PROGRAM

Interdisciplinary approach has been a crucial issue in the history of sciences, arts, technology and medicine. Interdisciplinarity is already present in many schools, however its wider introduction at all levels and at a global range would be desirable. Schools must output alumni who are able to solve problems in everyday life, in science, in culture, and who are able to independently execute interdisciplinary tasks that do not fit into former schemes. Experience of the past could be a good lesson for the future.

Study and examples of general holistic approaches, concepts, phenomena can play a central role.
Symmetry is one of the most powerful means among such approaches.

Acquisition of future knowledge is based on the pool of knowledge accumulated by traditional and recent research.

Main target groups of the Symmetry Festival 2009 are:

- researchers;
- educators – at school and at university levels – in arts, sciences and humanities;
- engineers;
- practitioners and researchers in medicine and pharmaceutics;
- artists, designers (theoreticians and practitioners);
- representatives of all media that transmit/convey new knowledge.


The science- and art-related questions to be answered by the participants of the Festival:

- What role did symmetry play in the history of discoveries, scientific research, arts, engineering and medicine?
- Symmetry as an idea and as a tool in (the history of) the sciences.
- How did symmetry principles assist acquisiting new knowledge?
- How can one re-evaluate, rearrange, reinterpret, and restructure earlier scientific knowledge in the light of more recent knowledge?
- How could symmetry be demonstrated to integrate knowledge of diverse disciplines?
- What have 20th-21st century arts learnt and implemented from the sciences?
- Did aesthetics play any role in former scientific discoveries? If so, what were the most important issues?
- Lessons of the recent new knowledge on the two human cerebral hemispheres: How can curricula draw both from the arts and the sciences, as far as possible, in a balanced proportion?
- What role played symmetry in integrating methods in the sciences of the inanimate and organic nature.
- Symmetry principles in the humanities.


Papers: