Carl Sagan left a big void when he died in 1996. His eloquence, his passion for explaining science to a wider public, made him a major cultural figure in late 20th century America. Now a new voice is emerging. Neil deGrasse Tyson, like Sagan, is an astronomer and physicist with a remarkable gift for speaking about the beauty and importance of science. Like Sagan, he hosts a PBS television program (NOVA ScienceNOW) and appears frequently on talk shows. The passing of the torch will become obvious next year, when Tyson hosts the sequel to Sagan’s ground-breaking 1980 TV series, Cosmos. Tyson’s connection to Sagan actually began at a very young age. In the video clip above, Tyson tells Ted Simons of the regional PBS show Arizona Horizonthe story of a remarkable act of generosity by Sagan when Tyson was only a teenager. If it whets your appetite, be sure to watch the complete 25-minute interview below. And don’t miss our very popular related post: Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read.
It’s a little random. It’s very cool. It’s Jared Ficklin’s interactive art project that takes Stephen Hawking’s Cambridge Lectures and then uses an algorithm to turn the physicist’s words into stars. The video pretty much explains all that you need to know. I should only add two things. 1.) Ficklin is one of the speakers at the big TED show this week, and 2.) it looks like you can snag The Cambridge Lectures (or pretty much any book you want) as a free audio download from Audible.com if you sign up for their 14 day, no-strings-attached, free trial. Get more details on that here.
“Everybody knows that Einstein did something astonishing,” writes Bertrand Russell in the opening passage of ABC of Relativity, “but very few people know exactly what it was. It is generally recognized that he revolutionized our conception of the physical world, but the new conceptions are wrapped up in mathematical technicalities. It is true that there are innumerable popular accounts of the theory of relativity, but they generally cease to be intelligible just at the point where they begin to say something important.”
Eighty-seven years after it was written, ABC of Relativity still stands as one of the most intelligible introductions to Albert Einstein’s theories. Russell wrote the book in 1925 as a companion to his earlier volume, ABC of Atoms. The project of writing books for a general readership was born of necessity. Russell had no academic appointment, and needed the money. But as Peter Clark explains in his introduction to the Routledge fifth edition to ABC of Relativity, the early 1920s were also a time when Russell was becoming increasingly preoccupied with social and political issues. He believed that many of the social ills of the period, including the rise of nationalism, were consequences of a widespread and entrenched irrationality, born of ignorance and a lack of education. Writes Clark:
It was certainly a heroic period in Russell’s life, when he earnestly believed that the sort of blind unthinking prejudice–which he conceived to be fundamentally responsible for the horrors of the First World War–could be transcended by the dissemination of knowledge and the exercise in critical reasoning power by all classes of society. His huge output in this period was designed to bring within, as far as possible, everyone’s grasp the freedom of thought and action which knowledge and learning brings. That spirit of enlightenment certainly pervades the ABC of Relativity.
Thanks to UbuWeb, you can listen to an abridged audio version of ABC of Relativity online. The book is read by English actor Derek Jacobi (who also starred in the film we featured last week on Alan Turing: Breaking the Code). Jacobi reads one of the later editions of ABC of Relativity. In 1959, and again in 1969, Russell consented to revisions by physicist Felix Pirani. Chapter 11 was rewritten by Pirani to incorporate the expansion of the universe, which wasn’t announced by Edwin Hubble until four years after the first edition of Russell’s book. The one troubling thing about the text, as it now stands, is that Pirani didn’t limit himself to the revisions made under Russell’s supervision. He made more changes in 1985, fifteen years after Russell’s death.
Stellar courses focusing on Einstein’s physics can also be found in our big collection of Free Courses Online. Just scroll down to the Physics section.
Last fall, we featured a talk by the hot-shot theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, “A Universe from Nothing,” which answered some big enchilada questions: What is our current understanding of the universe? When did the universe begin? What came before it? How could something come from nothing? And what will happen to the universe in the future?
The lecture gave a snapshot of the thinking laid out in Krauss’ newly-released book by the same title: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. The book just hit the stands, and right now it’s #51 on the Amazon bestseller list. Not bad for a text that delves into the complex mysteries of dark matter, quantum mechanics and cosmology.
In case you missed the original lecture, we have posted “A Universe from Nothing” below for your viewing pleasure. (It has racked up over a million views on YouTube.) And you can catch the video trailer for Krauss’ new book right above. Find more great physics videos in our collection of Free Online Courses and Great Science Videos.
