Nature by Numbers

Time has gotten away from me once again. I blame it on the finals that I just finished. That and the long weekend in which I didn't want to do anything.

But I have something wonderful for you.

This video?

Beautiful and moving.

And what's it about?

Math.

Never thought those things would go together, did you? The video was made by Cristóbal Vila and you can find more information about it at this website.

Science Friday: Connecting Science and Art

Yes, you read that correctly. It's a whole podcast on connecting science and art. It's like Science Friday decided to create an hour just for me!

Cormac McCarthy (you know, author of The Road, All the Pretty Horses, 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, things like that), Werner Herzog (a brilliant filmmaker - go see Cave of Forgotten Dreams) and Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist, author of Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, and a favorite of mine because he is so obviously in love with science) sat down with Ira Flatow and talked about science, art, evolution, biology and our place in the cosmos.

Below is a little excerpt that I found particularly moving, but you should all listen to it yourselves. The webpage is here and the download is here.



Lawrence Krauss: As you can imagine with artistic and scientific greats like this, the conversation quickly became very philosophical. What you don't realize is when you try and confront the real world, as a scientist it's terrifying, because it forces you to throw away a lot of things you believe, and sometimes you have to go away from it...Even as a theoretical physicist, sometimes alone at the night, confronted with the possibility that the real universe might actually correspond to something you're thinking about is terrifying.

Werner Herzog: Well, of course it is, because it's not friendly. Just imagine being sucked into a black hole, even landing on the sun which looks so benign and beautiful and there's hundreds of thousands of atomic explosions boiling every second.

Lawrence Krauss: Yes..we have to confront our own, in some sense, an unfriendly universe potentially, but also our own insignificance in a cosmic sense and what significance we make of ourselves is, to me, part of it...is this amazing gift we have to appreciate the universe and imagine it not just as it is but as it might be, in order to understand ourselves better.