Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The Role of Wonder in Science, A Conversation With Brian Greene

I stumbled upon this video last night:1



Here's a little piece:
"The most amazing thing about the scientific journey is that we spend most of our life in the dark. We spend most of our life trying to figure things out and most people don't recognize, but maybe people here do, that 99.9% of everything we do is flat out wrong. It's not wrong because we make mistakes, it's wrong because the universe is such a rich source of mystery that our attempts to understand it are usually off the mark. ... It's all about being comfortable searching in the dark."
Here's some background on Brian Greene. I don't understand physics to anything near this depth (it was still dots (electrons) when I was in school, not strings, although that was beginning to change) but I was still rapt. Why?
  • Green's grasp of his topic is so thorough that he can explain esoteric concepts, effectively, to a lay person. ("If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Einstein) In fact, he's known for his popular books on the subject: The Elegant Universe, and The Fabric of the Cosmos both made into NOVA specials on PBS.
  • I loved Greene's hand gestures.
  • I loved how the interviewer, Michael John Gorman, listened to him, queried him, and just let him speak. Gorman departed from the trend in interviewing these days which sees the host inject his own life stories into the conversation.
  • I was impressed by Greene's apparent health, both physically and mentally. While almost three-quarters of adult men in this country are overweight or obese, Greene, at age 49, has remained trim, spry, curious, and competent. His diet? Vegan since 1997.
________
1 Thanks to Robert Piper, @rgpiper, for tweeting it.

4 comments:

Claudia said...

A vegan! Nice to know I'm in good company. By the way, I took my blood pressure yesterday and the top number is 20 points lower!! Crazy or what. I started vegan exactly 4 weeks to the day today with my last egg for breakfast. I don't know what is doing it cause I'm not eating much fat either so it could be that. What I want to know is why doctors don't tell patients they can lower BP by diet?

Bix said...

That's great, Claudia. Do you know any of your other numbers?

Claudia said...

My cholesterol was never really high, in the 170s. I don't care about going and getting it tested and having all that blood drawn and all because I don't think its a problem. But get this, our insurance at work is making us get tested and tell them the numbers and if not we have to pay a penalty. So we have to pay to keep it private.

Bix said...

How about that. I've heard of insurance companies, or employers, penalizing subscribers for being smokers, or being overweight (like deducting from their pay some amount more for their health insurance premiums), but not for declining scans, or not divulging information. Interesting times.