Brilliant but unmotivated, Stephen Hawking was a 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge when he first noticed something was wrong. He was falling down a lot, and dropping things. He went into the hospital for tests, and learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The doctors told him he would gradually lose control of every muscle in his body.
“My dreams at that time were rather disturbed,” Hawking said. “Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved.”
The doctors gave the young man two and a half years to live. That was in early 1963. Over the next half century, Hawking defied all odds and went on to become one of the most celebrated scientists of the era, making major contributions to quantum cosmology and the understanding of black holes. Along the way, the wheelchair-bound Hawking became a cultural icon, a symbol of disembodied intellect and indomitable spirit.
This coming Sunday, 49 years after his grim diagnosis, Hawking will turn 70. A scientific conference in his honor got underway today at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, and will culminate on Sunday with a public symposium, “The State of the Universe,” featuring some of the world’s greatest astronomers and physicists, including Martin Rees, Kip Thorne and Saul Perlmutter. You can watch live streaming video of the events at the official website.
To help celebrate, we present Errol Morris’s 1992 film of A Brief History of Time (above), Hawking’s bestselling book. Morris weaves biography in with the science, interviewing members of Hawking’s family–his mother, sister and aunt–along with friends and colleagues, including Roger Penrose, Dennis Sciama and John Archibald Wheeler.
A Brief History of Time was Morris’s first film as a director-for-hire (he was recruited by Steven Spielberg for Amblin Entertainment), which created some difficulties, but Morris was pleased with the outcome. He later said, “It’s actually one of the most beautiful films I ever shot.” The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Filmmaking and the Documentary Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival.
In 1992 Morris told the New York Times Magazine that A Brief History of Time was “less cerebral and more moving” than anything he had worked on before. “This feeling of time, of aging, of mortality combined with this search for the most basic and deep questions about the world around us and ourselves,” Morris said, “is pretty persuasive stuff.” Find it listed in our Free Movies Online collection, within the Documentary section.
In the world of everyday experience we conceive of three dimensions of space. Through any point, no more than three perpendicular lines may pass. The notion that there might be more than three dimensions has traditionally been the domain of science fiction shows like The Twilight Zone.
In this engaging lecture (click image above to watch), theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss explains the growing respectability of extra-dimensional theories in physics, tracing the evolution of the idea from Plato’s cave through Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, and from Einstein-Minkowski spacetime through Kaluza-Klein theory, on into modern-day string theory.
Last week, the reports about Higgs Boson, otherwise called the God particle, put CERN and the Large Hadron Collider back into the news, leading some to ask: What exactly are Higgs and the Collider all about? We’re glad you asked. And what better way to answer that question than with a fly, little rap by Kate McAlpine (aka Alpinekat) and Will Barras. You can find the full lyrics below the jump, and the parts about Higgs Boson right below…
The Higgs Boson – that’s the one that everybody talks about.
And it’s the one sure thing that this machine will sort out
If the Higgs exists, they ought to see it right away
And if it doesn’t, then the scientists will finally say
“There is no Higgs! We need new physics to account for why
Things have mass. Something in our Standard Model went awry.”
But the Higgs – I still haven’t said just what it does
They suppose that particles have mass because
There is this Higgs field that extends through all space
And some particles slow down while other particles race
Straight through like the photon – it has no mass
But something heavy like the top quark, it’s draggin’ its ***
And the Higgs is a boson that carries a force
And makes particles take orders from the field that is its source.
They’ll detect it…
Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science. Where possible, we have included links to free versions of the books, all taken from our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections. Or you can always download a professionally-narrated book for free from Audible.com. Details here.
If you’re looking for a more extensive list of essential works, don’t miss The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume series that you can now download online.
1.) The Bible (eBook) — “to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.”
4.) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos.”
5.) The Age of Reasonby Thomas Paine (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.”
6.) The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.”
7.) The Art of Warby Sun Tsu (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.”
8.) The Prince by Machiavelli (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.”
Tyson concludes by saying: “If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.”
He has also added some more thoughts in the comments section below, saying:
Thanks for this ongoing interest in my book suggestions. From some of your reflections, it looks like the intent of the list was not as clear as I thought. The one-line comment after each book is not a review but a statement about how the book’s content influenced the behavior of people who shaped the western world. So, for example, it does no good to say what the Bible “really” meant, if its actual influence on human behavior is something else. Again, thanks for your collective interest. ‑NDTyson
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
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