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Lectures On the Frontiers of Physics Online
modernphysics writes "The Outreach Department at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics offers a wide array of online lecture playbacks examining hot topics in modern physics and beyond. Presentations include Neil Turok's 'What Banged?,' John Ellis with 'The Large Hadron Collider,' Nima Arkani-Hamed with 'Fundamental Physics in 2010,' Paul Steinhardt with 'Impossible Crystals,' Edward Witten with 'The Quest for Supersymmetry,' Seth Lloyd with 'Programming the Universe,' Anton Zeilinger with 'From Einstein to Quantum Information,' Raymond Laflamme with 'Harnessing the Quantum World,' and many other talks. The presentations feature a split-screen presentation with the guest speaker in one frame and their full-frame graphics in the other."
as though everything happened by 'mistake', & the hyper-'geniuses' of the day are going to straighten it all out. it's a safe bet.
Last week at JavaOne there was a presentation on the LHC and Mars and simply put they just stunned me at how interesting this stuff was and I leapt back on the net to find out more. The Royal Institute in the UK has the Christmas Lectures which always amazed me as a child.
But at school? Apart from one teacher science was always a dull subject, it was numbers in a way that made Maths seem exciting and it just never covered where all this science was leading to. Its no wonder that there are a shortage of scientists and engineers out there when the school system turns the most exciting subjects into the dullest ones.
So sure some of these presentations are beyond the level of kids at school, but isn't it sometimes worth blowing their minds to make them realise why they are doing what they are doing? Science is a stunning thing, can we please stop making it dull.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Web server meltdown in 3....2.....1.....
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From the blurb: John Ellis with 'The Large Hadron Collider,'
That sounds dirty.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
For some reason, after those titles, the phrase, 'Many Norweigian films including "The Hot Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", and "The Huge Molars of Horst Nordfink"' floated through my head.
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...advanced networking technology. Site appears to be slashdotted.
In physics, at least it's possible from time to time to definitively disprove something.
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Its possible to disprove things in psychology too. (For example, the cognitive effects of L-dopa on parkinsons patients, or the overall average decline in IQ as a result from childhood trauma, etc...)
... get an education outside of the USA where they actually teach you something other than blind pride in your country and in your opinions ...
In fact, you can disprove anything so long as you're not required to back it up with information (as per YOUR POST).
Go... I say
Is also the next director of the Perimeter Institute and has just won the TED prize, partly for his work on physics and partly for his development work, he is behind the African Institute of Mathematical Science and wants to make sure that the next Einstein is from Africa: http://youtube.com/watch?v=UNbP7O6jasw
Isn't your example Psychiatry and not Psychology?
I, for one, welcome our new--uh, wait, wrong line.
I, for one, haven't noticed a whole lot of disdain for psychology around here, except perhaps where it is justly deserved--e.g. when the methodology is suspect or the conclusions don't follow. Perhaps those sort of mistakes don't happen as often in the physics realm. Perhaps it's easier to get into the field of psychology, or easier for a non-expert to find flaws with the experiments. Perhaps it's because whenever we read a bad summary of a physics paper, we can go to arXiv and get the real story.
In short, I much doubt that there's many on here who would claim that one field of scientific investigation that is more valid than another--if the science was done right, we must accept the results.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
What banged ?
your mom, with the large hardron collider.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
Wicked, Slashdot KO's Joomla based lecture site
Exciting as these subjects are, what I'd really like to see is someone tackling these:
1. What are particles? - Particles are simply assumed a priori. Nobody has ever managed to explain what a particle is.
2. What is time - why is it different from space?
3. Mass is 'curvature of space', so to speak. So what is electric charge?
TED: Ideas worth spreading is a great site for short lectures on a huge range of topics, from music to physics to economics to technology.
But at school? Apart from one teacher science was always a dull subject, it was numbers in a way that made Maths seem exciting and it just never covered where all this science was leading to. Its no wonder that there are a shortage of scientists and engineers out there when the school system turns the most exciting subjects into the dullest ones.
Well, the problem is that doing science requires understanding the basics. There are many different levels of stuff you have to understand before you can understand how they do the really cool things. That said, a good teacher can devise interesting problems that take the requisite skills to solve. This takes an inordinate amount of effort and creativity on the part of the teacher, and there lies the problem.
I'm a scientist, and I really enjoyed my time as a TA in grad school. I tried hard to come up with good ways of explaining very difficult material that the freshmen could pick up. I tried to keep the class interesting, or at least did my best.
So sure some of these presentations are beyond the level of kids at school, but isn't it sometimes worth blowing their minds to make them realise why they are doing what they are doing? Science is a stunning thing, can we please stop making it dull.
