Category: lectures

Why is life the way it is? A talk by Nick Lane

February 3, 2017 • 12:00 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Nick Lane of University College London has just been awarded the Royal Society’s 2016 Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture, which “is awarded annually to the scientist or engineer whose expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms is exemplary”. Nick is a brilliant writer of several books, including Life Ascending and, most recently The Vital Question, which Bill Gates fell in love with. (You can find more about his work, which has been translated into 25 languages, here).

Nick is also a leading researcher on the origin of life, and in particular on the way that eukaryotes – organisms with a nucleus and above all with mitochondria – came about. His research and his way with words led to him being awarded the Prize this year, which is much deserved.

As you’ll have noticed from the title of the award, he also got to give a lecture at the Royal Society, which took place at the award ceremony on 1 February. His title was also the subtitle of The Vital Question – Why Is Life The Way It Is? The Royal Society has been incredibly speedy about editing the video and here it is, for your delectation.

It’s 55 minutes long (there are 2 mins of introductory remarks you can skip over before you get to the citation, and then the talk) so you need to take your time, or bookmark it for later viewing. It is highly recommended, with some very important and complicated ideas being put over in a simple and engaging manner – exactly  really is brilliant, and will help you understand why we all are the way we are.

[JAC: I echo Matthew’s enthusiasm; if you have an hour to spare, and can enlarge this (there are slides), you’ll learn a lot from this video.]

Sean Carroll’s Gifford Lectures

November 28, 2016 • 8:45 am

The Gifford Lectures, first given in 1898, were established by a bequest of Lord Adam Gifford, and were intended to “promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term — in other words, the knowledge of God.” In other words, they were supposed to use evidence from nature to give evidence for God (“natural theology”).  And that was how they began, with lecturers like Paul Tillich, Ian Barbour, and Alfred North Whitehead. But then the organizers decided to throw in some atheists as well, and those, including Carl Sagan, Steven Pinker, and now our own Official Website Physicist, Sean Carroll™, have given some of the best talks. Nevertheless, the emphasis is still on the evidence for theism, promoted by speakers like Alvin Plantinga, Simon Conway Morris, and Roger Scruton.

The Giffords are some of the most prestigious lectures around, and I’m pleased that Sean was able to deliver them. His were given in Glasgow: the lectures are alternated among Glasgow, St Andrews, and Edinburgh. (Wikipedia lists all the luminaries who have spoken.) The topics were drawn from his recent book: The Big Picture, which I recommend highly. He’s also a great speaker, and though I haven’t yet listened to all of these (though I have read the book), I certainly will. I present four of the five of the talks, put on YouTube, below. Sadly, for some reason the first lecture wasn’t recorded: a huge cock-up on the part of the organizers. But you can at least see the slides.

Here’s Sean’s take on his own performance from his website:

Sometimes the speakers turn their lectures into short published books; in my case, I had just written a book that fit well into the topic, so I spoke about the ideas in The Big Picture. Unfortunately the first of the five lectures was not recorded, but the subsequent four were. Here are those recordings, along with a copy of my slides for the first talk. It’s not a huge loss, as many of the ideas in the first lecture can be found in previous talks I’ve given on the arrow of time; it’s about the evolution of our universe, how that leads to an arrow of time, and how that helps explain things like memory and cause/effect relations. The second lecture was on the Core Theory and why we think it will remain accurate in the face of new discoveries. The third lecture was on emergence and how different ways of talking about the world fit together, including discussions of effective field theory and why the universe itself exists. Lecture four dealt with the evolution of complexity, the origin of life, and the nature of consciousness. (I might have had to skip some details during that one.) And the final lecture was on what it all means, why we are here, and how to live in a universe that doesn’t come with any instructions. Enjoy!

Lecture #1 has no video yet, just slides, and you can see them by clicking on the screenshot:

gifford-lecture-one-cosmos-time-memory-1-638

 

Lecture #2

Lecture #3

Lecture #4

Lecture#5

Lecture #6

Stephen Hawking to give the 2015 Reith Lectures

September 7, 2015 • 3:15 pm

Professor Ceiling Cat is going home to rest, but before I do I want to call your attention, courtesy of reader Dermot C., to the fact that Stephen Hawking will be giving this year’s series of Reith Lectures for the BBC. This prestigious series has featured leading thinkers since 1948, when Bertrand Russell first spoke on “Authority and the Individual.” They’ve been a mix of science and non-science talks, but the lineup has been great. Here’s the series for this decade so far:

  • 2010 Martin Rees, Scientific Horizons
  • 2011 Aung San Suu Kyi and Baroness Manningham-Buller, Securing Freedom
  • 2012 Niall Ferguson The Rule of Law and its Enemies
  • 2013 Grayson Perry Playing to the Gallery
  • 2014 Atul Gawande The Future of Medicine

The 2015 lectures (it’s not clear yet if there will be more than one) will be on black holes, and Hawking will be recorded at the Royal Institution in London on November 12. (Presumably he’ll use his voice synthesizer).

And there’s more: at the link above you can actually email questions to Dr. Hawking (Askstephenhawking@bbc.co.uk), and he’ll answer a few of them.  You can also get tickets here. Though they’re not available yet, you can get put on a mailing list to find out when they are.

The BBC has archived all the Reith lectures in one place, so if you find some of the topics and speakers intriguing, go here to listen.

Dawkins event (avec moi) in Chicago

August 16, 2013 • 7:49 am

As many of you know, Richard Dawkins has written the first part of a two-part autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, which will go on sale September 24.  I have a prepublication copy, and if you have any interest in Richard or his science (a lot of it is about science), I recommend the book highly. This first volume goes up to the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, and volume 2, continuing up to the present, will be out in two years or so.

Richard will be appearing here in Chicago (Evanston, actually) on October 3 at the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall at 7 p.m.  There are links with details here and here, and I’m not sure whether there’s an entrance fee (I doubt it).  I’ll be interviewing Richard about the book—and other stuff—onstage for about 45 minutes, and then he’ll have Q&A with the audience. It should be great fun, and I’ll try to think up some good questions.

This is part of a national book tour covering cities from New York to California, and you can see the schedule here.

Just a note that you should keep your eye on the Chicago links, as tickets, whether free or not, are sure to go fast. Right now they haven’t said anything about how to reserve seats.