The Nobel Prize in Literature, Brian Keating's Book on the Nobel Prize and the Limitations of It

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Dawkins: No scientist has ever won the Nobel Prize in literature. But if anybody deserves it, he's one of the handful of scientists that writes at such a high level literary style," Dawkins says. "I feel like in writing the book, it became really clear that there are very different motivations out there for choosing to do experiments" 'The way you think about the world leads you to solve problems better than other people get something like that,' Hawking adds.

Physics has always sought to deepen our understanding of the nature of matter and the world around us. But how do you conduct experiments with the fundamental building blocks of existence? How do you manipulate a particle a trillion times smaller than a grain of sand? How do you cause a proton to sail around a twenty-seven-kilometer-long loop 11,000 times per second? And, crucially, why is all this important? In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the experiments that changed the course of history.

Shermer and Sheehy discuss: what it’s like being a female physicist in a mostly male field • Does science progress through falsification, confirmation, consensus, or Bayesian reasoning? • atoms, light, Higgs Boson, time, gravity, dark energy, dark matter, string theory, radioactivity • Gold Foil Experiment • cloud chambers • particle accelerators • splitting the atom • Is there a place for God in scientific epistemology? • Is math all there is? Is math universal? • other universes, dimensions, and the multiverse.

Suzie Sheehy is a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time between research groups at the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne. She is currently focused on developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine. The Matter of Everything is her first book.