Sunday, December 10, 2006
The Universe Speaks
Just as the gently irreverent Alex Filippenko, in his science podcast, was saying “Isn't it amazing that as the energy is released the liquid grows and crystallizes” — explaining how those camper's hotpacks work — the video stream froze. Perfect.
These lectures by Filippenko are probably the best science podcasts (video stream the best choice) I've come across. It is a golden age for astronomy and Filippenko is a hands on kinda guy, working on material as an “observational astronomer” that later is published in scientific journals. Direct from the horse's mouth, you will hear wonderful discussions of the awesome in these podcasts. Filippenko just won a national teaching award — clearly deserved. His classes are sold by The Teaching Company for a fee. But here it is online for free.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that the deeper the understanding a scientist has, the closer to the actual material in a meaningful rather than purely regurgitative mode, the clearer the discussion, the simpler the language, to explain that very complex thing we call reality.
Here's the spoiler, the punch line, the cause of the Big Bang: the stupefying universe ejaculated from a quantum fluctuation in an inconceivably dense, energetic, hot (20 trillion degrees) singularity, as predicted by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The originating energy (fluctuation) could have been minute and still have created the infinite cosmological beast. In fact this inflationary energy might be the source of the “dark energy” recently discovered (based on work done by Filippenko's team @ Berkeley).