Creativity plays a critical role in the arts and sciences, and it is this intersection that interests both K.C. Cole and Murray Gell-Mann. Given their mutual interests in physics, and their passionate desire to make complex ideas decipherable and accessible to the general public, these two individuals will discuss how creative force plays itself out in the arts and in science.

K.C. Cole is an award-winning science writer for The Los Angeles Times and a teacher at U.C.L.A. She writes about physics and mathematics for a wide variety of publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek to Esquire and Lear’s. Since 1994, she has covered physical science for The Los Angeles Times where she also writes the column, “Mind Over Matter.” Her writing has been described as coming from the crossroads of art and science, mind and matter, sense and soul. Though physics has long been a thing of mystery and complexity, K.C. Cole transforms it into the stuff of philosophy and poetry.

K.C. Cole’sbooks include Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos, The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything, and The Universe and the Teacup.

Murray Gell-Mann, who appears as one of the figures in James Drake’s City of Tells, is a Distinguished Fellow of the Santa Fe Institute. Although a theoretical physicist, Professor Gell-Mann’s interests extend to many other subjects including natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, history, depth psychology, and creative thinking. His interests also encompass biological evolution, cultural evolution, and ideas about learning and thinking. His recent research at the Santa Fe Institute has focused on the subject of complex adaptive systems, and how knowledge and understanding are to be extracted from the welter of information that can now be transmitted and stored as a result of the digital revolution.

Gell-Mann is the author of the popular science book The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. In 1969, Professor Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elemental particles. In addition to numerous other awards, he has received honorary doctoral degrees from Yale University, the University of Chicago, and Cambridge and Oxford Universities.