The Universe Speaks in Numbers

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Val Gibson. Val Gibson is a leading experimental particle physicist and is head of the high energy physics research group at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University Cambridge. She is a prominent member of one of the teams of experimenters at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012.

Read more in Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers.

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Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Sir Roger Penrose. Sir Roger Penrose, a hybrid mathematician-cosmologist, is one of the most accomplished scientific thinkers of the past fifty years. In this compelling interview with Graham, Penrose describes some of the key events of his remarkable career.

Read more in Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers.

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‘The most perfect microscopic structures in the known universe’ – that is the exquisite description of sub-nuclear scattering amplitudes given by theorist Lance Dixon, based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California. Having made his name as a string theorist in the 1980s, Dixon became one of the leading pioneers in the field of scattering-amplitudes, developing a host of ingenious ideas and techniques. In this thoughtful interview, he describes why he switched his research focus, the fascination and importance of the amplitudes, and the prospects for the subject’s future.

This is one of a number of interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers.

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'Black holes have become one of the liveliest areas of theoretical research. By thinking about these cosmic objects, using quantum theory and relativity, theorists are clarifying our understanding of information, gravity and the other fundamental forces of nature. Stanford University’s Lenny Susskind is one of the leaders in this field. In this lively interview, he describes how he made the transition from plumbing to particle physics, and why theoretical physics is now so exciting.

This is one of a series of interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers.

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The interplay between fundamental physics and pure mathematics has led to many remarkable mathematical insights over the past fifty years. Karen Uhlenbeck is one of the mathematicians who made pioneering insights into geometry when studying the physicists' gauge theory of particle interactions. In this podcast, she talks candidly about how many mathematicians came only grudgingly to accept in the 1960s and 1970s that they could do first-class work by focusing on topics whose importance had first been emphasised by physicists, in connection with understanding the real world.

This is one of a series of interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.