LASER—An Introduction

I called cultural historian Piero Scaruffi recently to chat about the beginnings of the Leonardo LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) program, a program that began in 2008 at the downtown campus of San Francisco State University and, at the time of my writing this introduction, has close to fifty host sites throughout the globe. Piero’s and my memories of the program’s beginning somewhat differ, but we both recalled a nascent LASER event in the spring of 2007 at Swissnex [1] in North Beach, San Francisco, although it wasn’t called a LASER then. This proto-LASER was facilitated by Christian Simm, who was then CEO of Swissnex-SF and a member of the Leonardo Governing Board. As chair of the now-defunct Leonardo Scientists’ Working Group (SWG), I, along with Piero and Christian, invited the SWG “members”—really just a database of scientists with a committed and serious connection to the arts...