Sir William Bragg is said to have said: “The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.” Having worked at the frontier of one of the most complex of the sciences, chemistry, George M. Whitesides has launched an effort Bragg would applaud: peeling back the layers of complexity in modern science to discern the scientific meaning of simplicity and thus to discover new scientific methods and approaches to invention.

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What would the universe look like to an electron some 370,000 years after the big bang? This spring the Planck cosmology probe released a fine-scale map of the subtle thermal variations imprinted on the cosmos around that time, revealing that the universe was slightly older than previously thought. But the Planck instruments also measured the polarized intensities of the ancient light. Mission scientists are now working to zoom in using the polarization data, getting that electron’s-eye insider view of the early universe. Cosmologists are eagerly waiting to see whether Planck has detected the gravitational waves that would provide direct confirmation that there was an inflationary period in the instant after the big bang. Meanwhile other experiments are searching for gravitational-wave signatures, in an effort Charles Lawrence calls “the most rapid expansion of our understanding of the universe that’s ever happened.”

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Paul Anastas acknowledges that science has made huge progress through reductionism and tinkering, learning what happens when you change just one parameter. But the resulting products and processes have given us a 21st-century world that is awash in unintended consequences and expends enormous agency on flawed and ineffective risk analysis. Reductionism, he says, is “a wonderful tool, a terrible master, an even worse religion.” He will propose ways for scientists and engineers to embrace systems thinking, systems design and “transformative innovation.”

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Nurses everywhere know the drill: “Tell me how bad your pain is on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst pain you’ve ever experienced.” Linda Bartoshuk wouldn’t use such a poor question to make decisions about pain medication. Bartoshuk studies the senses, especially taste, and she made her mark with research revealing why the experience of taste varies across individuals. Now she’s trying to fix the way scientists measure perception. It turns out that you can achieve much more reliable measures by asking a cross-modality question — say, comparing pain intensity to the intensity of a light or sound. She likes to show, rather than tell, so attend this session expecting to experience the difference between good and bad measurement, and to be surprised by what sweet taste really is.

For more information, see the CASW website.