The Alpha Course runs in 162 countries and has been attended, according to their website, by 25 Million people. Over a 9 week period, students are guided through Christian theology ostensibly to “Explore the meaning of Life”.

Simon Clare, an unabashed atheist, signed up to his local course in Brighton, wondering if his faithlessness would be challenged. Spoiler: He wasn’t converted but he was surprised at what he learnt about faith.

The new Archbishop Of Canterbury, Justin Welby, found his faith at the home of the Alpha Course and his election suggests that the Alpha model of spreading the word is now at the heart of Christianity’s struggle for survival. As well as giving an overview of the course from biblical history to singing in tongues, Simon will discuss what atheists can learn from the Alpha Course.

Simon Clare runs Horsham Skeptics in the Pub and is a founder member of the South East Skeptics Society.

This is the tale of a scientific revolution that failed. Most scientific revolutions are about politics in some way, not just the nature scientists look at, but this was especially political in scope. Science, these revolutionaries argued, had lost its way. Science had become too focused to the whims of senior staff and their cronies, allowing its energies to be applied to war and environmental destruction. If the public didn’t like science, so the argument went, maybe they had a point. In the shadow of the still-blazing light of the atomic bomb, with increasing concern over chemical and biological weapons as well as an emerging environmental crisis, science needed to take a good, hard look at itself. Elitist and stuffy, science had let itself fester a bit. The time had come to imagine a new way of doing science. They were the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, BSSRS, or Bizrus to their friends. Active and reasonably well-known throughout the 1970s, they fell apart in the 1980s and are largely forgotten today. This is their story.

Alice Bell is a freelance journalist, specialising in the politics of science and technology. She writes about innovation for How We Get to Next and climate change for the Road to Paris. She's a science policy blogger for the Guardian and columnist for Popular Science UK. She used to be an academic, teaching science communication at Imperial College. Before that she set fire to bubbles for the Science Museum for a living.

Not everyone can be a Caesar, an Einstein, an Elizabeth I... not everyone can change history. From the very skeptical to the downright bizarre, find out about the creative minds, the bloody murders, the amazing discoveries that, until now, have been left to get dusty in the forgotten pages of unfashionable history books.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration between space agencies in the US, Europe and Canada, will succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as the foremost space telescope in 2018. Its unprecedented size, sensitivity and suite of instruments will revolutionise our view on the Universe, from showing us how the very first galaxies formed to revealing the atmospheres of planets outside our own solar system, where life may be forming. Sarah Kendrew will give an overview of the mission and the exciting science it will do after launch. She'll talk about where the mission is right now, from her personal involvement in one of JWST's 4 instruments, MIRI.

Sarah Kendrew is an astronomer at the University of Oxford. She works on optical and infrared instrumentation for the observatories of the future, and researches how stars form in the Milky Way Galaxy. Website: http://skendrew.github.io/ Twitter: @sarahkendrew

Elliot George, the 'docile Dawkins', is the author of Godbuster - Exorcises all known gods. He is a retired Science teacher who can't stop spreading the message of Scientific Realism and, recently, he accepted the challenge of an Evangelical Pastor to debate the validity of belief in the Pastor's own church. The video of this event will be on youtube soon... Elliot also provides free teaching resources on the TES website for the non-belief section of the National Curriculum Religious Education syllabus. These resources attempt to redress the imbalance between the availability of faith material and the dearth of atheist material in secondary schools. They include several powerpoint presentations and the website http://doubtersclub.webplus.net. They have been viewed and downloaded thousands of times and have attracted some criticism from believers - one called him a Nazi!

 'A SCIENTIST IN WONDERLAND' is the story of my life as a doctor and a scientist. Despite a youthful ambition to become a jazz musician, I eventually studied medicine and became first a clinician and then a medical research scientist, taking up professorships in Germany, Austria and finally in England. My reverence for the pursuit of truth through the application of the scientific method, coupled with a growing interest in the history of medicine during the Nazi era, did not always endear me to my peers. In 1993, when I was I was appointed to the world's first chair in complementary medicine, this was an area that had rarely been studied systematically, and was almost entirely dominated by evangelic promoters of quackery - among them, famously, HRH Prince Charles. Many of  these enthusiasts exhibited an overtly hostile, anti-scientific attitude towards the objective study of their therapies. Clashes were inevitable, but the sheer ferocity with which advocates of alternative medicine would pursue their aims came as a profound surprise. My memoir provides a personal insight into the cutthroat politics of academic life and offers a sobering reflection on the damage already done by pseudoscience.

Prof. Edzard Ernst, MD, PhD, FMEdSci, FSB, FRCP, FRCP(Edin.)
EMERITUS PROFESSOR
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER