Lee Smolin (born 1955) is an American theoretical physicist, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. He is married to Dina Graser, a communications lawyer in Toronto. His brother is David M. Smolin.

Smolin is best known for devising several different approaches to quantum gravity, in particular loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory. His research interests also include cosmology, elementary particle theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and theoretical biology.

Smolin was born in New York City to Michael Smolin, an engineer, and Pauline Smolin, a playwright. His brother, David M. Smolin, became a professor in the Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama. He was educated at Hampshire College. He received his Ph.D in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1979.

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.

Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.

Peter Michael Stephan Hacker (born 15 July 1939 in London) is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is known for his detailed exegesis of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his outspoken conceptual critique of cognitive neuroscience.

Peter Hacker studied philosophy, politics and economics at The Queen's College, Oxford from 1960-63. In 1963-65 he was senior Scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he began graduate work under the supervision of Professor H. L. A. Hart. His D.Phil thesis "Rules and Duties" was completed in 1966 during a Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford.

Since 1966 Peter Hacker has been a fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and of the Oxford University philosophy department. His visiting positions at other universities include Makerere College, Uganda (1968); Swarthmore College, USA (1973 and 1986); University of Michigan, USA (1974); Milton C. Scott visiting professor at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada (1985); Visiting Fellow in Humanities at University of Bologna, Italy (2009). From 1985 to 1987 he was a British Academy Research Reader in the Humanities. In 1991-94 he was a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. Peter Hacker retired in 2006, but he has been appointed an Emeritus Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford.

Hilary Lawson (born 19 January 1954) is a philosopher, filmmaker, and video artist. Known for his theory of Closure, he is Director of the Institute of Art and Ideas, founder of the Artscape Project and a director of TVF Media.

Hilary Lawson was born and grew up in Bristol, England, the only son of Harold Lawson, local businessman councillor and writer of short stories in the early days of television, and his wife Norma (née Gear). He was awarded a scholarship whilst an undergraduate at Balliol College Oxford and went on to take a first in PPE. As a student he became interested in problems of self-reference and began a DPhil on The Reflexivity of Discourse. This later became the basis for his first philosophical book Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament.

Schooled in analytic philosophy, his approach increasingly diverged from the mainstream having more in common with the American philosopher Richard Rorty and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In the late seventies, disenchanted with the philosophical environment of Oxford, he left academia and began a career in television and documentary film.

Isaac Asimov (/ˈaɪzək ˈæzɨməv/ EYE-zək AZ-i-məv; born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, Russian: Исаак Юдович Озимов; Yiddish: אייזיק יודאָוויטש אסימאוו; c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His works have been published in all ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (although his only work in the 100s—which covers philosophy and psychology—was a foreword for The Humanist Way).

Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series, both of which he later tied into the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote many short stories, among them "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.