Podcast appearances and mentions of Saul Perlmutter

Dark energy, the mysterious force powering the expansion of the universe, appears to be weakening over time, according to a major cosmological survey that has thrown the laws of modern physics into doubt. Ian Sample tells Madeleine Finlay how this new finding could shed light on the ultimate fate of the cosmos, and Saul Perlmutter, who won a Nobel prize for his work proving the universe is expanding, describes how the new development could upend assumptions about how this mysterious force operates. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

In this week's episode, host Margaret Walls speaks with Carolyn Kousky, associate vice president for economics and policy at Environmental Defense Fund, about the instability of markets for homeowners insurance, especially in states that are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. Kousky and Walls explore the key drivers of this instability, including the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, insurance costs, and consequent strain on insurers that must pay more substantial claims. Kousky discusses challenges in the accessibility and affordability of homeowners insurance, along with policy interventions that can support equitable responses to extreme weather events and improve resilience following future disasters. Kousky also introduces her new nonprofit, Insurance for Good, which aims to bridge gaps between research and practice in terms of this affordability, equity, and resilience. References and recommendations: Insurance for Good; https://www.insuranceforgood.org/ “Wildfire Insurance Availability as a Risk Signal” by Xuesong You, Carolyn Kousky, and Ajita Atreya; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5017469 “Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense” by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell, and Robert MacCoun; https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/saul-perlmutter-phd/third-millennium-thinking/9780316438308/ “Change: How to Make Big Things Happen” by Damon Centola; https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/damon-centola/change/9781549152092/

Want to help us improve Behavioral Grooves? Take our listener survey here! Looking for your next great read? We've got you covered! It's time for our annual Best Books episode, where we share the standout reads that inspired and informed us this year. We've organized our picks into four categories—Leadership, Work Life, Relationships, and Critical Thinking—to help you find the perfect book for your personal or professional journey. Whether you're looking for fresh ideas, practical insights, or even a last-minute gift, this curated list has something for everyone. Join us as we explore the year's most impactful reads and get ready to turn the page on some life-changing ideas! ©2024 Behavioral Grooves Topics [0:00] Welcome back to Best Books! [2:37] Best Books for Leadership [11:56] Best Books for Work Life [19:23] Best Books for Relationships [30:05] Best Books for Critical Thinking [43:18] Wrap up - Happy Holidays from Behavioral Grooves! ©2024 Behavioral Grooves Links Both and Thinking by Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis The Friction Project by Huggy Rao and Robert Sutton Likable Badass by Alison Green Is Your Work Worth It? by Christopher Michaelson and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas Burnout Immunity by Kandi Wiens The Ritual Effect by Mike Norton Tightwads and Spendthrifts by Scott Rick The Laws of Connection by David Robson 12 Questions for Love by Topaz Adizes May Contain Lies by Alex Edmonds You Only Die Once by Jody Wellman Third Millennium Thinking by Saul Perlmutter, Robert M. Coon, and John Campbell A Year of Living Constitutionally by AJ Jacobs Musical Links Kurt's Song of the Year: Ren - Money Ties Tim's Song of the Year: Lake Street Dive - Nick of Time

In Berkeley Talks episode 215, a cross-disciplinary panel of UC Berkeley professors, whose expertise ranges from political science to philosophy, discuss how they view decision-making from their respective fields, and how we can use these approaches to make better, more informed choices. Panelists include: Wes Holliday, professor of philosophy. Holliday studies group decision-making, including the best methods of voting, especially in the democratic context. Marika Landau-Wells, assistant professor of political science. Landau-Wells studies the effect that threat perception has on national security decision-making, and how some decisions we make to protect ourselves can endanger many others.Saul Perlmutter, Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Professor of Physics and 2011 Nobel laureate. Perlmutter co-teaches a Big Ideas course, called Sense and Sensibility and Science, designed to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers by exploring key aspects of scientific thinking.Linda Wilbrecht, professor of neuroscience and psychology. An adolescent scientist, Wilbrecht studies how adolescent learning and decision-making changes from ages 8 to 18, and how it compares to that of adults and children. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, executive dean of the College of Letters and Science (moderator).The campus event was held on Oct. 9 as part of the College of Letters and Science's Salon Series, which brings together faculty and students from a swath of disciplines to interrogate and explore universal questions or ideas from disparate perspectives.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.College of Letters and Science photo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Facts matter. The scientific process matters. The ability to think critically is essential to navigate our world, to make good decisions and to solve some of the world's most intractable problems. Nobel Prize laureate Saul Perlmutter believes everyone can learn the skills scientists use to think critically so that they don't fool themselves. Saul is joined by Tim Minchin, a writer, composer and fierce defender of facts and UNSW's Verity Firth to discuss the importance of collaboration, humility and critical thinking in decision-making.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ray White speaks to Ian Mann, MD at Gateways Business Consultants and regular book reviewer, about Saul Perlmutter's thought-provoking book "The Third Millennium Thinking", exploring its insights on innovation, strategic thinking, and navigating complex challenges in the modern world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Saul Permutter won the Nobel Prize for his eventual role in the discovery of dark energy. In 1996 when I was lecturing at LBL he bet me that he would show dark energy didn't exist. His group had been measuring supernova distances for years, in hopes of determining the deceleration rate of the universe. Instead, after recalibrating some of his earlier data, his group and an independent group discovered the universe was actually accelerating. That is the beauty of science, it supersedes any individual prejudices, and scientists actually change their minds if the data requires it. This is one of the many important characteristics of science that Saul and his collaborators discuss in their recent book, Third Millennium Thinking. It is a good read, full of useful examples about how scientific thinking is important in the world beyond just science. Saul and I had a lively conversation about science, the scientific method, and his own experiences as a scientists. It was an enriching and enlightening discussion, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Saul Perlmutter fick Nobelpriset i fysik 2011 för upptäckten av universums accelererande expansion – den helt oväntade upptäckten att universum inte bara fortsätter bli större och större, utan att det också går fortare och fortare. Han berättar här om hur upptäckten gick till. Och om hur det visade sig att det som Einsteins såg som sitt största misstag i själva verket visade sig vara det som gör det möjligt för kosmos att växa – den mystiska mörka energin. . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a world challenged by the politicization of data, contradicting evidence, and an onslaught of information, could the key to more effective and informed decision-making be as simple as, thinking like a scientist? Professor of physics Saul Perlmutter, professor of philosophy John Campbell, and professor of psychology and law Robert MacCoun combine their interdisciplinary minds in the book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense. The book explores the essence of scientific thinking and how it can be applied to practical societal issues. Saul, John, and Robert join Greg to chat about the genesis of “third millenium thinking,” the role of values in scientific judgment, and the importance of teaching probabilistic thinking and experimentation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why is it so hard to just walk the Humean line and to be very explicit about sorting out these differences?09:03: [John Campbell] The message of the book is: keep the Humean line as far as we can, separate the facts and values. Scientists, we all know, have a lot to tell us about the facts, but we, the people, are the ones who tell you about the values. And then, I think, that has to be anyone's first brush, sort of partitioning off the boundaries of science, to keep that Humean line. But then it does get complicated when you think about things like mental illnesses and so on, where you're asking not just, Is this condition that a person had? Is this a real thing? But you're also asking, Is this a bad thing? Is it a bad thing for a person to be like that? So with autism, is that just neurodiversity that is not really within the sphere of medical treatment at all? There are boundaries there as to where science is authoritative and where the people have a voice. And this kind of issue clearly has to be a debate, it seems to me. It's not something for professionals only.To what extent must we trust the processes within the expert community?37:04: [Saul Perlmutter] I think that there's a difference between really understanding a field enough that you don't need the expert and having some understanding of how science works so you can recognize which experts you are more likely to trust.They myth of lone genius47:26: [Robert MacCoun] This mythology of the lone genius, I think, is very much the antithesis of third-millennium thinking, this notion that it's because I'm brilliant that you should listen to me. And that's really not where we think the authority of science comes from. It's not from the IQ of the scientist. It's from the procedures—the hoops you have to jump through to make your ideas work. And it's those procedures that give you credibility, not just brilliance.If you hold to the Humean line, why would your value judgments about what's good or bad for society impact your causal arguments?32:25: [Robert MacCoun]  The role of standards of proof when you're dealing with probabilistic evidence, you need to weigh two kinds of errors: false positive errors of claiming a hypothesis is true when it's not, and false negative errors of saying the hypothesis is wrong when in fact it's true. That is not a scientific matter. That is a matter of values. We can't avoid it. In dealing with uncertainty, we have to impose some sort of standard of proof. And so, under the Humean model, you take values very seriously. I don't think we would argue that values are simply outside the domain of science.Show Links:Recommended Resources:David HumeNeil deGrasse TysonSupreme Court overturns ChevronArticle: Supreme Court strikes down Chevron, curtailing power of federal agenciesGuest Profile:Saul Perlmutter's Profile at UC BerkeleyJohn Campbell's Profile at UC BerkeleyRobert MacCoun's Profile at Stanford UniversityTheir Work:Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense

How do we make sense in a world that often seems nonsensical? In this week's episode, Kurt and Tim team up with Saul Perlmutter and Rob MacCoun, co-authors of Third Millennium Thinking, to try and answer these unanswerable questions for listeners. Together, they bring the scientific method from theory to practice as they explore key aspects of scientific inquiry, probabilistic thinking, and the significance of embracing uncertainty in problem-solving.  Saul and Rob help bring scientific practice into reality and cover various topics from the role of experimentation in identifying cause-and-effect relationships, the importance of assigning probabilities in decision-making, and the virtues of persistence and optimism in tackling challenges.  In today's increasingly polarized climate, it's important to understand the value of seeking diverse perspectives to avoid mental traps and the power of collective cognition in decision-making. From probabilistic thinking to scientific optimism this conversation showcases how applying the scientific method can enhance not only our individual way of thinking but our interactions with the world.  © 2024 Behavioral Grooves Topics  [4:08] Intro and speed round [7:48] Scientific method and experimentation in various fields [16:54] Using probability to make informed decisions [21:34] Dangers of polarization and the importance of making quick estimates [28:08] Using mathematical estimates to solve problems [32:55] Scientific optimism in the face of challenges [43:05] Collective cognition and the importance of acknowledging uncertainty [50:35] Grooving Session: Using the scientific method to improve thinking © 2024 Behavioral Grooves Links  Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense Nobel Prize - Saul Perlmutter Rob MacCoun Steven Pinker The Law of Group Polarization Musical Links Jazz Classics John Williams, Star Wars

"We live in an experimenting society" Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter reassures us, "The fact that we can use partial information and do better is actually one of our superpowers." Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell and Robert MacCoun takes the optimism and tools of science and helps us apply them to the everyday. They help us think about how we think, taking our values and fears into account, but not being overwhelmed by them. Third Millennium Thinking: https://thirdmillenniumthinking.com Photo by Jon Schainker. Used with permission. Theme music by Sean Balick; “Celestial Navigation" by Aeronaut, via Blue Dot Sessions.

No one has all the answers, but we could all learn a thing or two about asking the right questions from Nobel Prize winning physicist Saul Perlmutter, philosophy professor John Campbell, and social psychologist Robert MacCoun.

  There's a lot that's remarkable about the new book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, starting with the fact that one of its three co-authors is a Nobel laureate who earned the Nobel prize in physics for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe. One might imagine that UC Berkeley professor, […] The post Saul Perlmutter: How To Make Smarter Judgments & Wiser Decisions appeared first on Mark C. Crowley.

Growing up, Saul Perlmutter just wanted to know how the world worked. In 2011, he was part of the Nobel Prize-winning team that discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe. Saul and Adam talk about how science and knowledge evolve, what surprising emotions come with discovery, and why the combination of individual humility and collective confidence can solve some of the world's biggest problems. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/RWAG6

Greetings Glocal Citizens! This week we're taking a trip to the stars and back with astrophysicist, author, STEM educator, multi-patented inventor, voice actor, TV personality, science communicator, and keynote speaker, Hakeem Oluseyi. Another fellow Stanford University Alum, Hakeem recently served as the Space Science Education Lead in the Space Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. His work has resulted in 11 patents, and more than 100 publications covering contributions to astrophysics, cosmology, plasma physics, and the development of space missions, observatories, focal plane instruments, detectors, semiconductor manufacturing, and ion propulsion. He has co-hosted and contributed to several shows on Science Channel and Discovery International including Outrageous Acts of Science, How the Universe Works, Space's Deepest Secrets, Strange Evidence, You Have Been Warned, The Planets and Beyond, and Strip the Cosmos. He regularly appears on news programs and has won or been nominated for several awards for science reporting including an Emmy nomination and four Webby Awards. His memoir A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars (https://a.co/d/csZJb4g) was released in 2021. Hakeem sees his professional mission as advancing humanity's understanding of the universe through scientific inquiry; passing on the detailed knowledge of this process and its results to the next generation; and service to humanity and country. True to his mission, he is doing all of the above not only in the U.S., but across the planet and into the cosmos. Where to find Hakeem? On LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hakeem-oluseyi-b345b68/) On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/hmoluseyi/?hl=en) On Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/hakeemoluseyi/) On Twitter (https://twitter.com/HakeemOluseyi?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) What's Hakeem Listening to? Philosophize This! (https://www.philosophizethis.org) Dan Carlin's Hardcore History (https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/) Curtis Mayfield (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Mayfield) Other topics of interest: The DMV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area) Wealthiest Counties in the United States (https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/slideshows/richest-counties-in-america?slide=17) IMAP - Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (https://imap.princeton.edu) Roddenbery Entertainment (https://www.roddenberry.com/entertainment/#podcasts) About Musician, Eminem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNYR1ioecJY) Mangaia Island (https://cookislands.travel/islands/mangaia) National Society of Black Physicists (https://nsbp.org/?) Mythology by Edith Hamilton (https://a.co/d/8TMDgP3) Nairobi Planterium (https://travellingtelescope.co.uk/2021/06/21/the-nairobi-planetarium/) What's an Error Bar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_bar) On Dark Matter (https://www.space.com/20930-dark-matter.html) About the physicists~ About Charles McGruder (https://heritageproject.caltech.edu/interviews-updates/charles-mcgruder) [Willie Rockward]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Rockward) [Stephon Alexander](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brice-orange-59102779/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brice-orange-59102779/) About Cynthia McINtyre (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1995/02/11/helping-black-students-picture-themselves-as-physicists/1d7b8f55-60c2-401d-833b-9a71c142f33d/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.47c6021f234b) [Arthur B.C. Walker, Jr.]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArthurB.C.WalkerJr.) Pius Okeke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pius_Nwankwo_Okeke) [Thebe Medupe]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thebe_Medupe) [Saul Perlmutter]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Perlmutter) Special Guest: Hakeem Oluseyi .

Greetings Glocal Citizens! This week we're taking a trip to the stars and back with astrophysicist, author, STEM educator, multi-patented inventor, voice actor, TV personality, science communicator, and keynote speaker, Hakeem Oluseyi. Another fellow Stanford University Alum, Hakeem recently served as the Space Science Education Lead in the Space Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. His work has resulted in 11 patents, and more than 100 publications covering contributions to astrophysics, cosmology, plasma physics, and the development of space missions, observatories, focal plane instruments, detectors, semiconductor manufacturing, and ion propulsion. He has co-hosted and contributed to several shows on Science Channel and Discovery International including Outrageous Acts of Science, How the Universe Works, Space's Deepest Secrets, Strange Evidence, You Have Been Warned, The Planets and Beyond, and Strip the Cosmos. He regularly appears on news programs and has won or been nominated for several awards for science reporting including an Emmy nomination and four Webby Awards. His memoir A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars (https://a.co/d/csZJb4g) was released in 2021. Hakeem sees his professional mission as advancing humanity's understanding of the universe through scientific inquiry; passing on the detailed knowledge of this process and its results to the next generation; and service to humanity and country. True to his mission, he is doing all of the above not only in the U.S., but across the planet and into the cosmos. Where to find Hakeem? On LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hakeem-oluseyi-b345b68/) On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/hmoluseyi/?hl=en) On Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/hakeemoluseyi/) On Twitter (https://twitter.com/HakeemOluseyi?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) What's Hakeem Listening to? Philosophize This! (https://www.philosophizethis.org) Dan Carlin's Hardcore History (https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/) Curtis Mayfield (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Mayfield) Other topics of interest: The DMV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area) Wealthiest Counties in the United States (https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/slideshows/richest-counties-in-america?slide=17) IMAP - Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (https://imap.princeton.edu) Roddenbery Entertainment (https://www.roddenberry.com/entertainment/#podcasts) About Musician, Eminem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNYR1ioecJY) Mangaia Island (https://cookislands.travel/islands/mangaia) National Society of Black Physicists (https://nsbp.org/?) Mythology by Edith Hamilton (https://a.co/d/8TMDgP3) Nairobi Planterium (https://travellingtelescope.co.uk/2021/06/21/the-nairobi-planetarium/) What's an Error Bar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_bar) On Dark Matter (https://www.space.com/20930-dark-matter.html) About the physicists~ About Charles McGruder (https://heritageproject.caltech.edu/interviews-updates/charles-mcgruder) [Willie Rockward]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Rockward) [Stephon Alexander](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brice-orange-59102779/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brice-orange-59102779/) About Cynthia McINtyre (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1995/02/11/helping-black-students-picture-themselves-as-physicists/1d7b8f55-60c2-401d-833b-9a71c142f33d/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.47c6021f234b) [Arthur B.C. Walker, Jr.]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArthurB.C.WalkerJr.) Pius Okeke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pius_Nwankwo_Okeke) [Thebe Medupe]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thebe_Medupe) [Saul Perlmutter]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Perlmutter) Special Guest: Hakeem Oluseyi .

Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Laureate, professor of physics at UC Berkeley and director of Berkeley Institute for Data Science joins Accenture's Arnab Chakraborty to discuss the field of AI advancing within organizations from practice to high performance. Hear how talent, culture and responsible design are all important factors to becoming a high performer. Listen now.

Sharing something from our friends at the TED Audio Collective—an episode of WorkLife with Adam Grant. Adam talks about harnessing the power of frustrated people to shake up the status quo — just like Pixar did. If you'd like to hear more, they've got a brand new podcast out called Re: Thinking with Adam Grant. On the show, get a peek into the minds of some of the world's most creative people. This season they've got entrepreneur Mark Cuban, bestselling author Celeste Ng, Oscar-winning actor and producer Reese Witherspoon, neuroscientist Chantel Prat, Nobel laureate physicist Saul Perlmutter, and death-defying rock climber Alex Honnold. Listen at https://www.ted.com/podcasts/rethinking_with_adam_grantSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Growing up, Saul Perlmutter just wanted to know how the world worked. In 2011, he was part of the Nobel Prize-winning team that discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe. Saul and Adam talk about how science and knowledge evolve, what surprising emotions come with discovery, and why the combination of individual humility and collective confidence can solve some of the world's biggest problems. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/RWAG6

Growing up, Saul Perlmutter just wanted to know how the world worked. In 2011, he was part of the Nobel Prize-winning team that discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe. Saul and Adam talk about how science and knowledge evolve, what surprising emotions come with discovery, and why the combination of individual humility and collective confidence can solve some of the world's biggest problems. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/RWAG6

Growing up, Saul Perlmutter just wanted to know how the world worked. In 2011, he was part of the Nobel Prize-winning team that discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe. Saul and Adam talk about how science and knowledge evolve, what surprising emotions come with discovery, and why the combination of individual humility and collective confidence can solve some of the world's biggest problems. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/RWAG6

Entrevista a José Maza, académico de la Universidad de Chile y  Premio Nacional de Ciencias Exactas de Chile en 1999. Revisamos el premio Nobel otorgado a Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt y Adam Riess por el descubrimiento de la expansión acelerada del Universo.

Entrevista a José Maza, académico de la Universidad de Chile y  Premio Nacional de Ciencias Exactas de Chile en 1999. Revisamos el premio Nobel otorgado a Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt y Adam Riess por el descubrimiento de la expansión acelerada del Universo.

Chat with Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess about his team's newest measurements of the 'most important number in cosmology' the Hubble Constant. Using the Hubble Space Telescope for what it was meant to do, Adam's team continues to make ultra-precise measurements. We'll also explore the Hubble Tension, the future of Hubble now that the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed, and other cosmic conundrums. Adam is a brilliant teacher and a wonderful raconteur. Don't miss your chance to chat with a brilliant scientist about the most important topic in cosmology today! From the team: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-005 From CNN: Measuring the expansion rate of the universe was one of the Hubble Space Telescope's main goals when it was launched in 1990. Over the past 30 years, the space observatory has helped scientists discover and refine that accelerating rate – as well as uncover a mysterious wrinkle that only brand-new physics may solve. Hubble has observed more than 40 galaxies that include pulsating stars as well as exploding stars called supernovae to measure even greater cosmic distances. Both of these phenomena help astronomers to mark astronomical distances like mile markers, which have pointed to the expansion rate. In the quest to understand how quickly our universe expands, astronomers already made one unexpected discovery in 1998: “dark energy.” This phenomenon acts as a mysterious repulsive force that accelerates the expansion rate. And there is another twist: an unexplained difference between the expansion rate of the local universe versus that of the distant universe right after the big bang. Scientists don't understand the discrepancy but acknowledge that it's weird and could require new physics. “You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers,” said Nobel Laureate Adam Riess at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a distinguished professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a statement. “This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it. This is likely Hubble's magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble's life to even double this sample size.” Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. https://www.stsci.edu/~ariess/ Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. Connect with Brian: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize  https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Produced by Stuart Volkow (P.G.A) and Brian Keating Edited by Stuart Volkow Music:  Yeti Tears Miguel Tully - www.facebook.com/yetitears/ Theo Ryan - http://the-omusic.com/

Chat with Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess about his team's newest measurements of the 'most important number in cosmology' the Hubble Constant. Using the Hubble Space Telescope for what it was meant to do, Adam's team continues to make ultra-precise measurements. We'll also explore the Hubble Tension, the future of Hubble now that the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed, and other cosmic conundrums. Adam is a brilliant teacher and a wonderful raconteur. Don't miss your chance to chat with a brilliant scientist about the most important topic in cosmology today! From the team: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-005 From CNN: Measuring the expansion rate of the universe was one of the Hubble Space Telescope's main goals when it was launched in 1990. Over the past 30 years, the space observatory has helped scientists discover and refine that accelerating rate – as well as uncover a mysterious wrinkle that only brand-new physics may solve. Hubble has observed more than 40 galaxies that include pulsating stars as well as exploding stars called supernovae to measure even greater cosmic distances. Both of these phenomena help astronomers to mark astronomical distances like mile markers, which have pointed to the expansion rate. In the quest to understand how quickly our universe expands, astronomers already made one unexpected discovery in 1998: “dark energy.” This phenomenon acts as a mysterious repulsive force that accelerates the expansion rate. And there is another twist: an unexplained difference between the expansion rate of the local universe versus that of the distant universe right after the big bang. Scientists don't understand the discrepancy but acknowledge that it's weird and could require new physics. “You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers,” said Nobel Laureate Adam Riess at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a distinguished professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a statement. “This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it. This is likely Hubble's magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble's life to even double this sample size.” Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Connect with Brian: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize  https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Produced by Stuart Volkow (P.G.A) and Brian Keating Edited by Stuart Volkow Music:  Yeti Tears Miguel Tully - www.facebook.com/yetitears/ Theo Ryan - http://the-omusic.com/

After making the astonishing discovery that what he and his fellow cosmologists thought they knew about the universe was wrong, Saul Perlmutter began a course at his university explaining why catching mistakes is at the heart of science. It's also a lesson in life for the rest of us.

Adam Riess is a distinguished professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University and an astronomer at the Space Tele- scope Science Institute. In 2011, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Brian Schmidt and Saul Perlmutter “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae.”  The work— done by a team—was recognized almost immediately (in Nobel years, at least), making Adam one of the youngest winners ever of the physics prize at age 41. Though we are contemporaries, I consider Adam Riess a role model. His relentless pursuit of topics of great meaning is inspirational. In 2005, he and I competed in a worldwide competition to determine who is a worthy successor to the great physicist Charles Townsend, winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics. I won first prize for my concept for the BICEP experiment—spoiler alert: I did not succeed in replicating Charlie Townsend's renown—and third place went to Adam Riess. On the day he won the Nobel Prize, my brother Kevin said, “Brian, you won the battle, but he won the war”—something only a big brother would say.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Much of what we know about the universe, we've learned in the past 25 years. These three astrophysicists, all Nobel laureates, were key to unlocking some of its greatest mysteries, including that the universe is expanding at an ever-faster rate. (For decades, scientists were certain it was slowing down.)  Now they are poised to help us learn a whole lot more... starting this year, with the launch of the James Webb telescope.  John Mather, Adam Reiss and Saul Perlmutter talk here about what drew them to study the cosmos, and explain in ways we can all understand, what the universe has to teach us. 

Astronomers rocked the cosmological world with the 1998 discovery that the universe is accelerating. Well-deserved Nobel Prizes were awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and today’s guest Adam Riess. Adam has continued to push forward on investigating the structure and evolution of the universe. He’s been a leader in emphasizing a curious disagreement that threatens to grow into a crisis: incompatible values of the Hubble constant (expansion rate of the universe) obtained from the cosmic microwave background vs. direct measurements. We talk about where this “Hubble tension” comes from, and what it might mean for the universe.Support Mindscape on Patreon.Adam Riess received his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University. He is currently Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Thomas J. Barber Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior member of the Science Staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Among his many awards are the Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Sackler Prize, the Shaw Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and the Nobel Prize.Johns Hopkins web pageSpace Telescope Science Institute web pageNobel LectureGoogle Scholar publicationsTalk on the expansion rate of the universeWikipedia

Our guest today is Dr Andrew Howell who leads the supernova group at the Las Cumbres Observatory and is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In other words, he's an astrophysicist. As a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, he helped to confirm the acceleration of the universe, for which his mentor, Saul Perlmutter was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. After that he moved to the University of Toronto, where he helped make the best measurements of the Dark Energy driving the acceleration of the universe. Andy is also the Principal Investigator of the Global Supernova Project, a worldwide collaboration to observe 1000 supernovae more intensely than has ever before been achieved. He's also been named to the list of the highest cited researchers in the world for the past two years. He is a co-author on more than 200 scientific papers, and has been instrumental in the discovery of several new classes of supernovae, including explosions brighter and dimmer than previously thought possible. His group co-discovered the first kilonova, a merger of two neutron stars, and helped to determine that they are the source of the heaviest elements in the universe like gold and platinum. This was widely heralded as the biggest scientific discovery of 2017, and Andy was selected by the National Science Foundation as one of a handful of scientists to make the official announcement in Washington, D.C. Andy also appears on and hosts radio and television shows about science for outlets such as National Geographic, The History Channel, and the BBC. Perhaps more surprisingly, he's also an accredited film critic who has written for sites such as Film Threat and Ain't It Cool News. His love of cinema inspired him to co-create the show Science Vs. Cinema, which he hosts. On the show he talks to both scientists and the cast and crew of films about the science portrayed in them. He's been a scientific consultant for books, comic books, and TV shows. He regularly gives public talks about science or the science in film all over the world. Learn more about Andy: http://www.dahowell.com/ Follow him on Twitter: @d_a_howell http://ScienceVsCinema.com

It has been 20 years since we learned the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to the mysterious force called dark energy. Saul Perlmutter shared the Nobel Prize in Physics because of his contributions. Now he shares his thoughts with us.  Also at this year’s COSPAR Assembly in Pasadena was the Director General of China’s National Space Science Center, Wang Chi.  Have you played with Eyes on the Solar System?  JPL’s Kevin Hussey conceived of the NASA Eyes app that will take you across the solar system and beyond.  And you’ll hear Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan’s message to the Martians in our future.  That’s right after this week’s What’s Up.  Learn more at:   http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/0808-2018-saul-permutter-wang-chi-nssc.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On s'en souvient, il y a cinq ans, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt et Adam Riess recevaient le prix Nobel de physique pour leur découverte d'une anomalie majeure dans le taux d'expansion de l'Univers via l'observation de supernovas, publiée en 1998. Cette accélération de l'expansion a été depuis attribuée à une constante cosmologique Λ (Lambda), d'origine non connue, une énergie noire, mais néanmoins nouveau socle du paradigme cosmologique et de son modèle standard.Mais aujourd'hui, trois physiciens anglais de l'université de Oxford viennent mettre en doute cette découverte en montrant que la signifiance statistique des résultats sur les supernovas Ia est bien plus faible que celle clamée il y a 18 ans.

