The Next Fifty Years of Science, and Other Videos from Googleplex

in Google, Science, Video - Science | March 20th, 2007

Last week, we talked a lit­tle (here and here) about the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of find­ing enlight­ened con­tent on GooTube (Google Video + YouTube). What we did­n’t men­tion is that some of this good con­tent comes straight from Google head­quar­ters itself. This page, sim­ply titled Videos from Google­plex, cap­tures talks giv­en most­ly at cor­po­rate cen­tral, and they’re bro­ken down into three cat­e­gories: TechTalks, Authors@Google, and Mis­cel­la­neous Google Videos. While some of the videos pro­mote Google’s inter­nal life and cul­ture, oth­ers touch on sub­jects that have broad­er appeal. Like this one: Here we have Kevin Kel­ly, co-founder of Wired Mag­a­zine and for­mer edi­tor of the icon­ic Whole Earth Review, talk­ing about how the path to sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge — how our sci­en­tif­ic method — is like­ly to change over the next 50 years. As you could well imag­ine, this kind of for­ward-look­ing think­ing is bound to res­onate at Google, but it’s easy to see it hav­ing an audi­ence beyond. Give this 49-minute video a look and see what you think. At best, you’ll take away some­thing from it. At worst, you’ll get a feel for what the folks at Google are pon­der­ing.

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Has Stephen Hawking Been Wrong For The Last 30 Years?

in Physics, Video - Science | March 16th, 2007

With his cut­ting-edge research on black holes in the 1970s, Stephen Hawk­ing emerged as a major play­er in the physics world. Then, with the 1988 pub­li­ca­tion of the best­seller, A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Hawk­ing achieved inter­na­tion­al celebri­ty sta­tus.

As this BBC pre­sen­ta­tion shows, Hawk­ing’s fame might rest on weak­er foun­da­tions than most could have imag­ined. Sev­er­al impor­tant physi­cists, includ­ing Leonard Susskind here at Stan­ford (see our pre­vi­ous ref­er­ences to him), zeroed in on Hawk­ing’s major con­tention that, when black holes dis­ap­pear, they take along with them all infor­ma­tion that ever exist­ed inside them, which leads to the log­i­cal con­clu­sion that there are clear lim­its to what sci­en­tists could ever know about black holes. After 20 years of debate, the Susskind camp seems to have won out, leav­ing Hawk­ing’s lega­cy in ques­tion. This BBC web page will give you the back­sto­ry in brief, but you may want to go straight to this 50 minute video.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment

in Psychology, Video - Science | March 8th, 2007

Back in 1971, Philip Zim­bar­do, a Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor, set up an exper­i­ment that quick­ly and now famous­ly went awry. Here, Zim­bar­do had under­grad­u­ates play the role of pris­on­ers and prison guards in a mock prison envi­ron­ment. Meant to last two weeks, the exper­i­ment was cut short after only six days when the guards, as The Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment web site puts it, “became sadis­tic and [the] pris­on­ers became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.” For Zim­bar­do, the way things played out says a lot about what hap­pens when good peo­ple are put in bad sit­u­a­tions. And it speaks to how tor­ture sce­nar­ios, like those at Abu Ghraib, become pos­si­ble. (For more on the par­al­lels between the prison exper­i­ment and the tor­ture in Iraq, you may want to check out Zim­bar­do’s talk at a recent con­fer­ence called “Think­ing Human­i­ty After Abu Ghraib.”

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Einstein’s E = mc2 Explained

in Science, Video - Science | February 28th, 2007

E = mc2. It’s hands-down the most well known equa­tion out there. But how many have the faintest idea what the equa­tion real­ly means? Not too long ago, PBS’ NOVA put togeth­er a “docu­d­ra­ma,” called Ein­stein’s Big Idea, which took a close look at how Ein­stein arrived at the equa­tion and what it means. Along with the pro­gram, NOVA pro­duced some relat­ed media resources, among which you’ll find a series of pod­casts (iTunes — Feed — mp3) fea­tur­ing 10 top physi­cists (includ­ing two Nobel Prize win­ners) who briefly explain the mean­ing and impor­tance of E = mc2. In addi­tion, and per­haps even bet­ter, they’ve post­ed an audio clip of Ein­stein him­self explain­ing what the equa­tion is all about. You’ll find many good resources here, so have a good look around.

If physics intrigues you, you should also check out a new Stan­ford course that’s being dis­trib­uted for free via video pod­cast. The course, Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Quan­tum Entan­gle­ment, is pre­sent­ed by Leonard Susskind, whom many con­sid­er the father of string the­o­ry, a con­tro­ver­sial inno­va­tion in physics that squares quan­tum the­o­ry with rel­a­tiv­i­ty and explains the nature of all mat­ter and forces. Now, when Susskind dis­cuss­es quan­tum entan­gle­ment, he is sure­ly get­ting into some heady, cut­ting-edge stuff. But the good thing is that the very pop­u­lar course was pre­sent­ed through Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies Pro­gram (where I work, just to put my cards on the table), and was geared toward the gen­er­al pub­lic. The course is expect­ed to last a full year, and it should result in 30 free two-hour lec­tures, which will all be grad­u­al­ly post­ed online. You can find a more detailed course descrip­tion here.

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University Video Collections

in Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | February 23rd, 2007

 

Note: Please don’t for­get to vis­it our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es, which includes many cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties in video.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.