Black holes may hold the key to understanding the most fundamental truths of the universe, but how do you see something that’s, well, black? Astronomers think they have the answer. Thanks to a global array of radio telescopes that turn the Earth into a giant receiver, we may soon have the first picture of the event horizon of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And, with the power of math, scientists are going even further, using equations to “look” inside black holes, peering at the central singularity where general relativity and quantum mechanics collide. Join Brian Greene and other leading physicists and astronomers on a journey to make darkness visible.

Find out more about the program and the participants: https://www.worldsciencefestiv....al.com/programs/dark

MODERATOR: Brian Greene
PARTICIPANTS: Shep Doeleman, Andrea Ghez, Vicky Kalogera, Cumrun Vafa

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The Big Ideas Series is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation.

Filmed live at the 2018 World Science Festival

Where do we get our mathematical symbols from? Why is the set of integers called ℤ ? When was the equals sign first used? How about zero? Good notation tends to catch on quickly, whereas bad notation can obscure beautiful theory.

The lecture explores how the introduction of new notation has paved the way for new leaps in understanding, and considers some mathematical quirks of language, such as what the number 4 in English has in common with the number 11 in Russian.

A lecture by Sarah Hart

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectu....res-and-events/maths

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: https://gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/greshamcollege
Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege
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This is a slide presentation by Prof. Ampim in a series of radio broadcasts on the ancient Kushite civilization, based on his extensive primary research in northeast Africa over the past 30 years.
Part 2 of 4
www.AdvancingTheResearch.org
www.ManuAmpim.com

Jim explores what are the most popular interpretations of quantum mechanics and how we might need to be a little more specific when we talk about ‘reality’.
Jim's book "Quantum Reality" is now available on Amazon: https://geni.us/OF5X

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/Udy2Rs-t47o

Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. He trained as a scientist, completing a doctorate in chemical physics at the University of Oxford in the early 80s, before embarking on post-doctoral research studies at Oxford and at Stanford University in California.

He gave up a tenured lectureship at the University of Reading after five years in order to gain experience in the commercial world. He worked for Shell International Petroleum for 11 years before leaving to establish his own business consultancy and training practice. He won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Marlow Medal for his contributions to scientific research in 1989.

This talk was streamed live by the Ri on 14 July 2020.

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Lucie Green takes us on a journey from the centre of the sun to planet earth in a run-down of the latest solar physics research.
Watch the Q&A here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JkxTILe2Nk

Lucie's book "15 Million Degrees: A Journey to the Centre of the Sun" is available to buy now - https://geni.us/2oB8V

110 times wider than Earth; 15 million degrees at its core; an atmosphere so huge that Earth is actually within it: come and meet the star of our solar system.

Light takes eight minutes to reach Earth from the surface of the Sun. But its journey within the Sun takes hundreds of thousands of years. What is going on in there? What are light and heat? How does the Sun produce them and how on earth did scientists discover this? Since the Royal Institution was founded in 1799 our knowledge of the Sun has changed dramatically and much of the work was carried out at the Ri.

Join Lucie Green for an enlightening talk, taking you from inside the Sun to its surface and to Earth, to discover how the Sun works, how a solar storm can threaten the modern technology that society relies on and more of the latest research in solar physics.

Lucie Green is a Professor of Physics based at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL’s Department of Space and Climate Physics. She studies activity in the atmosphere of our nearest star, the Sun. In particular, she looks at immense magnetic fields in the Sun’s atmosphere which sporadically erupt into the Solar System.

Lucie is very active in public engagement with science, regularly giving public talks and appearing on TV shows like Sky at Night.

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Writing is generally agreed to be among the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest invention, since it made history possible.
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You can read more about Irving's quest to explore the Noah's Ark myth in "The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood": https://geni.us/zU95bVO
or learn more about cuneiform writing in "Cuneiform": https://geni.us/eMPb

Writing seems to have been invented in the late fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia in the form of wedge-shaped marks pressed into soft clay with a reed stylus: the script known as cuneiform. Through his work on this ancient language, Irving Finkel, has uncovered amazing secrets from over five thousand years ago, including the story behind Noah’s ark.

Irving Finkel is the curator in charge of cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum, of which the Middle East Department has the largest collection of any modern museum. This work involves reading and translating all sorts of inscriptions, sometimes working on ancient archives to identify manuscripts that belong together, or even join to one another. He is the author of The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood.

This talk was filmed in the Ri on 18 January 2019.

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Dave Ostler, David Lindo, David Schick, Erik Shepherd, Greg Nagel, Ivan Korolev, Joe Godenzi, Julia Stone, Kellas Lowery, Lasse T. Stendan, Lester Su, Osian Gwyn Williams, Paul Brown, Radu Tizu, Rebecca Pan, Robert Hillier, Roger Baker, and Will Knott.
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