The story of the evolution of life on earth during one photon's journey across the universe. Told by Saul Perlmutter who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Dr. Bea worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. His research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is co-founder of Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UCB.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon and welcome to spectrum. My name is Chase Jakubowski and I'll be the host of today's show. Today we present part two of our two interviews with Robert B professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Dr B served as an engineer for the U S Army Corps of Engineers, Shell oil, shell development and Royal Dutch Shell. His work has taken them to more than 60 locations around the world. Has Engineering work, has focused on marine environments, is research and teaching, have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is cofounder of the Center for catastrophic risk management at UC Berkeley in part two. Brett swift asks professor B about the California Delta balancing development and environmental conservation and shoreline retreat. [00:01:30] Is civil engineering misunderstood Speaker 4: or do people simply have a love hate relationship with the built environment? I think a mixture of civil engineering has been changing, so people's preconceived views in many cases are out of date and it's also low of, hey, when the built in art man bite you, it hurts and [00:02:00] hurt, encourages. Hey, there is a big reliance on it though at the same time as well. Yes. Airports, bridges, tunnels, water supply system, sewage supply, large ill NGS. That's our game. We're out of Egypt and Rome. That's where we got our start. And now the new term is infrastructure. Yes. To sort of put all that together into one idea. Yes. [00:02:30] Are there landscapes scale projects out there that people should be aware of and cognizant of? Yeah, that are underway or have recently completed? Yes. One we've been watching carefully is location than the other lunch and it's what's called the water works and the reason we zoom in closely is it's an excellent laboratory test bed for a comparable [00:03:00] problem we face here in California with aren't California Delta infrastructure systems. Speaker 4: Now the Lens, much more comeback, but it deals with an unforgiving test that's the North Sea. And so they've been learning actually over a period of 3000 years. How would it work in a constructive collaborative way with water? We face the same problem here at home. [00:03:30] Often the attention associated with civil engineering projects is due to the tension between environmental degradation and economic gain. Is it possible to have balance when you're doing something on this kind of scale? Answer is yes and it's a term bounce. Nature itself can be extremely destructive to itself. Watch an intense [00:04:00] storm attack, a sensitive reef area in the ocean. The tension and it can be constructive if it's properly managed, is we need to develop these systems, some of which need to make money and at the same time we need to ensure that what is being achieved there is not being degraded, destroyed by unintended consequences [00:04:30] to the environment. Speaker 4: One of the very good things that happened to civil engineering here at Berkeley is we changed our name. We're known as civil and environmental and that's to bring explicit this tension between built works, the natural works, and for God's sakes, remember we have a planet that we've got to live on for a long time. As engineers, we are still [00:05:00] learning how to deal with that tension and particularly when something's on a really large scale, best of intentions going forward, body of knowledge at the time you do the project, how do you know what the environmental impacts are going to be? Those unintended impacts reveal themselves. How do you walk these things back? How do you backtrack from having installed something on a landscape level? That clunky question. [00:05:30] That's one of the reasons for my fascination with the Netherlands, but the way I've worked there for a year, complements of previous employer [inaudible] is Royal Dutch Shell, so I was there learning all the dodge had confronted flooding from the North Sea and essentially the approach was built a big dam wall between you and at [00:06:00] water, you're on the dry site and it's on wet side. They promptly learned that was not good. The in fact heavily polluted areas that they were attempting to occupy and suddenly a new thing started to show in their thinking called give water room so that today they have actually sacrificed areas back to the open ocean [00:06:30] to get water. The room needs to do what it needs today and in the end the entire system has been improved. We've been trying to take some of those hard won lessons back to our California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 6: You were [00:07:00] listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift is interviewing Bob Bobby, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talk about the California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 7: We've talked about the delta a bit. Do you want to expand on the challenges of the Delta and [00:07:30] the downside? Speaker 4: Well, I'll start with the downside. One of the things I used to say in class when I was still teaching here is terror is a fine instructor. Okay. So the downside would be if we had what we call the ultimate catastrophe and it's foreseeable and in fact predictable [00:08:00] in our delta, we would be without an extremely important infrastructure system. For a period of more than five years. That includes fresh supply for small cities like Los Angeles and San Diego and small enterprises like the Central Valley Agricultural Enterprise. So the picture makes Katrina New Orleans look like a place [00:08:30] story. This is big time serious. You'd say hooky bomb. That's a pretty dismal picture. Why? And the answer is back to this risk crepe. The delta infrastructure systems started back in the gold rush days and we want to add some agricultural plans that we built, piles of dirt that I've called disrespectfully [inaudible]. And then we put in transportation [00:09:00] roadways, power supply, electrical power, and then we come up with a bright idea of transporting water from the north side of the delta to the South side of the Gel so we can export orders. Speaker 4: Southern California. Those people need water too. Well, it's all defend it by those same