World Science Festival
Steven Weinberg: On The Shoulders Of Giants
Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote Isaac Newton. In a new annual series, World Science Festival...
World Science Festival
A Simple, Right Theory of Everything
Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote Isaac Newton. In a new annual series, World Science Festival...
World Science Festival
J.J. Thomson and His Discovery of the Electron
Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote Isaac Newton. In a new annual series, World Science Festival...
World Science Festival
Modern Science's Gift to Culture
Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote Isaac Newton. In a new annual series, World Science Festival...
World Science Festival
Is It Anti-Science or Just Confusion?
Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote Isaac Newton. In a new annual series, World Science Festival...
World Science Festival
How We Hear
Have you ever wondered how we hear? Harvard physicist and auditory physiologist Christopher Shera explains that the inner workings of the ear. He simply explains how the bones and membranes in your head amplify and transform sound energy...
World Science Festival
How Loud Can You Go?
How soft is a pin drop? How loud is an explosion? The human ear can handle sound at both very large and very small intensities. Here, physicist and auditory physiologist Christopher Shera illustrates the vast range of human hearing....
World Science Festival
Black Holes and Time
A black hole has such an enormous mass and gravitational force that it essentially collapses in on itself. But why does gravity work in that direction, instead of pushing objects away? And what does this have to do with the process of...
World Science Festival
The Discovery of Black Holes
Today, mathematics is predicting the reality that there are extra dimensions beyond the three that humans can see, the existence of additional universes outside of the one that Earth inhabits, and even the possibility that the world is...
World Science Festival
The Sound of Ancient Gravity
“Binary inspiral” refers to a binary system (with two neutron stars or black holes, for example) where the two objects are spiraling in towards each other. The two bodies about to collide are called Hulse-Taylor objects because Russell...
World Science Festival
The bet Stephen Hawking made with Kip Thorne
Remember that bet Stephen Hawking made with Kip Thorne in the 90s about whether information could escape a black hole? (No, not the infamous one wagered between the two physicists in the 70s involving a subscription to Penthouse.) The...
World Science Festival
Why Extra Dimensions Make Sense
In recent years, a growing body of work—based on the principles of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and string theory—has been steadily converging around a proposal that our universe is actually only one of many universes. Here, Brian...
World Science Festival
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics
Basic researchers working in pure mathematics often develop fundamental laws, even entire branches of math, without any specific application in mind. Yet, as Mario Livio points out here, many of these posited laws turn out—sometimes...
World Science Festival
Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace
Extra dimensions of space—the idea that we are immersed in hyperspace—may be key to explaining the fundamental nature of the universe. Relativity introduced time as the fourth dimension, and Einstein’s subsequent work envisioned more...
World Science Festival
Godel's Lasting Legacy
Austrian logician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems showed us the limitations of mathematics within mathematics. While math is still useful for proving scientific theorems, Gödel transformed the perception of pure mathematics in a way...
World Science Festival
Gödel's Lasting Legacy
Austrian logician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems showed us the limitations of mathematics within mathematics. While math is still useful for proving scientific theorems, Gödel transformed the perception of pure mathematics in a way...
World Science Festival
Why Einstein Wanted To Unify
Harvard University science historian and physicist Peter Galison describes Einstein's quest to find a single, elegant theorem that applies equally to planets and particles in this clip from the 2008 World Science Festival program "Beyond...
World Science Festival
World Science Festival 2016 Gala
This year, the Gala will mark the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s discovery of the General Theory of Relativity—one of the deepest and most remarkable theories ever contemplated—by honoring one of the truly great theoretical physicists...
World Science Festival
Can the Large Hadron Collider Kill Us?
When the Large Hadron Collider first came online, there was much disinformation and fear about the tremendous energy levels required to run the experiments. Most public concern was about the possibility of the LHC creating a black hole...
World Science Festival
Unknown Pleasures: The Search for New Particles
The Large Hadron Collider is a miraculous piece of technology that has been charged with discovering new fundamental physics particles. But how can scientists design an experiment to detect new particles when they don’t know what these...
World Science Festival
Large Hadron Collider: ALICE Experiment
ALICE is unique among the four major Large Hadron Collider experiments because it is the only experiment analyzing collisions between atomic nuclei instead of proton–proton collisions. Physicist Jennifer Klay explains how scientists will...
World Science Festival
The Higgs Boson: What Are We Looking For?
Finding the Higgs Boson is no easy task. Like most subatomic particles, it cannot be directly observed. But as CERN physicist Monica Dunford explains, we can instead try to look for what particles like the Higgs decay into. She...
World Science Festival
Can We Reach Absolute Zero?
Absolute zero is the temperature at which entropy reaches its minimum value, and all energy has been taken out of a system. But is it reachable? Can anything ever be that cold? Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Phillips explains the...
World Science Festival
When did you start having an interest in atoms?
Children are naturally curious about the world around them. They experiment, explore, and discover without even thinking about it. Nobel Prize winning physicist William Phillips reaches out to the children of today as the scientists of...