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SAN FRANCISCO - Ten minutes before showtime, the crowd is already spilling out the doors of San Francisco’s Axis Cafe. A high-energy buzz fills the air - until the star of the evening steps on-stage and fires up his PowerPoint presentation.
A hush descends upon the crowd in the Potrero Hill venue as Terrence Deacon, a University of California-Berkeley biological anthropology professor, begins holding forth on Fibonacci numbers and finches. As audience members sip tomato-basil soup, they’re also listening intently and thinking ahead to the Q&A section where they’ll ask questions like, “What was that about the lazy gene?”
The scene at the Axis Cafe on a recent Wednesday night is part of San Francisco’s monthly “Ask a Scientist” salon, where science buffs and average Joes alike gather to get the lowdown on everything from brain development, to global warming, to the physics of monster waves.
The combination of a casual setting that includes beverages and articulate scientists who don’t assign homework seems to have struck a chord not just with geeks. The “cafe scientifique” movement that began in England a decade ago has spread to science cafes around the world, in coffeehouses, bars, even bowling alleys.
The San Francisco Bay Area alone boasts five such salons, as well as special math and science events sponsored by Berkeley’s Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, the local American Chemical Society and other groups.
Recent events included Deacon’s language development talk in San Francisco, a “Darwin and Buddha” discussion in Sebastopol, Calif., - where the science cafe meets every week - and Alan Alda of M*A*S*H and Scientific American Frontiers fame, waxing eloquent on M*A*S*H and curved space in Berkeley.
It’s been a delightful, though dizzying whirl for Juliana Gallin, the graphic designer who launched Ask a Scientist five years ago, before she’d even heard of the European movement.

azcentral.com

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