attend Science Festival talks

I’ve been saying that the Science Festival is not what it was but actually I’ve enjoyed the talks I’ve attended this year and I concede there is a fair spread of science covered—I just want more of what I’m interested in.

Marcus Chown was very good.

Nature is beating us over the head to show us that other universes exist.

0000001000000100000110001000011010001111110010111011101000010000 are the first 64 digits of a Chaitin Omega number. Chown said that if we knew the first 10,000 digits we’d have the answers to all possible questions we could ask regarding the universe.

See Christian Calude

And then there’s the Tipler’s Omega point

Edit: quote from MC’s website re Calude

Omega may be uncomputable but one man has computed the uncomputable. His name is Cristian Calude, and he has calculated the first 64 bits of Omega. Omega is like a sacred text. Its first few thousand bits contain the answers to more mathematical questions than can be written down in the entire universe.

Worried about losing your job? Why not go along to a lecture on prime numbers?

This talk may have been a condensed version of Marcus de Sautoy’s Royal Institution lectures shown on Five over Xmas. Marcus du Sautoy is a most unlikely mathematician but just what the subject needs, I think, in the way of a populariser.

Prof du Sautoy mentioned that Messiaen’s Quartet for the end of time involves primes.

Superstrings was one of the best Sc Fest talks I’ve attended.

Fred Pearce

toomey albedo only 485 results—have I got this wrong?

realclimate.org

Stephen Salter was in the audience and he told us about some technical fixes including his own The figures he gave last night were a bit more hopeful than those quoted in the linked article, except that they don’t have any money for development. And I thought, from what he said last night, that it was more to do with increasing albedo than rainfall.

The science festival is not as good as it was but I’ll try to find some talks to go along to.

The Centre of Our Galaxy – Black Holes, Rare Stars and Cosmic Mayhem

Michael Merrifield gave kudos to Immanuel Kant for getting it right about galaxies back in the 18th Century. I’ve read that Kant never ventured out of Konigsberg his entire life, so it is perhaps the more impressive that he correctly deduced the nature of island universes.

There is a cauldron of (massive) stars near the centre of our galaxy.

That’s about all I got out of it as I was feeling a bit dozy:)

There must have been 200 or so in the audience. Heinz Wolf again doing the honours.

The Pleasurable Kingdom was a great talk. Jonathan Balcombe seems a thoroughly nice man. Bought the book (a first for me in 10 years of going to the science festival). There’s a web site PleasurableKingdom

Balcombe recommended The Parrot Who Owns Me which I think I’ll ask the library to get. When he was signing my book I asked him if he’d read Gavin Maxwell; he hadn’t; I suggested he did:)

Someone made a point at the end about how in the UK people seem to care more for their pets than beggars in the street. JB answered that animal rights shouldn’t exclude human rights, and should go hand in hand with them. I think that it was clear from what he was saying that it requires a certain amount of empathetic observation of animal behaviour (as opposed to Descartes’ view of animals as soulless automatons) to appreciate their intelligence. Similarly I’d say that we need to engage in empathetic observation of our own species – on the street, in trains, on buses etc. It’s difficult; we judge each other so easily. Hence Gurdjieff’s aphorism.

The talk was reasonably well attended, maybe 100 people in the audience. Old Prof Heinz Wolf introduced the talk and described himself as an animal lover at the end.

The Pleasurable Kingdom Animals and the nature of feeling good.

Edinburgh Science Festival 2006