Recently I downloaded all of the TED Talks from iTunes onto my iPod. The TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference that defines its mission as “ideas worth spreading”. The lectures, also called TED talks, cover a broad set of topics including science, arts and design, politics, culture, business, global issues, technology and development, and entertainment. Speakers come from a similarly wide variety of communities and disciplines and have included such people as former U.S. president Bill Clinton,Nobel laureates James D. Watson, Murray Gell-Mann, Al Gore, Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales,notable architect and urbanism critic James Howard Kunstler, and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. I enjoy watching them every year, and some day hope to attend the conference. What good I may do there, I don’t know; but I think it would be an interesting experience.
Anyway. I was watching the lecture by Professor Brian Cox (below) about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that was “switched on” on 10 September of this year. I now have a new hero of science. He is an advocate for raising the the awareness of science in the public eye, and is not afraid to call the naysayers out when they try to spread rumors about what the LHC is trying to accomplish (see the title quote). There is something about having particle physics explained to you in a Lancastrian accent that makes it…accessible and understandable. Granted, the lecture’s only about 16 and a half minutes long, and I don’t have to sit through university lectures and work out the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but I am a visual learner so I’ll take what I can get. Read the rest of this entry »
