Scientist and investment banker Robert Kuhn has developed a multi-media forum for contemplating answers to such questions. Questions such as these lack simple answers, but open discussion of them is vital to understanding the nature of human existence. At least that's the theory of Robert Kuhn, an investment banker with a Ph.D. in brain science from the University of California in Los Angeles and a passion to use communications technology for intellectual discourse, not to sell advertising. The project centers on 28 television shows that were taped in 1999. In one show, Leon Lederman, director emeritus of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988, joins a panel of men discussing why quantum physics is so beautiful.
Viewers can provide feedback after the shows through a related interactive Web site.
The way they waited as each man spoke of it, as if to compare the experience. That's why I watched so transfixed, wishing I were this thing they described. They began airing, in no particular order, on public television stations across the United States, and can also be viewed on the show's Web site through a format known as streaming video Closer to Truth . Bruce Murray, a planetary scientist and geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who has been a panelist in several of the shows, said a major strength of Closer to Truth is its integration with the Internet. Murray helped Kuhn develop the accompanying Web site so the general public can participate in the discussions, through a Web tool known as a hyperforum.