Showing results for "Futures" in Physics

Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium. The struggle for these tiny, magical materials has razed empires, demolished civilizations, fed our greed and our ingenuity for thousands of years. But the story is not over. We are often told we now live in a weightless world of information but in fact we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting worse. To make one bar of gold, we now have to dig 5,000 tons of earth. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we extract six tonnes of other materials - from sand to stone to wood to metal.

Brought to you by Penguin. An exhilarating new biography of John von Neumann: the lost genius who invented our world The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the...

Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein's project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe's structure and origin. The quest for gravitational waves involved years of risky research and many personal and professional struggles that threatened to derail one of the world's largest scientific endeavors.

Brought to you by Penguin. Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future: The Inventions that will Transform our Lives is a hypothetical journey through the next 100 years of scientific innovation, as told by the scientists who are making it happen. We all wish we could predict the future, but most of us...

Brought to you by Penguin. In this exhilarating and sometimes mind-bending book, renowned scientist and author Paul Davies tells the gripping story of how, beginning with an iconic mathematical equation in the 1920s, a radical new theory of nature – quantum mechanics – burst upon the modern...

In The Universe, today's most influential science writers explain the science behind our evolving understanding of The Universe and everything in it, including the cutting-edge research and discoveries that are shaping our knowledge. Lee Smolin reveals how math and cosmology are helping us create a theory of the whole universe. Neil Turok analyzes the fundamental laws of nature, what came before the big bang, and the possibility of a unified theory. And much more.

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

With the ongoing advancement of AI and other technologies, our world is becoming increasingly intelligent. From chatbots to innovations in brain-computer interfaces to the possibility of superintelligences leading to the Singularity later this century, our reality is being transformed before our eyes. This is commonly seen as the natural result of progress, but what if there's more to it than that? What if intelligence is an inevitability, an underlying property of the universe?

Nikola Tesla was a bundle of contradictions - a consummate showman and a private recluse; a man of science addicted to self-promotion; a prolific inventor of technologies that made other people’s fortunes. Tesla made giant leaps in the technology of electrical supply, X-rays, radio remote control, and wireless electrical transmission. He embodied the aspirations and the contradictions of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. Then as now, he attracted cranks and visionaries in equal number.

If looking at today’s headlines makes you wonder about the fate of our planet, here is some news that may surprise you: from an evolutionary standpoint, we are exactly where we need to be. According to eminent biologist Bruce H. Lipton and political and cultural commentator Steve Bhaerman, we...

Over the course of 14 billion years, humanity has gained the ability not only to imagine the future, but to design and engineer it. Entertaining and profound, Future Rising by Dr Andrew Maynard, provides a highly original perspective on our relationship with the future. Written to be easy to pick up and hard to stop listening to, Future Rising starts at the big bang and traces a pathway along the emergence of intelligent life, through what makes humans uniquely capable of creating different futures, to the profound responsibilities that this comes with. 

Physics is our language to understand nature. It goes beyond formulas and allows us to shape the world. Hosted by Hanna Siemaszko, this podcast—brought to you by the Department of Physics and Materials Science (DPhyMS) at the University of Luxembourg—features conversations with some of the brightest minds in physics. You'll hear clear explanations about quantum mechanics, atomic clocks, laser cooling, AI, and data science from experts who know how to make these topics understandable. Originally launched as a lead-up to the Physics for Future conference, this three-episode miniseries makes ...

An award-winning astronomer and physicist’s spellbinding and urgent call for a new Enlightenment and the recognition of the preciousness of life using reason and curiosity—the foundations of science—to study, nurture, and ultimately preserve humanity as we face the existential crisis of...

Brought to you by Penguin. An acclaimed physicist signposts a new revolution in fundamental physics, and with it a new description of reality For the last century, physics has been following the paths set out by the same two theories—quantum mechanics and general relativity—and, let’s face...

UN PODCAST PARA EL CAFÉ es un segmento de tertulia que busca hablar de temas importantes que no encajan en una entrevista y son de tipo filosófico, cultural, del diario vivir y repercute de alguna u otra forma en nuestras vidas. Un emprendimiento de Radio Futuro Internacional.

A little over a century ago, a young Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity to the world and utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. His theory changed the way we think about space and time, revealed how our universe has been expanding from a hot, dense state called the big bang and predicted black holes. Where the Universe Came From is a 13.8 billiion-year journey through the cosmos.

Our Future In Space is a forum to to facilitate a dialogue on how to successfully build a human space civilization, whether on orbit or surfaces throughout the solar ecosystem, that will serve as the focal point of future human society. Sponsored by Orbital Assembly Corporations, the world’s only company developing artificial gravity space stations.

In Countdown, science journalist Sarah Scoles uncovers a different atomic reality: the nuclear age's present. Drawing from years of on-the-ground reporting at the nation's nuclear weapons labs, Scoles interrogates the idea that having nuclear weapons keeps us safe, deterring attacks and preventing radioactive warfare. She deftly assesses the existing nuclear apparatus in the United States, taking listeners beyond the news headlines and policy-speak to reveal the state of nuclear-weapons technology.

In the 18th century, the British minister and mathematician Thomas Bayes devised a theorem that allowed him to assign probabilities to events that had never happened before. It languished in obscurity for centuries until computers came along and made it easy to crunch the numbers. Now, as the foundation of big data, Bayes's formula has become a linchpin of the digital economy. But here's where things get interesting: Bayes's theorem can also be used to lay odds on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and on the biggest question of all: how long will humanity survive?

A podcast that will fill you in on the what's, how's, and if's of this rapidly evolving technology.