Science & Cocktails with Peter Sloot

Event in English, semi-seated.
19:30 doors open for cocktails
20:30 Peter Sloot (talk)
21:40 MORADO (live music)

After nearly a decade of successful and awarded editions in Copenhagen, Johannesburg and Brussels, and three previous editions of Science & Cocktails in Amsterdam with Robbert Dijkgraaf, Ewine van Dishoeck and Charlotte Hemelrijk, we invite Peter Sloot to talk about understanding complexity. Afterwards, chilled and smoky cocktails and live music by the psychedelic pop band MORADO.

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The Simplicity of Complexity
Are crowds of people predictable? Can we disrupt criminal networks by taking out the kingpins? Is Oprah Winfrey more influential than you are? Can mistakes help to deliver a message faster? Are we reaching a pandemic tipping point, and if so, can we avoid it?
We live in a complex world and are surrounded by complex systems. From a biological cell, made of thousands of different molecules that work together seamlessly, to our global society; a collection of seven billion individuals that try to work and live together. These complex systems display endless signatures of order, disorder, self-organisation and self-annihilation. Understanding this complexity is one of the biggest scientific challenges of our time. In this talk we will discuss how this complexity emerges at the edge of chaos, we will peek into the collective behaviour of crowds of people, the intricacies of the immune system and the (un-)importance of the kingpins of criminal networks, all 'magically' emerging from the simple rules of Nature.

Peter Sloot
Full professor in computational science at university of Amsterdam, professor of advanced computing at ITMO St. Petersburg in Russia and director of the complexity institute in Singapore and scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Study at the university of Amsterdam. Peter tries to understand how nature processes information. He studies this 'natural information processing' in complex systems by computational modeling and simulation as well as through formal methods. 

After the talk, psychedelic pop band MORADO will take you on a journey through their universe with songs inspired by the psychedelic movement from the 60s/70s and sci-fi from the 80s. Their songs sound like a colorful, extraterrestrial jungle with catchy chorus’, moving melodies, wavy vintage sounds and bombastic sound explosions.

This event is an initiative by the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) with the support ofNWA Route 2. 

Science & Cocktails Amsterdam is presented in cooperation with Paradiso and acknowledges the support of New Scientist.