Best of Brian Cox Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 1

if you look at the world then it's incredibly complex and beautiful it's very difficult to imagine how this could have been assembled out of the raw materials that were available the Big Bang because we know that when the universe began three minutes after it began there are two things in the universe two ingredients was made of clouds of hydrogen and helium there over time those clouds collapsed on the gravity to form stars and it's in stars that the heavier elements that carbon and oxygen nitrogen iron phosphorus neon silver everything you see in the world today was made so that's where it came from but when they were assembled they were locked away inside the hearts of stars so how did they get out to form planets like this well they merge when stars die at the end of their lives because when stars run out of fuel they explode and they sprinkle those heavier elements out into the universe again and then they can wreak elapsed under gravity into new generations of planets and stars like this one but the most interesting story for me is the origin of the heaviest elements the rarest elements like gold and silver and platinum because we know that the conditions in the house of stars are not usually hot enough to assemble those heaviest elements so where do they come from well they're made in the most violent explosions in the universe supernova explosions the deaths of the most massive stars in the cosmos because it's only in those explosions that the conditions are hot enough and the pressures are high enough to build things like gold the reason gold is so rare and so valuable here on earth is because those conditions only exist on average for less than one minute per galaxy per century [Music] first thing I think to say about the the ambition because I said we want to understand the universe and our two great theories of it is to look at the sheer size of the problem and that's one of the things that I think captured my imagination first when I first began to get into science very when I was 5 6 7 years old it was the sheer ambition of it because this is a picture of the universe actually pictured the night sky if any of you are interested in astronomy that thing that there is the constellation of Orion that you can always see in the winter sky but I want to focus I want you to focus on a piece of sky that's somewhere around here I'm gonna zoom in on it now it's piece of sky that you would cover if you took a 5 pence piece and held it about 25 meters away so imagine taking a 5 pence piece and putting it 25 meters away over a tiny piece of sky well a few years ago now the Hubble Space Telescope which is in orbit around the earth turned its gaze to that tiny piece of sky the 5 pence piece bit of sky and took a picture it opened its camera shutter for thousands and thousands and thousands of seconds and just gathered the lights from that piece of sky it was deliberately chosen because it's a dull uninteresting piece of sky actually from the surface of the earth you would see virtually nothing in it at all but this is the picture that Hubble took and you see that it's anything books empty it's called the Hubble Deep Field image it's one of the most important and fascinating images in the recent history of astronomy and it's not empty he's got lots of structure lots of points of light in there are actually over 10,000 points of light of blobs in that image and virtually every one of them over 10,000 of them they're actually galaxies distant galaxies so they're not stars they're galaxies now those galaxies on average have what a hundred thousand million stars like our Sun in them at least so a hundred thousand million stars in each one of those ten thousand blobs the most distant object in that image and I'm going to talk a bit about how we know these things in a moment but the most distant object is 13.2 thousand liyan light-years away it was actually discovered in this image only a few months ago now light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second 186,000 miles a second and at that speed is taken over 13 billion years to travel from the most distant object in that image to earth to the hubble space telescope now when you think that the earth is only just under five billion years old it means that most of the light from most of the galaxies in that image began their journey began its journey to earth before there was on earth and if some of the most distant galaxies there they were over halfway here when the solar system was just a cloud of gas and dust it hadn't yet coalesced into the Sun and planets and moons of the solar system so imagine what that looks like that's a time remember five pens please piece of sky 25 meters away imagine what that looks like when you extend it over the entire sky well this is a beautiful map of the observable universe every dot on that map is a galaxy with 100 billion stars like our Sun in it at least there you see that the structure in there they're not randomly distributed it's very interesting I'm gonna show right at the end of the talk that we think we're beginning to understand where that structure came from just to get some sense of scale that little line up there you might not even be able to see it in the back but that's the 1 billion light year line so light takes a billion years to travel from one end of that line to the other this is the observable universe and I'm gonna show you there's a ridiculous number that I have to show you it's better to show it than say it this is the number of stars that we think are in the opposite well we know from observation or in the observable universe at the moment 30 thousand million million million stars just like our Sun some bigger some smaller 350 billion large galaxies seven thousand billion smaller dwarf galaxies that's the observable bit of the universe we have pretty strong