Absolutely, sometimes you do have to do the "holy SHIT!" demo. The prof that taught the freshman class I TA'd would always take the kids out and do the "toss the alkali metals in the lake and watch them go BOOM!" demonstration. Kids love watching stuff blow up. You want to tailor it to things they actually can understand, though. Better yet is to come up with a really fun project where they can take what they're learning to build something cool.
I kind of miss teaching. My mother was a teacher, and made history a fantastically fun, participatory subject. She took the kids out to do local archaeology. She had them act out fun stuff from history books to make it more than people and dates. One time a group of her students staged a "coup" - and of course she gently showed them what happens when you stage a coup against a strong dictator. ;) As a result, every time I'm in town visiting and we're out in town, invariably a former student of hers from decades past will come up and give her a huge hug. Good teachers mean a lot to kids. I never had a teacher that good (we agreed it was best for me not to take her classes), but then I guess I had a great mom instead.
I would love to be able to bring that kind of excitement to science classes. I wish it was in any way financially viable, but I couldn't pay our mortgage.
"Hot" and "Topics in modern physics" don't work in the same sentence for most people.
I realize that some of you will have a hard time with this concept. See previous discussions regarding Slashdotters and girlfriends.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Prof Walter Lewin at MIT has some entertaining lectures online as well at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/CourseHome/index.htm. Great image of consercation of mechanical energy on the opening page.
Too bad. I'm always eager to learn more about what those in physics think is important, even though I can not always understand it.
anyone know how to do what the subject says? my firefox says there is no plugin for the weird plugin perimeter is using, but I'd rather download the videos anyway. But how?
One of the problems with psychology is that there's psychology the (somewhat young, quite difficult) science, and psychology the art. When someone says they have a degree in psychology you don't always know whether it's a BSc or a BA.
General Relativity rocks. It is elegant in its minimialism. All efforts to add a little extra have failed, usually by allowing a dipole gravity wave mode of emission which has been ruled out by binary pulsar data.
The only field theory that is manifestly better than GR is the Maxwell field equations. Every time we have added to it in the name of symmetry, the theory has done more. James did it himself by tacking on the Ampere current. Einstein looked to get rid of a duplicate law, and so special relativity was born. With the huge supply of new particles coming out of atom smashers, the gauge symmetry in EM (U(1)) was expanded to SU(2) for the weak force, and SU(3) for the strong.
None of those smart cats listed in the initial post will be talking about the Maxwell equations. Too bad, the history of physics is clear: expand Maxwell, you win.
Max depends on the field strength tensor d_u A_v - d_v A_u. There is a subtraction in there, a great thing (called an exterior derivative). But in the name of symmetry, we need to work with the rest of it, d_u A_v + d_v A_u. Do that right, and you get a unified field theory that Einstein failed to find by looking for workable extensions of GR. Extend Max, not GR.
If anyone here wants to see the nuts and bolts of deriving the Maxwell equations using the Euler-Lagrange equations, search for "GEM action" on YouTube. A small variation - two minus signs - on the Maxwell equations leads to equations for gravity. Yes, I show that there is a metric solution (the Rosen metric if you are up on your GR jargon, a bunch of exponentials if not). Yes I know there is an issue of spin 1 and spin 2 which can be addressed if you get what the phase of current coupling really is.
YouTube can survive being slashdotted.
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
I appreciate Terry Pratchett's comment, however, I think it's substantially wrong. Boredom isn't invented by humans, but we do create it through a natural function of our minds.
Do you ever get bored at all? It is possible to completely do away with boredom, but one must accept the extra-ordinarily mundane aspects of life. It's interesting that the problem of boredom comes from the need to entertain oneself. So - washing dishes can be boring because you want to do something else more entertaining. Noticing the mind shoot away from the super-mundane, and then giving into the situation at hand is how boredom can be dealt a final death blow (over time).
The wonders of the universe, and the intellectual curiosity to discover what makes things go - in and of themselves will not do away with boredom. I think the reason people don't want their mind "blown" has much more to do with a sort of intellectual laziness and an attitude that it's unimportant. Furthermore, many find ideas agitating(!), and find left-brain workouts quite uncomfortable. Being comfortable with processing ideas is a hallmark of computer programmers (nerds). This doesn't mean slashdotters are necessarily more intelligent - there is more to intelligence than ideas.
I believe that science is sabotaged by willful ignorance, business/religious agendas, and a plain old "taking it for granted", that other people can take care of it.
Boredom is a whole different dimension, and quite pervasive.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Anyone have ideas on what AV tools they used to split the screen and record the presenter with the presentations?