein says in his book. >> he was a physicist, right? >> he was a physicist. he was humbled and reverence of the rationality of the universe and first of all, you can't measure reference in units of mass and energy and secondly if it's a rational universe that is comfortable to us it could have rational thought. but here's another objection i have to the science method that

does not acknowledge consciousness. you know, leonard says that science is based on the loop loop theory, experimentation and observation. where does the experiment designed in consciousness? where his observation made? in consciousness. we have no scientific explanation for consciousness. right there, you are knowing the white elephant in the room, you know? you are saying that we can have an explanation in the absence of consciousness when all explanations, science needs consciousness to extend anything and consciousness does not need science to extend anything. all it needs is self-awareness. >> a couple of things. one is that deepak seems to be characterizing science is not being able to have an awe and wonder in nature even as he was

quoting einstein in the me say that is very important for any physicist. who is going to spend your life -- you are smart guy, you can go to law school hammock a lot of money but instead you've choose to sit in a dark office working on these equations all day and all night, no promise of any particular success and he do that because you do have awe and wonder and you want to know how it works. that is spiritual. i said, spirituality is important for science in just because sciences don't believe that wolves jump across the sky -- [laughter] >> there's not one person in this room that believes that. >> led to me, you do. >> i do? when did you hear me say that? >> i don't mean that literally. >> in any case, the other thing deepak said that the sciences deny consciousness. i don't know where that comes from. sciences don't only deny

consciousness, there are scientist leading consciousness but scientists admit that they don't just, they can just say where it comes from. scientist up progress in small steps, carefully and scientist will start talking about what consciousness is when they have a good idea what it is but just because they can't explain it doesn't mean they deny it. >> what prominent scientists of of feed -- and he has it his personal agenda to say this. that is not a very scientific attitude. i think his scientist -- his attitude is scientific even though he accuses me. one thing i can say about

leonard is great intellectual integrity. we have spent a lot of time together and i can say that you know, he has intellectual integrity but there are fundamentalist -- who will make statements and actually have an agenda. science is not supposed to have an agenda. >> a lot of deepak in fairness, a lot of people would say that may be a first cause has, you could make a case that is justifiable and the definition of god or something but people get uncomfortable with spirituality and religion because from the idea of the first cause or consciousness, religions tend to make up a lot of rules and ideas and plans and programs that drive people kind of -- >> spirituality needs observation. >> to say the spirit is one thing and then to say how this is how you ought to live is another and the claims the

people who are spiritual make as lender points out in the book are not really verifiable. how do you know whether it's better to be peaceful or warlike, whether it's better to be anxious or calm, whether it's better to in this situation do this or that but religions in the spiritual traditions and to say this is the right way to go and scientist come along and say, how do you know? >> religious dogma and religious experience. >> what i want you to help us answer is how do you defend the inevitable need that any spiritual leader has to say things about the world taste on your spirituality that will inevitably lead to conflict? >> a.g. wells who said morality is just jealousy with a halo. [laughter] any imposed morality is immoral. but the religious experience

which usually is transcended from unity consciousness spontaneously brings about what is called platonic quality, a yearning for platonic quality to duty, evolution, peace, social justice, harmony, love, compassion, equanimity. this is the religious experience that is a spontaneous expression of transcendence of being connected to the first cause, whatever you want to call it. i think if you defend the religious experience, jesus had a religious experience. then of course the devil came and said, let's institutionalize it and call it religion. [laughter] >> so you believe in the devil? >> i believe that everything has its opposite just like particles have anti-particles and the

universe would be meaningless if it was not one of contrasts. so when i'm saying the devil i think of it metaphorically as the divine opposite. [laughter] >> for those of us and leonard refers to this in the book, for those of us who lived in the 20th century, one of the great challenges to people who say that god is good, awesome and beautiful and unifying inharmonious etc. is obviously the experience of the holocaust or the experience of a confrontation with evil or the sense in which nothing good could allow -- >> could at the evolutionary impulse? >> why would god if there is such a first cause, if that being is good and true why would they have made -- >> if you think of a being as being infinite, contains everything. in other words by definition it's not infinite. that is the difference between

eastern wisdom traditions and some of the western traditions. they want god to conform to their ideas of how things should be. in fact, when god is being infinite is all things. there are many faces of the divine and it is our job to see where it allows us to align with the evolutionary destructive impulse that if that consciousness is infinite by definition, it can be everything. >> even the bad? >> of course. we see the bad, don't we? at the stage of development of consciousness. it's a spiritual stage of development. we have stages of development in psychology. why can't we have stages of development in spirituality? >> i'm thinking of stages of development of whatever we are calling god. i just don't know why --

