In Summary

  • Associate Professor Alan Duffy will feature in the Science Tent and the Splendour Forum at the festival
  • Festival-goers will be taken on a cosmic journey through history to find out how we came to be
  • There will be discussion of the effects of global warming and a general science quiz

At this year’s Splendour in the Grass, Swinburne’s Associate Professor Alan Duffy will join the line-up of science acts featured in the festival’s Science Tent.

Associate Professor Duffy’s talk, ‘The Cosmic Story of You’, will take festival-goers on a cosmic journey through the history of exploding stars and crashing galaxies to explain how you became you.

“You almost certainly know when and where you were born, perhaps even something of your family tree going back generations,” Associate Professor Duffy says.

“But your full cosmic history is billions of years longer than that, stretching across stars and galaxies and resulting in you being you, only for now and never to be repeated.”

Associate Professor Duffy says it’s wonderful to have the opportunity to expose a new audience to such complex yet fascinating scientific concepts.

“In less than an hour, I hope to walk through the full history of how we came to be, from how the oxygen we breathe was created in a star five billion years ago, to where the iron in your blood comes from,” he says.

“I’m excited to be a part of the festival and to communicate these mind-blowing astronomical ideas to a new group of young people.”

Associate Professor Duffy will also feature in a quiz show at the festival called ‘The Great Science Squabble’, in which the experts on stage will be asked a broad range of science-related questions. 

You can also catch him as part of the Splendour Forum in a panel discussion on ‘Apocalypse Fatigue’, the idea that doomsday predictions about the effects of global warming are no longer enough to shock us into changing our behaviour.

Science Squabble: Saturday 21 July, 12.45pm

The Cosmic Story of You: Saturday 21 July, 4.15pm

Apocalypse Fatigue: Sunday 22 July, 12.30pm