How Did Geometry Create Modern Physics?

<p>Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries.</p> <p>In a wide-ranging conversation with co ... Show More

<p>Every time data travels — from smartphones to the cloud, or across the vacuum of space — it relies on a silent but vigilant guardian in the form of error-correcting codes. These codes, baked into nearly every digital system, are designed to detect and repair any errors that no ... Show More

<p>Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final years, Stephen Hawking working with Thomas Hertog proposed a striki ... Show More

Some see the world of thought divided into two types of ideas: evolutionary and revolutionary ideas. However, the truth can be more nuanced than that; evolutionary ideas can spur revolutions, and revolutionary ideas may be necessary to create incremental advancements. General rel ... Show More

Sean Carroll is creating a profoundly new approach to sharing physics with a broad audience, one that goes beyond analogies to show how physicists really think. He cuts to the bare mathematical essence of our most profound theories, explaining every step in a uniquely accessible ... Show More

<p>When math is based on abstract concepts, how do we know it’s correct? Dr. Eugenia Cheng takes on that question in a new book.</p><p> </p><p>The concept of math has been around for a long time, developing independently in many different cultures. In 1650 BC, the Egyptians were ... Show More

It’s commonly believed that the arts and the sciences have little in common with each other. The distinction that’s most frequently made is that the arts are creative in nature whereas the sciences are logical. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In this episode, we catc ... Show More

Children who are being taught mathematics often balk at the idea of negative numbers, thinking them to be fictional entities, and often only learn later that they are useful for expressing opposite extremes of things, such as considering a debt an amount of money with a negative ... Show More

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Juan Maldacena. Juan Maldacena has been described as the first great theoretician of the twenty-first century. In a series of brilliantly imaginative insights, he has enriched our understanding of gravity, space-time and black ho ... Show More

In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell argued that light was a wave of electric and magnetic fields. But it took over four decades for physicists to put together the theory of special relativity, which correctly describes the symmetries underlying Maxwell's theory. The delay came in p ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and life of one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Emmy Noether. Noether’s Theorem is regarded as one of the most important mathematical theorems, influencing the evolution of modern physics. Born in 1882 in Bavaria, Noet ... Show More

'Black holes have become one of the liveliest areas of theoretical research. By thinking about these cosmic objects, using quantum theory and relativity, theorists are clarifying our understanding of information, gravity and the other fundamental forces of nature. Stanford Univer ... Show More