Miami University

The Miami Report

News and Public Information Office
Glos Center
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056
(513) 529-7592
(513) 529-1950 fax
newsinfo@muohio.edu

Jeffrey Bennett to speak for Miami convocation Aug. 22

Email this Article

Beyond UFOs: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and its Astonishing Implications for Our Future, by Jeffrey Bennett, is Miami's Summer Reading Program book for 2008 - the 27th year of the program.

Bennett will be the keynote speaker at convocation, 9 a.m. Friday, Aug. 22, in Millett Hall, after which first-year students will join faculty, staff and upper-class students for small group discussions of the book.

Bennett, an astronomer, author, speaker and science education consultant, has taught at every level from preschool through graduate school. He has written college textbooks in four distinct areas: astronomy, astrobiology, mathematics and statistics. His book, The Cosmic Perspective, is the most popular college astronomy textbook in the country.

Bennett is also the award-winning children's book author of Max Goes to the Moon, Max Goes to Mars and the forthcoming Max Goes to Jupiter. He has donated his children's books to more than 10,000 public elementary schools through the "Max Goes to Schools" literacy program.

Among his major projects, Bennett proposed the idea for and helped develop the Colorado Scale Model Solar System and the Voyage Scale Model Solar System on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

He created numerous educational programs for the Hubble Space Telescope and other space missions during the two years he spent as a visiting senior scientist at NASA headquarters.

In Beyond UFOs, Bennett begins by discussing the nature of science and "why it cannot say much about reports of UFOs, a fact that he uses to argue that we must take our discussions 'beyond UFOs' if we really want to know whether other intelligent beings share the universe with us."

Through a discussion of the science of astrobiology and topics such as the origin of life on earth and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), Bennett shows that these scientific issues have "profound implications to our own civilization."

For more information about the Summer Reading Program and Beyond UFOs, go to www.units.muohio.edu/srp.

Date Published: 05/08/2008
Volume: 27 Number: 21