A place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, people meet to discuss science, which is changing their lives.

· Forthcoming meetings
· Email updates
· Contact us
· How to set up a Café Scientifique

Other local groups

Leeds Salon
Headingly Cafe

Leeds Café Scientifique is a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, people meet to discuss science, which is changing their lives.

The Queen’s Arms, 201 Harrogate Road , Chapel Allerton.

Upcoming meetings

Alice ’s Secrets in Wonderland
Monday 15th Feb
Melanie Bayley
What would Lewis Carroll’s ‘ Alice ’s Adventures in Wonderland’ be without he Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess’s baby or The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party? These famous characters are missing from the original story the author told Alice Liddell and her 2 sisters during a boat trip near Oxford . What inspired these later additions?
‘Lewis Carroll’ was Charles Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician at Oxford . He valued Euclid’s ‘Elements’ as the epitome of mathematical thinking, starting with a few axioms and building complex arguments through simple, logical steps in geometry and trigonometry. But the 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics with new concepts like imaginary numbers, symbolic logic, projective geometry and quaternions. For Dodgson this was all ‘semi-colloquial’ and therefore parodied in Alice – hence the Cheshire Cat, the Duchess’s baby and the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – each one a critique of the new mathematics. This is a new analysis of Alice , originated by Melanie Bayley a PhD student from Oxford

8pm at the Queens Arms (upstairs)

What Happened in Copenhagen
Monday 1st March
Dr. Simon Lewis
Science + Politics x Denmark = Chaos. Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change states that its goal is to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’.  Understanding how human actions change the climate system, and the impacts of these changes on people and their life-support systems is a role for science, whereas deciding what is dangerous (to whom?), and how to avoid it (at what cost?), is within the realm of politics. This logical mix of science and politics had led to much confusion. The 15th UN meeting on climate change was no exception, despite unprecedented media scrutiny.
Dr Simon Lewis is a Royal Society research fellow at the Earth & Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds , and an expert in the role of tropical forests in the changing Earth system.  He was in Copenhagen advising a central African government and took time out of doing science to get involved in the negotiations. He will give a brief summary of how we got to Copenhagen via the IPCC and CRU email hack and what the outcome of the UN talks might mean.

8pm at the Queens Arms (upstairs)

Mailing list

If you would like to receive emails to let you know about forthcoming meetings, then just email us at cafe-sci@dial.pipex.com.


Uganda report

Click here to download a report on the local language Cafe Scientifique programme in Uganda.