The Universe in a Grain of Sand: Science New Wave Festival Opening Night

Dir. Mark Levinson. 2024, 73 mins. U.S. How do technology and art bring us closer to understanding the world? The Science New Wave Festival kicks off its 17th year with the U.S. premiere of a film that gets to the core of why we’re here. Deftly intertwining a history of computation with a broad survey of experimental cinema, physicist and filmmaker Mark Levinson explores how experimentation in film and science together reshape our ability to represent and understand the world at its most fundamental level. U.S. premiere

Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / discounted for MoMI members ($7–$11). There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. The cost of admission may be applied toward a same-day purchase of a membership. 

Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission. 

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About the speakers: 

Mark Levinson is the award-winning director of the documentary feature Particle Fever. The film won the inaugural Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication and the National Academies of Science Communication Award. Before embarking on his film career, Mark earned a PhD in theoretical physics. In the film world, he first became a specialist in sound editing, working on over 40 feature films, including The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. He is the director of the fiction film Prisoner of Time and the hybrid film The Bit Player. He is currently adapting Richard Powers’s award-winning novel The Gold Bug Variations into a feature film. 

Erin Espelie co-founded NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2017, where she’s an associate professor of cinema. Her poetic, nonfiction films have shown at a variety of venues including an Atlanta salt factory, the New York Film Festival, a Kentucky observatory, the British Natural History Museum, SFMoMA, CERN, Full Frame, CPH:DOX, and a California experimental forest. Since 2014 she has been editor in chief of Natural History magazine. 

Dr. Darío Gil is IBM Senior Vice President and Director of Research. He heads the technical community of IBM and directs innovation strategies in hybrid cloud, AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, and exploratory science. Dr. Gil is also the Chair of the National Science Board (NSB), which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF). An advocate of collaborative research models, he co-chairs the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which advances fundamental AI research to benefit of industry and society. He also co-chairs the Executive Board of the International Science Reserve, a global network of open scientific communities that provides specialized resources to prepare for and help mitigate urgent, complex global challenges. 

Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NY. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the goal of developing novel treatments. She’s also interested in the neural basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity. A passionate science communicator, she hosts the Nova series Your Brain, and hosted shows on Discovery Channel and PBS. Berlin received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, and Master of Public Health from Harvard University, and trained in clinical neuropsychology at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of Neurological Surgery.