Just got back from a great trip to Beijing, very enjoyable if a bit tiring, where much musing was done on the Primordial Existential Question, about which more anon. But I also mused a bit about what this blog needs, and I came to the conclusion that must have been obvious to everyone else long ago: more videos of me.
So, here you are. Thanks to some heroic efforts on the part of folks who would just as soon lurk behind the scenes, we now have video captured from the C-SPAN broadcast of our science panel at YearlyKos. Here is my talk, conveniently divided into two pieces to appease the YouTube gods. They are a little fuzzy, but you get the idea. I used the mysterious beauty of dark matter and dark energy as an excuse to make some didactic points about science and rationality and politics. (If I weren’t an atheist, I would have made a good preacher.) You can also find videos of Chris’s talk and Ed’s talk at their respective sites; Tara, who felt sorry for me for being given the impossible task of making the universe sound interesting, has the Q&A up as well.
But! Behind the fold, the true payoff!
Those talks of mine are inspiring and educational and all that, but they’re not truly art. For that, you will have to check out this series of videos by Dylan King. Here is a taste.
For our slower viewers, I’ll explain: this is a series of trumpet improvisations, recorded over (and inspired by, I like to think) my appearance on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. A confluence of science and music, radio and the internet, that can only be described as unique.
wow. great talk. you’re awesome. You’ve blown me away with science, yet again. Also, I esp. like the little bit near the end about science and honesty. what the bleep is hilarious (that was my reaction when i first saw it), until you see that it has continually been an annual top seller at amazon.com. Then things start to get depressing. Oh well, as you say, there’s still hope for us all. Cheers!
Martin,
Well, I suppose to be more precise I should say that gravity is instrumental in changing the expansion, while the initial conditions of our region of the universe are also important. But whichever way you slice it, the expansion goes away once you’re in an orbit around anything. And furthermore, the existence of acceleration in the expansion indicates that gravity is decidedly not working against the expansion, except on small scales.
Jason,
I would say that dark energy is not gravity: wouldn’t you? Take the cosmological constant out of Einstein’s equations and you will see that gravity certainly is working against (acting to decelerate) the expansion.
Martin
Here’s an interesting link about dark matter surprises. I think it’s recent but don’t see a release date:
Analyst Magazine
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Sean, brilliant talk!!! Thanks for posting the video.
By the way, I prefer T.S. Eliot over Portishead to the trumpet over you: http://www.hyperlexic.com/ts_eliot_portishead.php
Check it out. It’s pretty cool. And greetings to JO…