Videos by topic: UNIVERSE
WHY CITIES KEEP GROWING, CORPORATIONS AND PEOPLE ALWAYS DIE, AND LIFE GETS FASTER
"The question is, as a scientist, can we take these ideas and do what we did in biology, at least based on networks and other ideas, and put this into a quantitative, mathematizable, predictive theory, so that we can understand the birth and death of companies, how that stimulates the economy?"
Go to stand-alone video: :
WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES?
"Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now. That is why we need to go back before inflation into before the Big Bang, into a different part of the universe to understand why inflation happened versus something else. There you get into branes and the cyclic universe. ... I really don't like any of the models that are on the market right now. We really need to think harder about what the universe should look like."
Go to stand-alone video: :
THE PHYSICS THAT WE KNOW
"We have decided, as a scientific endeavor, to extrapolate as much as we can from our knowledge of the individual processes that we can measure: evaporation from the ocean, the formation of a cloud, rainfall coming from a cloud, changes in wind patterns as a function of the pressure field, changes in the jet stream. What we have tried to do is encapsulate those small-scale processes, put them together, and see if we can predict the emerging properties of that fundamental complex system."
Go to stand-alone video: :
PRESSING QUESTIONS FOR OUR CENTURY
"Science is the greatest achievement of human history so far. I say that as a huge admirer of the Renaissance and Renaissance art, music and literature, but the world-transforming power of science and the tremendous insights that we've gained show that this is an enterprise, a wonderful collective enterprise, that is a great achievement of humanity. How are we going to make more people party to that? That's a pressing question for our century."
Go to stand-alone video: :
IS THERE A HIGGS?
"In a very pure sense you build the accelerator you need when you know what the question is."
Go to stand-alone video: :
MODELING THE FUTURE
"Warming is unequivocal, that's true. But that's not a sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much of the climate Ma Earth, a perverse lady, gives us is from her, and how much is caused by us. That's a much more sophisticated, and much more difficult question."
Go to stand-alone video: :
THE ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO
"I invited a group of cosmologists, experimentalists, theorists, and particle physicists and cosmologists. Stephen Hawking came; we had three Nobel laureates, Gerard 'tHooft, David Gross, Frank Wilczek; well-known cosmologists and physicists such as Jim Peebles at Princeton, Alan Guth at MIT, Kip Thorne at Caltech, Lisa Randall at Harvard; experimentalists, such as Barry Barish of LIGO, the gravitational wave observatory; we had observational cosmologists, people looking at the cosmic microwave background; we had Maria Spiropulu from CERN, who's working on the Large Hadron Collider — which a decade ago people wouldn't have thought it was a probe of gravity, but now due to recent work in the possibility of extra dimensions it might be."
Go to stand-alone video: :
THE LANDSCAPE
"What we've discovered in the last several years is that string theory has an incredible diversity—a tremendous number of solutions—and allows different kinds of environments. A lot of the practitioners of this kind of mathematical theory have been in a state of denial about it. They didn't want to recognize it. They want to believe the universe is an elegant universe—and it's not so elegant. It's different over here. It's that over here. It's a Rube Goldberg machine over here. And this has created a sort of sense of denial about the facts about the theory. The theory is going to win, and physicists who are trying to deny what's going on are going to lose."
Go to stand-alone video: :
THE MAKING OF A PHYSICIST
something about his life and his attitude toward the world and toward physics.
Go to stand-alone video: :