Do we really live in the “best” of all possible worlds? And what does “possible” here even mean? What is missing if everything is as good as it gets? Can we get away without utopias – politically, socially, economically and ecologically? What kinds of visions have refugees? How are violence and terror compatible with the idea of a best possible world? And what does the best possible of all worlds do to our self-conception? Are there aesthetic recipes for a better life – for a better self? Can it all be good after all?

More than 100 participants dare to find answers to these questions at “Salon Sophie Charlotte 2016”: Astrophysicists, art-historians and human rights theorists, writers, filmmakers and theologians, mathematicians and future-scientists. The salon is dedicated to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Around 1700 he founded – together with Electress Sophie Charlotte – the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The visionary thinker Leibniz keeps encouraging us until today to have new visions. It was he who gave the impulse to ask for the “best of all possible worlds”.

For this event, all rooms of the academy building located at the Gendarmenmarkt will be open to debate artistic-scientific contributions on the topic of alternative worlds: For children and adolescents as well as, for lovers of amusing research and serious science, for fans of science slams and paternoster-performances.

Empires and Better Worlds

About 20 years ago, her fellow writer Ingo Schulze, raised in the GDR, travelled  in the opposite direction towards Russia, where he spent some years to estalish a newspaper. Hoppe and Schulze will compare notes on the East-West-Relationship over the change of time: Two opposing empires that each give an idea of a better world.

An event of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in collaboration with Villa Aurora.