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HowTheLightGetsIn brings together voices from across philosophy, science, politics, and the arts to explore the questions that define our times. Through thought-provoking conversations and fresh perspectives, the festival invites new ways of understanding the world around us.
Explore the first speakers joining us at HowTheLightGetsIn London 2025.
"Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals."
One of Britain’s most provocative thinkers, John Gray is a political philosopher known for dismantling liberalism and exposing the illusions of human progress. Former Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, Gray has challenged orthodoxy across the political spectrum with a body of work that ranges from critiques of Enlightenment rationalism to meditations on the limits of secular humanism.
He is the bestselling author of Straw Dogs, The Silence of Animals, and Seven Types of Atheism as well as a frequent contributor to The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement. Gray’s sharp insights and contrarian stance continue to shape contemporary debates on ethics, politics, and the future of humanity.
"One of the most important thinkers alive." — The Times
“A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.”
Alain de Botton is the bestselling philosopher redefining how we understand love, work, and meaning in the modern world. He first rose to prominence with Essays in Love, a novel-philosophy hybrid that became an international bestseller. He has since authored several bestselling works that blend literary elegance, psychological insight, and philosophical depth.
In 2008, he founded The School of Life, an organisation dedicated to developing emotional intelligence through philosophy, psychotherapy, and culture. De Botton has lectured widely, appeared in multiple television documentaries, and written for The Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others, consistently arguing for the power of ideas to transform how we love, work, and live.
“Alain de Botton, one of our era’s most uncommonly perceptive, lyrical, and lucid existential contemplatives.” — The Marginalian
"The smartphone has become the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation."
Anna Lembke is a groundbreaking psychiatrist and addiction medicine expert. She is Professor and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University. Alongside shaping individual lives in her clinical practice, Lembke has featured on the hit Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, and has testified before various committees in the United States House of Representatives and Senate.
Lembke gained national recognition with her 2016 book, Drug Dealer, MD, which examined the role of medical professionals in the opioid crisis. Her more recent bestselling book, Dopamine Nation, argues that too much pleasure in the short term causes pain in the long term.
"Lembke is a whiz on why we get hooked on things - and how we can enjoy pleasurable things in healthier doses." — The Guardian
“The key to the survival of liberty in the modern world is the embrace of multiple identities.”
Timothy Garton Ash is a leading British historian, political writer, and one of Europe’s most compelling chroniclers of modern transformation. He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Known for his vivid reportage and sharp historical insight, Garton Ash has authored acclaimed works including The File, The Magic Lantern, and Free Speech, blending memoir, analysis, and frontline observation. His most recent book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, won the Lionel Gelber Prize in 2024 and cements his place as a leading voice on Europe’s postwar evolution.
"One of Britain's leading public intellectuals." — The Spectator
'"Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed."
Fearlessly critical of the scientific mainstream, Sabine Hossenfelder is a groundbreaking theoretical physicist who specialises in the foundations of science. She is a leading science communicator, best-selling author and researcher. Her recent books include Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, and the New York Times's Best Selling Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions.
Hossenfelder is the creator behind the popular YouTube channel, "Science without the gobbledygook" which has amassed over one million subscribers. Her writing has featured in some of the world's top publications including Scientific American, New Scientist, and Nautilus.
“A physicist who is utterly fearless, completely honest, and quite funny.” — Peter Woit, mathematical physicist
"We live in a country afflicted by a senile and selfish capitalist system."
Neil Kinnock is a British political figure whose career has spanned parliament, party leadership, and the European stage. Elected MP for Bedwellty in 1970 and later becoming Labour Party leader from 1983 to 1992, he undertook the monumental task of modernising the party after its crushing electoral defeat, battling internal factionalism, confronting Militant entryism, and laying the groundwork for the eventual rise of New Labour.
After stepping down as leader, he served as Vice-President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004 and later as Chair of the British Council, remaining a passionate advocate for European cooperation, education, and public service.
"Neil Kinnock saved the Labour Party. Without him, there would have been no Blair, no 1997 landslide." — Peter Mandelson
"The Holy Grail is...trying to understand a theory of quantum gravity."
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a pioneering theoretical physicist reshaping our understanding of space, time, and gravity. A first-generation Cuban-American from Chicago, she built and flew her own plane solo at 14, graduated from MIT with a perfect 5.0 GPA, and earned her PhD from Harvard, where her early work on the spin memory effect was later cited by Stephen Hawking. She has received job offers from NASA and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, and was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list twice.
Now a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute and Deputy Director of the Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography, Pasterski leads efforts to encode the universe as a hologram, a bold step toward uniting quantum theory with general relativity.
"Her potential is off the charts." — Allen Haggerty, MIT
"The Nobel prizes have strayed far from the vision their founder had for them, and they badly need to be reorganised."
Brian Keating is a prominent experimental cosmologist and professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his work on the BICEP experiments at the South Pole, which seek to detect primordial gravitational waves, and ripples in spacetime from the very earliest moments of the universe. His research aims to answer fundamental questions about the origin, structure, and fate of the cosmos. Keating has hosted the Clarke Center Into the Impossible podcast since 2016.
Keating’s bestselling book, Losing the Nobel Prize, offers a candid and provocative critique of the scientific establishment and the politics of big science, challenging the notion that awards define success or truth in research.
