The Great Courses Professors Remember Stephen Hawking
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Overview
About
We need to push on our understanding of cosmology, particle physics, gravity, not to mention how complexity and entropy evolve through time, and eventually you'll be able to really understand what our theories predict.
ALMA MATER
INSTITUTION
Sean Carroll is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and both a member of the Fractal Faculty and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He received his PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, and the host of the weekly Mindscape podcast. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.
Perhaps the next time you go out to the countryside, you will ponder the magnificence of the Universe and its contents-and the fact that, through careful experiments, observations, and thought, humans are coming to a good understanding of what makes it all tick.
ALMA MATER
INSTITUTION
Dr. Alex Filippenko is Professor of Astronomy and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his B.A. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Filippenko's research accomplishments, documented in more than 500 scientific publications and 600 abstracts and astronomical circulars, are among the most highly cited in the world. Science magazine credited two international teams of astronomers (on which he was the only coauthor contributing to both teams) with the top "Science Breakthrough of 1998" for research on exploding stars (supernovae), which shows that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, propelled by mysterious "dark energy." Professor Filippenko received a share of the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize for this discovery, work that went on to receive the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Professor Filippenko also leads the world's most successful robotic search for exploding stars. Dr. Filippenko was elected in 2009 to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors accorded to a U.S. scientist. He has also been recognized with several major awards, including the 2010 Richard H. Emmons Award for excellence in the teaching of college-level introductory astronomy for non-science majors from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the 2007 Richtmyer Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the 1997 Robert M. Petrie Prize of the Canadian Astronomical Society, and the 1992 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001 and a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 2002. In 2006, he was honored nationally as the "Outstanding Doctoral and Research Universities Professor of the Year" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. At UC Berkeley, Dr. Filippenko's teaching awards include the Donald S. Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Physical Sciences and the Distinguished Teaching Award. Dr. Filippenko is coauthor of The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, now in its 4th edition (2013), and winner of the 2001 Texty Excellence Award for best new textbook in the physical sciences. He has played a prominent role in numerous television documentaries, including about 40 episodes spanning six seasons of The Universe on The History Channel.
Gravity is about both phenomena near at hand at the human scale, everyday and intuitive, and phenomena far off at an astronomical scale.
ALMA MATER
INSTITUTION
Dr. Benjamin Schumacher is Professor of Physics at Kenyon College, where he has taught for 20 years. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1990. Professor Schumacher is the author of numerous scientific papers and two books, including Physics in Spacetime: An Introduction to Special Relativity. As one of the founders of quantum information theory, he introduced the term qubit, invented quantum data compression (also known as Schumacher compression), and established several fundamental results about the information capacity of quantum systems. For his contributions, he won the 2002 Quantum Communication Award, the premier international prize in the field, and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Besides working on quantum information theory, he has done physics research on black holes, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. Professor Schumacher has spent sabbaticals working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a Moore Distinguished Scholar at the Institute for Quantum Information at California Institute of Technology. He has also done research at the Isaac Newton Institute of Cambridge University, the Santa Fe Institute, the Perimeter Institute, the University of New Mexico, the University of Montreal, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of Queensland.
Astronomy, by looking outward, leads us to questions that reflect upon ourselves in very deep ways.
ALMA MATER
INSTITUTION
Felix J. Lockman, Ph.D., is the Green Bank Telescope Principal Scientist at the Green Bank Observatory, a facility of the National Science Foundation. He did his undergraduate work at Drexel University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Lockman's area of research is the structure and evolution of the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, with a special emphasis on radio observations of neutral hydrogen. He was project scientist for the Green Bank Telescope during its construction phase and then moved to the Green Bank Observatory, where he was the site director for six years.
Dr. Lockman's research has involved studies of the ionized, neutral atomic, and molecular gas in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. He has published numerous articles in professional journals and edited several books, including Gaseous Halos of Galaxies and But It Was Fun: The First Forty Years of Radio Astronomy at Green Bank. Dr. Lockman's 1990 review article on hydrogen in the Milky Way, coauthored with Dr. John M. Dickey of the University of Tasmania, is the most cited publication in the history of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. In 2013, he was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in recognition of his significant studies of neutral hydrogen in our galaxy and others, and for his service to U.S. radio astronomy.
To really pay full tribute to Albert Einstein, I'd argue that we need to appreciate not only his great success, but also his challenges, mistakes, and errors.
ALMA MATER
INSTITUTION
Dan Hooper is a senior scientist and the head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He is also Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Dr. Hooper received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was later a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and the David Schramm Fellow at Fermilab.
Dr. Hooper's research focuses on the interface between particle physics and cosmology, covering topics such as dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry, neutrinos, extra dimensions, and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. He has authored more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and he has given an even larger number of technical talks at scientific conferences and university seminars and colloquia.
Dr. Hooper is the author of two books written for nonscientists: LDark Cosmos and Nature's Blueprint. He has also written for popular magazines such as Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist. He gives many public lectures and is frequently called on by the media to comment on science news. Dr. Hooper's television appearances include Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman and Space's Deepest Secrets, and he has been interviewed on NPR's Science Friday.
01: The Great Courses Professors Remember Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking. Some of us knew him because we took physics in high school and/or college. Some of us knew him from his celebrity cameos on shows such as “The Simpsons.” Some of us knew him as the focus of the award-winning film “The Theory of Everything.” And some of us knew him personally. Hear from five of The Great Courses’ favorite professors— Professor Benjamin Schumacher, Ph.D., Professor Alex Filippenko, Ph.D., Professor Felix J. Lockman, Ph.D., Professor Sean Carroll, Ph.D., and Professor Dan Hooper, Ph.D.—as they discuss their encounters (either through real-life meetings or via abstract inspiration) with physicist, author, and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, Stephen Hawking. We all have our own view of this brilliant researcher, but hearing from the brilliant men he (almost) worked with, knew, or deeply inspired will provide new perspectives and insights into the extraordinary life of Stephen Hawking.