evidence now the universe is significantly bigger than that but we can just see this blob surrounding us the blob from which light has had chance to travel during the history of the universe so the universe is big is what it's a sexy and I think maybe science education going forward should think less about what chapter of a book is communicated and more about why science matters and how it works and why can affect the fate of civilization yeah I mean when we talked about I was 12 when I first saw cosmos and the thing particularly that very famous 13th episode made a big impact on me which was really a plea to use all we've learned about our place our physical insignificance but yet because it's likely in my view at least that civilizations are rare you can make an argument actually the the we may be the only civilization at the moment in the Milky Way galaxy you can argue that it's a possible point of view so that connection was made so powerfully in the context of the nuclear arms race at the time 1978 nineteen nine 1980 and that put me in mind of an essay which I think the value of science it's a famous essay by richard fineman which was based on a talk that he gave I think back in the 1950s the early 1950s and and you would expect it you expect him to say that the value of science is in the spin-offs that technology increased life expectancy medical science etc and of course he says that first but then at the end of the essay he says that is not the most valuable thing if I could if I could give communicate one thing about the process of science and Brian Greene actually emphasized this absolutely rightly I fully agree with him it's an what Fineman called he defines science is a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance which i think is a wonderful definition first it's very humble it first merely satisfactory and he this is the philosophy that you begin ignorant and you build ideas you test them against data that's fine and very famous they always said if your ideas disagree with experiment they're wrong and he does matter who you are what your name is that wrong in that very famous speech he gave you can obviously on YouTube but I think that idea that he goes on to develop the the the gift of science primarily is that is the philosophy of ignorance and he extends out to the idea of of what a democracy is he says that because nobody knows anything with 100% certainty the only way you can run a society or a countries is by a trial and error system so you try something for four or five years and if it doesn't work you turf the guys out and try something else for four or five years and in his own inimitable style he talks about that but he's surely rights and I think that is one of the the key things that we can aim to deliver in any science documentary of course it will be 90% about the science because malla gr the origin of life or biology whatever it is but underpinning that the idea of the celebration of uncertainty and and making sure that art for me anyway every time we we speak of ideas as Brian Greene absolutely beautifully did we underline the fact that this is always preliminary and there are no great sages that stand and get it right no no trumpian ideas are present in science I think it's very very inconsiderate Brian also confessed that they granted his PhD even though it was wrong is that correct and I wanted to just play you a little video of for me what the best definition of science or the scientific method than I've heard comes from a very famous physicist called Richard Fineman who won a Nobel Prize for building one of the first quantum theories of electricity and magnetism it's called quantum electrodynamics this is back in the 1940s and 50s it's our best theory today of how light interacts with matter what Fineman was also I recommend that you read his books he was a brilliant teacher a brilliant lecturer as well as a Nobel Prize winning physicist and he gave this lecture back in I think it was in 1960s and it's just a one-minute definition of the scientific method in general we look for new law by the following process first we guess it then we come along let that's what really true then we compute the consequences of the guest to see what if this is right if this law that we guessed is right we see what it would imply and then we compare those computation results to nature or we say compared to experiment or experience compare it directly with observation to see if it works if it disagrees with experiment it's wrong in that simple statement is the key to science it doesn't make it different how beautiful your guest is it doesn't make you good about smart you are who made the guest or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment wha-at slaughter is to it so I think that's a really beautiful description and what science is it's really very simple it's the application of common sense in many ways what it is is looking at the universe looking at nature guessing about how it works seeing what the consequences of that gas are testing those against nature and as Fineman said the great power of science it doesn't matter who you are there's no such thing as authority in science if your guest disagrees with nature then he's wrong and that's all there is to it [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: Brian Cox, Best of, Amazing, Arguments, Clever, Comebacks, agatan foundation, clips, Hitch, Best, argument, comeback, Antitheism, Atheist, Religion, Debate, Philosophy, funny, Science, nice, answer, anti-theist, anti, theist, intelligent, bright, smart, church, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, morality, god, humanism, free will, theism, agatan, fnd, foundation, how to, Catholicism, catholic, Atheism, William Sanford Nye, the Science Guy, Part 1, cosmology, astrophysics, professor, physicist, particle physics

Id: hAy10BrR2u4

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018