"[Keating's] project, which will give astronomers an important new tool to peer back in time to our early
universe." — Mark Thiemens, University of California San Diego
“The fake outrage of academic philosophy amazes me.”
Tommy J. Curry is the Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh, renowned for his critical scholarship on the intersection of race, gender, and power. He was awarded the prestigious American Book Award for his groundbreaking book The Man Not, which dismantles prevailing narratives by arguing that Black masculinity is not a mimicry of white patriarchy but a unique and oppositional identity.
Curry’s work has been hailed by scholars as “required reading for all who work at the intersection of race and gender, especially in the current political milieu,” and he continues to challenge academic orthodoxy through his fierce public interventions, teaching, and edited volumes in Africana philosophy.
“Tommy Curry challenges the cozy consensus among self-conceived progressives in the humanities… required reading for anyone interested in understanding oppression or having unquestioned assumptions put to the test." —Charles W. Mills, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center
"No one looking at the vast extent of the universe and the completely random location of homo sapiens within it could seriously maintain it was intentionally created for us.”
One of the world's foremost philosophers of physics, Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at NYU and Founder and Director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. He is a member of the "Foundational Questions Institute" of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The influence of Maudlin's research in the foundations of physics, metaphysics, and logic cannot be overstated. He has reinvigorated our understanding of quantum mechanics as pointing to the counterintuitive idea of non-locality, what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." Maudlin warns that we should be wary of physical theories that contradict our direct impression of reality, especially when it comes to the nature of time.
“To make his case, he’s had to reinvent geometry.” — Wired
"The geometry, the content, and the fate of the universe are all intricately linked."
Priyamvada Natarajan is an award-winning theoretical astrophysicist known for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy and gravitational lensing. She is an an astronomy and physics professor at Yale University, and the author of the bestseller Mapping the Heavens – The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.
Natarajan was included on the TIME100 list of most influential people in the world in 2024 and the 2025 recipient of the Dannie Heineman Prize in Astrophysics awarded by the American Astronomical Society and the American Institute of Physics
“A strikingly lucid account of the expansion, not just of the universe, but of the way we have tried to understand it." — New York Times
"[O]ur cosmological models have taken on creation-myth status.”
Phil Halper is a fearless science communicator and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, known for challenging the orthodoxy of modern cosmology. In his writing and his popular YouTube series Before the Big Bang, Halper argues that the dominant Big Bang model has become less a scientific theory and more a secular creation myth, invoking the language of singularity and genesis in ways that mirror religious cosmologies.
As co-author of Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins, he explores alternative theories of the universe’s beginnings, from bouncing cosmologies to cyclical time, arguing that these alternatives are too often dismissed not on empirical grounds but because they threaten a cosmological narrative that science has grown attached to.
"In many books, early-universe cosmology is presented as established. Afshordi and Halper show nothing could be further from the truth!" — Robert Brandenberger, McGill University
“Language is not primarily about representing the world. It’s about managing social interaction.”
Nick Enfield is a professor of linguistics, renowned for his work on how language helps construct our reality. Challenging the dominant narrative that language is a transparent window into the world, Enfield’s book Language vs. Reality shows how language frames our perspectives and shapes how we relate to one another. According to Enfield, language is far better for persuasion than for objectively capturing facts.
In addition to his theoretical work, Enfield has conducted linguistics field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos. His popular writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American Mind, among other outlets.
“I am happy that Nick Enfield is a linguist because there are very few scientists in the world who can match him for insights into the cultural and social nature of human language." Daniel L. Everett, Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences, Bentley University
“…philosophy can harbor hopes for tyranny, but it can also pave the way toward reform and revolution.”
One of the most influential political philosophers of her generation, Seyla Benhabib is known for her groundbreaking work on democracy, human rights, and the ethics of migration and global justice. Benhabib’s work redefines what it means to belong in an age of borders and pluralism. Drawing on Kant and Habermas, she reimagines global relations as an ongoing democratic negotiation that transcends borders, with profound consequences for migrants and refugees.
Benhabib is the author of several books, including The Rights of Others, Another Cosmopolitanism, and Exile, Statelessness and Migration. In 2009, she was awarded the Ernst Bloch Prize, one of Germany’s most distinguished philosophical honors given every three years, for her work on “the contradictions of a globalized world.” Amid ongoing global debates about nation-states, citizenship, and belonging, Benhabib’s philosophy could not be more relevant.
“Outstanding services to critical theory, political philosophy and democracy research” — Theodor W. Adorno Prize
"But it’s fallibilism, not relativism, that gives us pause by reminding us we may be wrong."
Timothy Williamson is a pre-eminent analytic philosopher and leading authority in logic, language, and metaphysics. He served as the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford from 2000 to 2023 and is currently a Senior Research and Teaching Fellow at New College, Oxford.
A Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, Williamson has published several foundational books, including Knowledge and Its Limits, Vagueness, and The Philosophy of Philosophy. His "knowledge-first" epistemology rejected the orthodox view of knowledge in philosophy, instead arguing that knowledge is a foundational concept which cannot be broken down further.
"One of the world's leading philosophers" — Jason Stanley
A UK First. Back To Big Thinking
The Guardian
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