>> if you look at the world right now, there is less violence today, less racism, less bigotry, less of everything than 1000 years ago. less slavery in this country, you know than a few hundred years ago. women could not work -- vote so we are improving in our evolution and that is part of the spiritual quest. but what i also have to say is the absence of that spiritual pledge we have indyk have to phrase this very carefully, i have to phrase this very carefully. science devoid of spirituality has given modern capacities that risks our extinction. it has given us mechanized

death, nuclear weapons, global warming, climate chaos. i saw a program the other day where on television, where there are people in civilian uniforms or civilian clothes. they worked 9 to 5 jobs. they take cigarettes and coffee breaks and they go home at 5:00 and play with their children and go to sleep but they are moving on the computer, to move drones in faraway places that have killed sometimes a few hundred people and they don't have any spiritual connection to that. this is diabolical creativity that i can say to you is -- the mass extinction of our civilization because of modern capacities links to primitive spiritual development.

>> so, leonard, doesn't science, shouldn't scientist, great advance thinkers like you and other people that are applying physics to technology, shouldn't you be asking for spiritual guidance almost daily? >> i think so and i think all people should be looking for spiritual guidance daily. deepak uses the example a lot, and i'm not quite sure what he is getting out because the sciences, like everyone else, like you and like everyone in the audience, they shouldn't do evil things but that is not really the question or the issue here. the question and the issue is, what is knowledge and how do we obtain it or do we want to limit its -- it? abu want to limit science we should make the argument that we should just stop signs. there'll be evil people whether scientists or engineers are just in it person who reads the book. the atom bomb takes a little technology but when once you read these things and want to get the knowledge, people can apply.

scientists are the ones who are seeking the new knowledge, not the ones who are making things from what we know generally speaking. i don't want to get letters on this. [laughter] so the question is come is a dangerous to have knowledge? that is what he is really talking about. once the knowledge is they are evil people can do evil things with it. >> but his net knowledge uncoupled from morals and ethics? >> i think knowledge is not the goal. wisdom is the goal. we need wisdom, not knowledge. science can be diabolical. >> can physics bring wisdom? >> it should. physics as you said, seek the guidance of those who understand the human spirit and say let's make our science, which we have the technology. we have the means today to

and come up with results that are verifiable and other people who hardly think about it at all scientists and deepak agrees with me on that.

>> the books that have been written recently, the dawkins book, the hitchens book and so on, these big sellers have captured a level of anger. >> people who are angry at what i just described. people are tapping into the other thing and everyone is tapping into something and they are all making a buck and that is great. [laughter] >> i can answer that question as to right a wrong. i think everything has a context. if we could go into germany and get rid of the man who, who caused the holocaust, so you have to save things in context, even right and wrong. >> deepak, science and religion, actually i guess this is for both of you, are often used to justify human superiority, human

consciousness, the human mind in the human capacity and religions tend to to place human beings at the center of meaning and value. aren't both guilty of making humans superior over all other creatures of the creatures and all other means? >> i mean you are talking about i guess when you talk about scientists making people superior, talking about specifically i'll adjust to talk about how humans are different from other species? >> in the book you point out that humans have reached a level of consciousness, a level of intellectual capacity and curiosity that allows them to reason in a way that other animals can do. to suggest that human beings have a special place. >> if you compare a human with the sparrow did we all agree that the human can reason a little better. but i don't think that science intends to feel any kind of strange superiority that people

are superior to other animals, that they have greater work. scientists are studying the brains of the animals and behavior and what different species are. >> my response is that the human being is a paradoxical species and we are the only species that can create, they can yearn for the divine and can have that longing for meaning and purpose, that have created art, science, civilization, so that is the amazing part of us. but as i said, the human species is also the predator on our planet that has gotten rid of other species, is risking extinction. i was talking to a revolutionary biologist the other day. he said if insects disappeared from our planet, life would stop on the planet in five years. if human beings disappeared from the planet in five years, life

would flourish in five years. if you look at it from a cosmic perspective, we are multiplying. we have caused an unsustainable planet. we are metastasizing and we are risking our extinction after 14 billion years of creation. we can do this in the next 100 years? so that is the price you pay for free will and it's our responsibility to say, do i want to harness our collective creativity and our collective imaginations to become the next evolutionary impulse for the first cause or do we want to blow its? >> but his spirit shroud the human only? do sparrows have spirituality? >> i think every living form is connected to the spirit. how can it not be if it's alive? in fact, animals are much more minor than we are and therefore much more pure and

unconditioned. >> so, unfortunately these are all good questions and i think one that i really want to know the answer to is for linda. which episode of "star trek" did you work on? [laughter] now we get to the real importance that. >> i worked on the second season. i was what was called the story editor, rewriting episodes that would come were, and that my partner and i wrote one episode ourselves and is called -- and it was leslie's first girlfriend. she was raised on a planet to be separated from the ruling spouse in being transported to her home planet. had never seen another, very spiritual episode deepak. had never seen another for species, had never been in love and was then selling in love with leslie but she was not supposed to fall in love with someone of another species certainly and she would have to be guided by an evil shape

shifter so they got a little tense for a while. that was my scientific spiritual episode of "star trek," the next-generation. [laughter] >> it couple of questions that came from "the washington post" which we are obliged to share in you both have to take a swing at these. the first one is for those of us who put space and science what constructive statement can we make for those without scientific training who attack scientific findings? for example, how should we respond to those that claim that hurricanes are the wrath of god? >> through education. >> just education? >> through education. >> religious people do this all the time. cowen's events, god just made this coincidence happened. i just ran into my old friend. it must have been god's work. >> there is no solution other

than education. >> that is never true that god didn't just put us here together? >> no, i wouldn't say that. i think we have a choice to do what we want and you know, natural disasters have causes that we can't explain like earthquakes. some natural disasters like hurricanes, we know that humans have a lot to do with it. changing weather patterns and climate, so we have to examine each case carefully. i would say a lot of the weather disturbances, we are definitely responsible for it. but i wouldn't blame god for it. >> so leonard what would make a more effective political leader, a person of science or a person of faith? >> a person of fee -- faith meaning a person who believes in what? kansas scientists be a person of faith?

are the exclusive? >> well, a scientist or a spiritual person. >> i think if if you have attorneys as politicians you certainly should be able to hav physicists. [laughter] [applause] >> i see in cuny to spiritual person, a person who believes in the human spirit who cares about people, who cares about the community and helping other people and it would be good to have someone who understand science once in a while and i say, go for the gold and trying get both. >> can i say something, that politicians understand very well intuitively? they know that people pretend to be intellectual but they actually are bristling with emotion. nobody ever makes a decision based on rationality. they make emotional decisions, so politicians understand that and there is a biological reason for that. emotion brings about 100 billion years and evolution and our

particle brain is only 4 million years so the emotional brain in many ways is older and people respond to that and intuitively know. so it's not what the politician is saying, but what they feel and when the politician is saying what they think. >> may be as we get ready to close i thought it might be worth remembering steve jobs today, his contributions are obviously enormous in many many ways. his well-known stanford commencement speech among the things he said was this. 's death is very likely the single best invention of life. it is life changing agent. so i guess the question is, did life invent death? did the universe, did the first mover in baghdad? was it a good invention? >> death makes life possible. if we didn't, you know every

part of your body is dying right now so you can read trade it. your are dying every day. you know you were a child once. that child is dead in you were a teenager. in biology we have a term which means programs cellular death. when the cells forget to die becomes cancer. cancer cells are ones that don't know how to die. the universe re-creates itself through the red mechanism of death but steve was on. free time i use any handheld device or my computer, steve's consciousness is in my body right now, and that is how we survive in each other's consciousness. that is where we are right now in each other's consciousness. >> do you think steve lives on leonard? >> i think he lives on in the minds of the people who loved him but i also agree with deepak that without death, the earth would quickly be overrun by old

