The program for the 2010 World Science Festival in New York City which runs June 2, 05 2010 is available here. Do check regularly as it is being added to and changed. Here’s a sampling of what’s available. For the astronomy buff,

The James Webb Space Telescope

FREE

Tuesday, June 1, 2010, 9:00 AM – Sunday, June 6, 2010, 9:00 PM
Battery Park

The world’s most powerful future space telescope is coming to New York City as part of the World Science Festival. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will allow us to unveil the very first galaxies formed in the Universe and discover hidden world’s around distant stars when the mission launches in 2014. For six days in June, a full-scale model of this successor to the famed Hubble Space Telescope will be on public view in Battery Park.

This detailed scale model, at 80 feet long, 37 feet wide and nearly 40 feet high, is as big as a tennis court. It’s as close to a first-hand look at the telescope as most people will ever get.

There’s more to do than just marvel. Once you’ve taken in the awe-inspiring sight, play with interactive exhibits, watch videos showing what we will learn from the Webb and ask scientists on-hand about how the telescope works.

And don’t miss our Friday June 4th party, “From the City to the Stars,” at the base of a spectacularly lit telescope, where leading scientists will join us to talk about the anticipated discoveries. Bring your telescope if you have one, or just yourself, and come congregate with amateur astronomers and novices alike for a festive evening of marveling at the wonders of the cosmos.

This program is made possible with the support of Northrop Grumman, and presented in collaboration with The Battery Conservancy.

If music and artificial intelligence interest you,

Machover and Minsky: Making Music in the Dome

Tickets must be purchased.

Thursday, June 3, 2010, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

Hayden Planetarium Space Theater

How does music help order emerge from the mind’s chaos? How does it create and conjure thoughts, emotions and memories? Legendary composer and inventor Tod Machover will explore these mysteries with Artificial Intelligence visionary Marvin Minsky. The two iconoclasts will revisit their landmark musical experiment, the Brain Opera, and offer an exclusive sneak peak at Machover’s upcoming opera, Death and the Powers, a groundbreaking MIT Media Lab production that explores what we leave behind for the world and our loved ones, using specially designed technology, including a chorus of robots.

This program is presented in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History.

Participants:

Tod Machover

Tod Machover, called “America’s Most Wired Composer” by the Los Angeles Times, is celebrated for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries. He is acclaimed for inventing new technologies for music, such as his Hyperinstruments which augment musical expression for everyone, from virtuosi like Yo-Yo Ma and Prince to players of Guitar Hero, which grew out of his lab.read more

Marvin Minsky

Minsky is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and had made numerous contributions to the fields of AI, cognitive science, mathematics and robotics. His current work focuses on trying to imbue machines with a capacity for common sense. Minsky is a professor at MIT, where he co-founded the artificial intelligence lab.

This one seems pretty self-explanatory,

Eye Candy: Science, Sight, Art

Tickets must be purchased.

Thursday, June 3, 2010, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Are you drawn to Impressionism? Or more toward 3D computer art? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or is it? Contrary to the old adage, there may be universal biological principles that drive art’s appeal, and its capacity to engage our brains and our interest. Through artworks ranging from post-modernism to political caricature to 3D film, we’ll examine newly understood principles of visual perception.

Participants:

Patrick Cavanagh

Cavanagh helped change vision research by creating the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard and the Centre of Attention & Vision in Paris. He is currently researching the problems of attention as a frequent component of mental illnesses, learning difficulties at school, and workplace accidents.read more

Ken Nakayama

No details.

Jules Feiffer

Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author & illustrator Jules Feiffer has had a remarkable creative career turning contemporary urban anxiety into witty and revealing commentary for over fifty years. From his Village Voice editorial cartoons to his plays and screenplays, including Little Murders and Carnal Knowledge, Feiffer’s satirical outlook has helped define us politically, sexually and socially.

Buzz Hays

No details

Margaret S. Livingstone

Livingstone is best known for her work on visual processing, which has led to a deeper understanding of how we see color, motion, and depth, and how these processes are involved in generating percepts of objects as distinct from their background.

Christopher W. Tyler

Tyler has spent his research career exploring how the eyes and brain work together to produce meaningful vision. Dr. Tyler, director of The Smith Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center, has developed rapid tests for the diagnosis of diseases of this visual processing in infants and of retinal and optic nerve diseases in adults. He has also studied visual processing and photoreceptor dynamics in other species such as monkeys, butterflies and fish.

Finally, there’s the importance of sound,

Good Vibrations
The Science of Sound

Tickets must be purchased.

Thursday, June 3, 2010, 8:00 PM – 9:30 PM

The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College

We look around us – constantly. But how often do we listen around us? Sound is critically important to our bodies and brains, and to the wider natural world. In the womb, we hear before we see. Join neuroscientists, biophysicists, astrophysicists, composers and musicians for a fascinating journey through the nature of sound—how we perceive it, how it acts upon us and how it profoundly affects our well-being—including a demonstration of sounds produced by sources as varied as the human inner ear and gargantuan black holes in space.

Moderator: John Schaefer

Participants:

Jamshed Bharucha

Bharucha conducts research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, focusing on the cognitive and neural basis of the perception of music. He is a past editor of the interdisciplinary journal Music Perception.

Jacob Kirkegaard

Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard explores sound in art with a scientific approach. He focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible.

John Schaefer

John Schaefer is the host of WNYC’s innovative music/talk show Soundcheck, which features live performances and interviews with a variety of guests. Schaefer, Executive Producer, Music Programming, WNYC Radio, has also hosted and produced WNYC’s radio series New Sounds since 1982 (which Billboard called “The #1 radio show for the Global Village”) and the New Sounds Live concert series since 1986.

Christopher Shera

Shera has done extensive research in solving fundamental problems in the mechanics and physiology of the peripheral auditory system. His work focuses on how the ear amplifies, analyzes, and emits sound, and his research combines physiological measurements with theoretical modeling of the peripheral auditory system.read more

Michael Turner

Turner is the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is a theoretical cosmologist who coined the term, “dark energy.” He has made seminal contributions to the understanding of inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter, and the theory of the Big Bang.

Mark Whittle

Whittle uses large optical and radio telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, to study processes occurring within 1,000 light years of the central supermassive black hole in Active Galaxies. His most recent interests focus on the way in which fast moving jets of gas, which are driven out of the active nucleus, subsequently crash into, accelerate, and generally “damage” the surrounding galactic material.

If you can’t make it to the festival in June, there are always the videos.