As a follow up to my post announcing the 2021 APS Annual Leadership Meeting with Nobel Prize Winner Kip Thorne live event, we’re fortunate that the fascinating talk was recorded and is now available for everyone to watch and share.
This panel was monitored by Brian Greene, an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. Greene was a physics professor at Cornell University from 1990-1995, and has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.
Greene has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general public, The Elegant Universe, Icarus at the Edge of Time, The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Hidden Reality, and related PBS television specials. He also appeared on The Big Bang Theory episode “The Herb Garden Germination“, as well as the films Frequency and The Last Mimzy. He is currently a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Greene was also the narrator for the U.S. version of the preschool television series, Maisy. In February 2020 his interview by podcaster Joe Rogan was viewed or heard by millions.
Included on this brilliant panel were:
Kip Thorne, theoretical physicist known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, he was the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) until 2009 and is one of the world’s leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He continues to do scientific research and scientific consulting, most notably for the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar. Thorne was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves“.
Alan Alda, well known actor (Most notably as the beloved “Hawkeye” Piece on M.A.S.H.), author and Science Advocate. For 14 years, he served as the host of Scientific American Frontiers, a television show that explored cutting-edge advances in science and technology. In 2010, he became a visiting professor at Stony Brook University. In 2009, he was a founder of the University’s Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. He continues as a member of its advisory board. He is also on the advisory board of the Future of Life Institute. He serves on the board of the World Science Festival and is a judge for Math-O-Vision. Host of the Science Clear and Vivid podcast.
Cailin O’Connor, Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine, Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. Author of The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread and The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution.
April Burke, Lobbyist in Washington DC for LIGO, Fermilab and other scientific endeavors. Founder of Lewis-Burke Associates LLC, established the firm in 1992 to combine substantive and political expertise with the goal of advancing federal support for higher education and scientific research.
I hope that you all get a chance to watch this discussion and share with your friends. In this age of social media and false information, scientists have a difficult task in generating trust and believability. The importance of their work affects us all and needs to be understood and supported.
