LF263 Brian Keating – Cosmos and Controversy: Science and the Big Questions

Brian Keating, author of Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor, discusses the origin of the Universe and how science is performed, presented, and perceived.

Modern science portrays itself as dispassionate and detached, with objective observers simply registering facts. But scientists are people too, with prejudices and emotions, rivalries and ambitions, hopes and fears. Pop science today is all over the media, making stars out of scientists unaccustomed to such acclaim. In an age of chaos and confusion where anti-scientific attitudes are also on the rise, can more be done to make science relevant and meaningful to the masses?

We also take a tour of cosmological theories from the Big Bang to the Steady State and ask, could our Universe really have arisen from nothing? And, in attempting to trace its origin back in time, is there a point beyond which we simply cannot see?

Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’
Tangerine Dream ‘Love On a Real Train’

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