Tick tock tick tock—the sound of an atomic clock that loses a second once every 3 billion years.

But why do we need such an accurate clock? On Saturday Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Phillips mesmerized the crowd speaking about atomic clocks at the World Science Festival event Einstein, Time and the Explorer’s Clock. This wasn’t a normal session. The standing room only auditorium was buzzing with the excitement and impatience of kids not yet in their teens. And Phillips was no regular speaker, equally awing kids and adults.

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John Hockenberry, a journalist and moderator for the Mind and Machine: The Future of Thinking session, started Friday nights even at the WSF by talking about our relationships with machines. He is wheelchair bound as a result of an accident decades ago. But the wheelchair isn’t an impediment, Hockenberry explains, “it’s me!” There is a sense of intimacy with this machine—a sense of it being part of him and his self image.

So he asked the philosopher of science and technology on the panel, Luciano Floridi, how old is this sense of self with a tool and machine? Old. For the Greeks preparing for battle the sense of self extended to the armor and sword. Food for thought: Floridi stated that you can have the same brain but in a different body—the platform is not important, it’s the software that counts.

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If we can explain violence—from biological, psychological, and sociological angles—are people more or less responsible for their violent acts?

Bridging neuroscience with law and morality, Thursday night’s Brutality and the Brain event at the World Science Festival commenced with the neuroscience of violent behavior and psychopaths and ended in a more philosophical realm of what is socially acceptable and how we define morality. Aptly enough, the packed auditorium first watched a collage of old coverage of atrocious acts of violence—such as the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and the more recent Virginia Tech shooting. As the gravity of the images and the criminals behind them sunk in, veteran journalist and moderator Walter Isaacson asked the panel, has science, namely neuroscience, taught us that evil and violence are part of human nature? (This question was sort of answered— equivocal yes—though the first one posed here, not surprisingly, never was).

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