fogey's like us and there would be no room or food or anything. there is no room. that is a necessary part of life at least if you are going to reproduce and we all like to do that. [laughter] >> so we can agree on that. well i think i started by saying all the things i prayed for that i didn't get. >> can i add, the chicago cubs, they may not be winning the world series but getting an. it hasn't happened in my lifetime. >> you will have to pray a little harder on that one. [laughter] but i think we are enormously grateful that the two of you have taken and put so much effort into helping the average reader understand the worldviews of physics and the emerging worldview of a new kind of spirituality that deepak has championed. does a very different when that kind of spirituality as we think of when we think of religious institutions that we can also

remember the great call of israel, the lord our god is one and where that prayer begins which i am sure has been spoken very many times from this place. the unity that comes from the ancient traditions, however crazy. the only thing these two guys agree on is how much they don't like the catholic church and i happen to be a catholic. the only institution that really gets pilloried in this book is the catholic church. [laughter] >> i wrote a book called the third jesus. >> i know you like jesus. i know you like jesus. >> he said jesus was a scientist. >> a scientist of the spirit. >> i think we really want to thank you. >> thank you for coming and tolerating us. [applause]

>> we are all invited to a reception downstairs, and i think both leonard and deepak are willing to stay and continue the conversation so we invite you all to come downstairs and enjoy refreshments. thank you. [applause] >> is assessed was into it -- and what -- celsus quintanilla the civil civil war and elaborate congresses in on the action. this is a new book put out by the library, illustrated timeline of the civil war and margaret wagner is the author. >> i am the author of the book. >> do you work for the library

full-time? >> i do. i am a writer and editor on the staff of the publishing office of the library. >> so what are we going to find in this book? are we going to find library of congress artifacts? >> you will find over 360 library of congress artifacts, number of them never have seen the light of day before. we have never published them before and you will find a dairy annotated timeline covering many of the aspects of the war, which is one reason we did this timeline. many civil war books cover the battles or the politics or one aspect, and with a timeline approach, we were able to cover all sorts of events, including those. >> margaret wagner with the pictures in the book, what are some of the things we will see that perhaps had not been seen before? >> you will see some manuscripts that we have not published

before. we have a new collection of civil war photographs that were just donated to the library. some of those are in the book. you will see this very sort of charming -- is like the moving picture depiction of the civil war. you will find drawings by civil war special artist and maps and illustrated envelopes with a lot of do you know, civil war political messages and nature arctic messages. you will find sort of the people and the voices. there are a lot of things in the book and that is one of the reasons i love working in the library and on projects like this because you get to know so many of the people and the people in the civil war era were

very eloquent and very opinionated and i have come to light many of them. >> is this divided between north and south? >> it laces amongst the north and south in the border states and it also brings in the international aspect, all over the world and especially in europe, people who are watching what happened in the united states. with the union survive? boyd the government of and by the people survive? this wedge a huge test that was important to other people besides us. >> writing a book for the library of congress. how is that a different experience perhaps then an independent author? >> well, you have a great responsibility, as all authors do, but to represent the library's collections and the library standards and also it is a great privilege because you go

through the collections and have the assistance of curators and specialists at the library. so, i learned a great deal with every single project i worked on there. >> now, do you get the proceeds as the author of this book? >> no, the library gets the proceeds. we receive for a season that goes back into the revolving fund so that we are able to publish other books. the library as you know is the largest library in the world. it has more than 147 million items, about 20 million are on line. but that leaves 127 million that are not, so our mission is to introduce people to materials that they might not find on line and in this book at the end of the book, there is an appendix that introduces people to the civil war collections in the library and gives them information about them and web addresses so this is our

mission, to let people know what we have. >> is this suitable for high school students, for middle school students? >> absolutely. as a matter of fact i had some students stop by here and they were telling me they were studying the civil war and social science and we had a nice chat about it so it is perfect for students as well as for civil war if it's in our those. >> margaret wagner is the author of this new library of congress book, the illustrated timeline of the civil war. >> in my view this as a time for america to get serious about our challenges and i won't go through all of them but the big one that i struggle with is their budget and are spending. see if your entrepreneurs are not active in investment is not landing in your marketplac