Big Ideas Audio
Big Ideas offers lectures on a variety of thought-provoking topics which range across politics, culture, economics, art history, science.... By nature of its lecture format, pacing and inquisitive approach, it is the antithesis of the prevailing sound-bit
Visit Show Website http://www.tvo.org/bigideas/Recently Aired
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H. Jay Melosh on What Killed the Dinosaurs
What killed the dinosaurs? And is humanity headed for a ...
What killed the dinosaurs? And is humanity headed for a similar fate? These questions are addressed by H. Jay Melosh, a Professor of Theoretical Geophysics at the University of Arizona, in this lecture entitled, Death of the Dinos: Giant Impacts and Biological Crises. With the help of sophisticated computer simulations Melosh presents his "hot" new theory on the KT extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
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Ian Buruma on Death of Metropolis
Writer and academic, Ian Buruma on Death of Metropolis: Why ...
Writer and academic, Ian Buruma on Death of Metropolis: Why are Some Hostile to Cities?
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Natalia Toro on Fundamental Physics at the LHC
Natalia Toro explains how complex collision data from the Large ...
Natalia Toro explains how complex collision data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being digested and examined and how it may set the course for the science of the future. Her lecture was delivered at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, on September 18, 2011.
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Seth Lloyd on Programming the Universe
Seth Llyod is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical ...
Seth Llyod is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His talk, "Programming the Universe", is about the computational power of atoms, electrons, and elementary particles.
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Adam Gopnik on Christian Writers and Liberal Readers
Adam Gopnik, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, discusses ...
Adam Gopnik, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, discusses W. H. Auden, William Emerson and Lewis Carroll in a lecture entitled, The Morning Star is the Evening Star: Christian Writers and Liberal Readers.
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Alain de Botton on Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton discusses his book Status Anxiety which examines ...
Alain de Botton discusses his book Status Anxiety which examines our fears over what others think about us and about how we are judged to be either a success or failure.
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Robert Morrison on Islam and Science
Robert Morrison, Associate Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College, on ...
Robert Morrison, Associate Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College, on Islam, Science and the Importance of History. Morrison cites Islamic religious scholars from historical times and from the present in order to show how Islam and science are compatable.
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Paul Steinhardt on Impossible Crystals
Physicist Paul Steinhardt discusses the creation of "Impossible crystals": quasi-crystals ...
Physicist Paul Steinhardt discusses the creation of "Impossible crystals": quasi-crystals with five-fold symmetry previously believed impossible.
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Andrew Coyne on Post-Economic Politics in Canada
National Post columnist, Andrew Coyne, presents a lecture entitled Post-Economic ...
National Post columnist, Andrew Coyne, presents a lecture entitled Post-Economic Politics in Canada. In Coyne's opinion, the state of the economy, contrary to popular belief, will not be the defining issue in our public policy debates. His lecture was produced in collaboration with the Literary Review of Canada and was delivered at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto on May 14th, 2012.
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Simon Winchester on his book The Meaning of Everything
Simon Winchester discusses his book The Meaning of Everything: The ...
Simon Winchester discusses his book The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.
