Science & Cocktails: Emergence, Cosmic Origins and Collective Patterns

Vijay Balasubramanian is a theoretical physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professorship in Physics and Astronomy. After a PhD in physics at Princeton, he became a Junior Fellow at Harvard. His work spans string theory, quantum field theory, black-hole thermodynamics, spacetime structure, statistical inference, information theory, and the physics of living systems.

Constantino Tsallis is a Greek-born, Brazilian physicist best known for proposing a nonadditive generalization of Boltzmann–Gibbs entropy, now widely called Tsallis entropy, in 1988. Raised in Argentina, he studied at Instituto Balseiro and earned a doctorate from the University of Paris in 1974. He worked at CBPF in Rio de Janeiro, founded Brazil’s National Institute of Science and Technology for Complex Systems, and is an External Faculty Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

Jácome “Jay” Armas is a theoretical physicist and associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, also affiliated with the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. His research spans string theory, quantum gravity, black holes, holography, and hydrodynamic approaches to soft, active, astrophysical, and quantum matter. He coordinates the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena, is the PI of the consortium Emergence At All Scales and founded the public science platform Science & Cocktails. Armas edited Conversations on Quantum Gravity, published by Cambridge University Press, and received the 2023 EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Outreach Prize.

Mark IJzerman is an interdisciplinary artist and composer working across ecology, sound, and technology. His installations and audiovisual performances draw on fieldwork and collaboration with scientists, often incorporating living organisms, custom-built hardware, and self-written software to build systems that take on a degree of their own agency. His recent work looks at the ways we, as humans, experience our ecology and the non-human around us — landscapes as much as other forms of life, the micro to the macro — using different media to let the non-human speak. Mark IJzerman has exhibited and performed his work in various venues and festivals, including Sonic Acts (NL), V2_ (NL), Chroniques Biennal (FR), De Lakenhal (NL), iii (NL), W139 (NL), Meakusma (BE), Le Guess Who? (NL), Rewire (NL), FIBER Festival (NL), LIMA (NL), Mapping Possibilities (EG), Mapping Festival (CH), EYE Filmmuseum (NL), Next Nature Network (NL), the International Space Station (outer space, via Moon Gallery), amongst others.

Iain Couzin is a scientist whose work sits at the intersection of biology, physics, and complexity science. He is Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Professor of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz, where he also leads the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour. His research asks how collective intelligence emerges in groups, from insect swarms and fish schools to primates and humans, and has clarified mechanisms of leadership, information transfer, collective memory, and consensus decisions. Couzin studied biology at the University of St Andrews and received his PhD from the University of Bath. After appointments at Leeds, Princeton, and Oxford, he became a professor at Princeton before moving to Konstanz, where he helped found a global hub for collective behaviour research. In 2025, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Although not a physicist by training, he is widely admired for bringing rigor to emergent behavior in nature.