Note: Although you can no longer find these videos on YouTube, you can find them available on this CERN website.
Sean Carroll, a physics professor at Caltech, has a knack for making science publicly accessible. He writes regularly for the blog Cosmic Variance, and you have perhaps seen him on the History Channel, Science Channel, or The Colbert Report. Yesterday, he announced that five lectures he gave at CERN now appear online, and it all begins with an Introduction to Cosmology, or the origin and structure of the universe. Then come lectures on Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Thermodynamics and the Early Universe, and Inflation and Beyond. The lectures (all nicely packaged together at Cosmic Variance) will appear in the Physics Section of our collection of Free Courses Online. You may also want to visit two related videos recently featured on OC:
When two teams of scientists announced in 1998 that the expansion of the Universe was not slowing down due to gravity but was in fact accelerating, the worldwide scientific community was shocked. The discovery turned many of the prevailing assumptions about the universe upside down. Looking back, perhaps the only thing that wasn’t a surprise was that the Nobel Prize Committee should take notice.
Last Tuesday the Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics would go to three American-born scientists from two rival teams: physicist Saul Permutter, head of the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, would receive half of the prize, while Brian P. Schmidt, head of the High‑z Supernova Search Team and an astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, Weston Creek, would share the other half with a colleague who wrote the original paper announcing the team’s findings in 1998, astronomer Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Despite popular belief, the two teams did not “discover” dark energy. As Perlmutter points out in the short film above, “People are using the term ‘dark energy’ basically as a place holder to describe any explanation for why it is that we seem to be seeing the universe’s expansion getting faster and faster.” What is actually known is that the universe has been expanding for as far back as we can observe, and about 7 billion years ago–roughly half the estimated age of the universe–the expansion began to accelerate.
“Why is it speeding up?” Perlmutter asked during a press conference on the morning his Nobel Prize was announced. “It could be that most of the universe is dominated by a dark energy that pervades all of space and is causing this acceleration. It could be, perhaps even more surprising, that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity needs a little bit of a tweak, perhaps acting slightly differently on these very large scales of the universe. But at this moment I would say that the question is wide open.”
After dismissing the popular notion that scientists are unable to truly appreciate beauty in nature, physicist Richard Feynman (1918 — 1988) explains what a scientist really is and does. Here are some of the most memorable lines from this beautiful mix of Feynman quotes and (mostly) BBC and NASA footage:
People say to me, Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics? — No, I’m not. I’m just looking to find out more about the world.
When we’re going to investigate [nature], we shouldn’t predecide what it is we’re trying to do, except to find out more about it.
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. (…) I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose.
When you doubt and ask, it gets a little harder to believe.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
In 2009, Richard Dawkins invited Lawrence Krauss, an internationally-known theoretical physicist and author of The Physics of Star Trek, to talk about some big enchilada questions. What is our current picture 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?
Krauss takes us back to the foundational work of Einstein and Hubble, then moves us through important breakthroughs in modern theoretical physics, ones that have helped us unravel some of these big questions. Give Professor Krauss 53 minutes, and he’ll give you the universe … and a few jokes along the way.
Earlier this week, NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson tweeted a 14 second time-lapse film of the Aurora Borealis taken from the International Space Station. The short clip called to mind a more extensive view of the Northern Lights shot by Don Pettit, also working in the ISS, back in 2008. (Watch above.) And it raised the basic question: What causes the Aurora Borealis anyway?
The beautiful natural phenomenon starts deep inside the core of the sun, and the rest of the story gets explained in a five minute animated video created by Norwegian filmmaker Per Byhring and the Physics Department at the University of Oslo.
They’re not your ordinary black holes. They’re bigger. They’re badder. They are supermassive black holes capable of producing the largest eruptions since the Big Bang. But, despite their massive size, we’re just starting to understand these forces operating in the center of galaxies sometimes billions of light years from Earth.
The documentary above (running about 18 minutes) offers a reasonably good primer on supermassive black holes. Or, to get another angle on things, you can turn to Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, a course taught by Charles Bailyn at Yale. Lecture 15 (watch here) is specifically dedicated to these mother-of-all black holes.
Last week, we highlighted The Last Journey Of A Genius, a documentary that recorded the final days of the great physicist Richard Feynman and his obsession with traveling to Tannu Tuva, a state outside of outer Mongolia.
Now here is what next week will bring — a new “substantial graphic novel biography” that “presents the larger-than-life exploits of the Nobel-winning quantum physicist, adventurer, musician and world-class raconteur.” The book written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick runs a fairly hefty 272 pages. The video clip on Youtube will give you a good feel for the artwork that tells Feynman’s personal tale.
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The search for extraterrestrial life brings us right back to where we started, planet Earth, at least for a moment. NASA researchers have discovered evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that holds the genetic instructions for life, were likely created in space and then brought to Earth by meteorites, leaving behind a “kit of ready-made parts” that contributed to the origin of life. All of this gets spelled out by Dr. Michael Callahan in this video released last week by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
If you still find yourself doubting our extraterrestrial origins, then chew on this more basic fact underscored by physicist Lawrence Krauss. We are all stardust. Put simply, every little atom in our bodies comes from a supernova, an exploding star…
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