PROGRAM OVERVIEW

COMPONENTS

Water of Life* has two primary components:

–A two-day workshop on Friday and Saturday, April 29-30, 2005 in
Varenna, Italy†

–Subsequent publication of a scholarly/scientific research volume
by a major university press

This program follows the successful 2003 Harvard research symposium Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry & Fine-Tuning‡. The book based on that meeting is scheduled to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2005-06.

Both Fitness of the Cosmos for Life and Water of Life are focused on the so-called “anthropic”/“fine-tuning-for-life” question and its applicability to physical chemistry and biochemistry. Typically, this question has been addressed within physics and physical cosmology. However, its fruitfulness in those domains unavoidably begs the question of its potential usefulness in setting new, innovative, and possibly far-reaching research agendas within the chemical and biological sciences.

In Fitness of the Cosmos for Life, we found that the nature of the inquiry into whether the universe is fine-tuned for life might well be intrinsically more complex and difficult in chemistry and biochemistry than it is in physics and cosmology. In Water of Life, we will therefore concentrate on only one—yet extremely significant—molecular substance for which many claims of fine-tuning have been made.

* See: http://www.templeton.org/wateroflife/
† At the Villa Monastero on Lake Como; see:
http://villamonastero.org/e/w3c/indice_e.htm
‡ Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-
Tuning—An Interdisciplinary, Exploratory Research Project
Commemorating the 90th Anniversary of the Publication of
Lawrence J. Henderson’s THE FITNESS OF THE ENVIRONMENT,
held at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
October 11-12, 2003;
see: http://www.templeton.org/biochem-finetuning/

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