Rachel Cooper's Overview on Thought Experiments (guest)

08/18/07 • -1 min

Rachel Cooper's Overview
Rachel Cooper, a lecturer at the University of Lancaster, provides for us an overview as to what thought experiments are and what they are used for. As a side note, she refers to Lucretius' Spear, an earlier podcast.
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Previous Episode

Einstein's Relativity

Einstein's Relativity
So many topics to cover in so little of time! Time dilation, spacetime continuums, all the sorts of fun stuff you learn in upper-level cosmology courses. Alas, we can't do justice to Einstein's theories or results here, but we can take a sure enough stab at it. The book I keep referring to is Einstein, His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson. It's really a great read and I don't want to sound like I'm just telling you to buy a book just for the sake of buying it. If you want to learn about relativity, but are too intimidated by Einstein's own book that he wrote on the subject, Isaacson covers it in depth as well as more than you ever bargained for.
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Next Episode

The Banach-Tarski Paradox

A mouthful no doubt! This week we go over just how a mathematical universe differs from a physical one on the basis of the Axiom of Choice. More interestingly, if we exploit this paradox, we can clone anything we want with the exact same properties as the original. As per Andrew's note, you can see an example of a fractal here. Really amazing stuff to say the least.

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