This week’s edition of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe completes a little trilogy, following as it does 4. Space and 5. Time. The theory of special relativity brings these two big ideas into one unified notion of four-dimensional spacetime. Learn why I don’t like talking about length contraction and time dilation!
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 6. Spacetime
And here’s the Q&A video:
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | Q&A 6 - Spacetime
For this installment of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, we turn to one of my favorite topics, Time. (It’s a natural followup to Space, which we looked at last week.) There is so much to say about time that we have to judiciously choose just a few aspects: are the past and future as real as the present, how do we measure time, and why does it have an arrow? But I suspect we’ll be diving more deeply into the mysteries of time as the series progresses.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 5. Time
And here is the associated Q&A video, where I sneak in a discussion of Newcomb’s Paradox:
This installment of our Biggest Ideas in the Universe series talks about Space. As in, the three-dimensional plenum of locations in which we find ourselves situated. Is space fundamental? Why is it precisely three-dimensional? Why is there space at all? Find out here! (Or at least find out that we don’t know the answers, but we have some clues about how to ask the questions.)
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 4. Space
This is likely one of my favorite Ideas in the series, as we get to think about the nature of space in ways that aren’t usually discussed in physics classes.
Update: here is the followup Q&A video. More details on Hamiltonians, yay!
Welcome to the third installment in our video series, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Today’s idea is actually three ideas: Force, Energy and Action. There is a compelling argument to be made for splitting these up — and the resulting video is longer than it should be — but they kind of flowed together. So there you go.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 3. Force, Energy, and Action
Major technological upgrades this time around, with improved green-screen setup, dark background on the writing, and a landscape format for the text. I am learning!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy during the lockdown.
Update: Here is the Q&A video. No cats make an appearance this time, sorry.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | Q&A 3 - Force, Energy, and Action
Welcome to the second installment in our video series, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Today’s idea is Change. This sounds like a big and rather vague topic, and it is, but I’m actually using the label to sneak in a discussion of continuous change through time — what mathematicians call calculus. (I know some of you would jump on a video about calculus, but for others we need to ease them in softly.)
Don’t worry, no real equations here — I do write down some symbols, but just so you might recognize them if you come across them elsewhere.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 2. Change
Also, I’m still fiddling with the green-screen technology, and this was not my finest moment. But I think I have settled on a good mixture of settings, so video quality should improve going forward.
Update: here is the Q&A video. Technical proficiency improving apace!
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | Q&A 2 - Change
We kick off our informal video series on The Biggest Ideas in the Universe with one of my favorites — Conservation, as in “conservation of momentum,” “conservation of energy,” things like that. Readers of The Big Picture will recognize this as one of my favorite themes, and smile with familiarity as we mention some important names — Aristotle, Ibn Sina, Galileo, Laplace, and others.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 1. Conservation
Remember that for the next couple of days you are encouraged to leave questions about what was discussed in the video, either here or directly at the YouTube page. I will pick some of my favorites and make another video giving some answers.
Update: here’s the Q&A.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | Q&A 1 - Conservation
So, how about all that social distancing due to the growing pandemic, eh? There is a lot more staying-at-home these days than we’re normally used to, and I think it’s important to keep our brains active as well as our hands washed and our homes stocked with toilet paper.
To that end, I’m doing a little experiment: a series of informal videos I’m calling The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. (Very tempted to put an exclamation point every time I write that, but mostly resisting.) They will have nothing directly to do with viruses or pandemics, but hopefully will be a way for people to think and learn something new while we’re struggling through this somewhat surreal experience. Who knows, they may even be useful long after things have returned to normal.
The idea will be to have me talking about one Big Idea in each video, hopefully with a new installment released each week. I’ll invite viewers to leave questions here (where I’ll be linking to each video), and at YouTube. Then I’ll pick out some of the most interesting questions and make another short video addressing them.
Before anyone jumps in to tell me — yes, I am very amateur at this! My green-screen usage could definitely use an upgrade, for one thing. Happy to take suggestions as to how to improve the quality of the video production (quality of the substance is what it is, I’m afraid).
Consider this a very tiny gesture in the direction of sticking together and moving forward during some trying times. I hope everyone out there is staying as safe as possible.