piles or hurt built back in the 1850s it's got art, gas storage under some of those islands and our telecommunications goes through there. [00:09:30] Our railroads go through air, so if you lose critical parts, those piles there, you got big problems. We can foresee it, we can in fact analyze, predict it. We've in fact quantified the risk. They are clearly unacceptable. We've talked to the people who have political insight and power. They are interested to the point of understanding [00:10:00] it and then they turn and ask, well, how do you solve the problem? Well, at this point we say we don't know yet, but we do know it's gonna take a long time to solve perhaps much like the Netherlands, 50 a hundred years. And you can see a Lee blank because there's a two to four year time window. What's this? 50 to a hundred years. Oh, can you tell me about tomorrow's problem? And tomorrow solutions [00:10:30] answer, no, this one's not that. So we've run into her stone wall. Speaker 7: So does it then become something that gets tacked on to all the other things that they want to do with the water? Because there's always a new peripheral canal being proposed. Right? Right. And the north south issue on water's not going away. So for some 50 years solution to happen in California politics, you'd have to have a pretty serious [00:11:00] consensus north and south to the shared interests there. Correct. And there's no dialogue about that really? No. Within the state, no. How about within the civil engineering community? Within the state? No. So everyone wants to ignore the obvious threat to the, so the California economy because basically you're talking about have you applied a cost to the a catastrophic event of the Delta failing? Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we thought that. Or Action Katrina, who Orleans [00:11:30] ultimately has caused the United States in excess of a hundred bill young as ours. Paul that by five or 10 because just the time extent. The population influence though we're talking about hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. So the economic consequences of doing nothing or horrible and then you'd say, [00:12:00] well, is it possible to fix it? Answer is yes. Well, do you know exactly how? No, we don't. That's going to take time to work through. It also takes key word. You mentioned collaboration. Different interests are involved and we need to learn how to constructively and knowledgeably liberate the signings to say, here's a solution that makes sense to the environmental conscience [00:12:30] in the environment. Here's a sense or a solution makes sense to the social commercial, industrial complex. Hey, we might have a solution here. Let's start experimenting it. We don't have the basis for that lot and consequently it slips back into our busy backgrounds. Much like the San Pedro LPG tanks that are still sitting air. It's in the background and the clock is ticking Speaker 7: and the Dutch model [00:13:00] doesn't help them see how it could evolve. Speaker 4: It doesn't seem to, they sort of have distanced the experience from the Netherlands and saying, well, we could never come to an agreement like that. Of course, as soon as you say that, that's the death coming to an agreement like that. Speaker 7: Well maybe they don't see the impending danger as existential as the Dutch do. Speaker 4: I think that's very true. The Dutch can just walk [00:13:30] outside of their homes. Many of them walk up one of those levees and on the other side they see what's happening. The North Sea is big and mean and ever present and they've got one common enemy, so to speak, and that set ocean and they got to stop the flooding, but yet they can't damage the environment. So they've had to come to grips one with themselves. One more the environment and the long term view. We could do it. We haven't. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 6: [00:14:00] Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l Ex Brooklyn. Brett swift is with our guests, Professor Robert B of UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talked about Shortline retreat and regulation of oil and gas extraction Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 7: [00:14:30] with the sea level rise and with storms becoming more volatile and surges from the oceans becoming real factors on shorelines. How should communities and nations approach the idea retreating from the ocean? Speaker 4: Well, again, thankful to our brothers and sisters and Europe. [00:15:00] They're several decades ahead of us in asking and answering exactly that question. They've developed three strategies. They look at existing locations. They then examine each of the three strategies to see which makes longterm sense. The first strategy is fight. A good example would be United Kingdom, the tims flood [00:15:30] barrier. Yeah, you might like to move London, but to not gonna move it very quick easily. And so the answer comes back we need to defend, but you only defend what you can defend, which means you don't try and defend the entire coast of England. You defend small parts of it that can be adequately defended. That's the fight strategy. The next one is flight. I call it get [00:16:00] out of dodge city. And so they say we need to stay age, a strategic withdrawal so that we withdrawal slowly surrendering back to the environment which needs to be surrendered back to the environment and eventually we're gone. The next one is freeze. What the mean is we'll occupy it until it's destroyed and then we're gone. As we looked at the coast, New York, [00:16:30] New Jersey after Sandy, I wish we had done some of that thinking. I hope we do some of that thinking for our California Delta. Speaker 7: I was thinking about civil engineering as it's applied in different parts of the world where a nation state is in a different stage of development. And how do you see civil engineering interacting in those environments differently and taking in risk management and how it's applied? Speaker 4: Well, I guess each society [00:17:00] has to go through its own learning experiences. You can always look at other society and say, oh they weren't very smart or they certainly could have done it this way, rather they did it. So we all into the after the game quarterbacking sort of Mo seems like each of these countries societies has to go through its own learning experience. [00:17:30] As I said earlier, those risk assessment and management businesses one damn thing after another and this learning transfer of insight forward seems to be as frustrating and difficult. Speaker 7: So offshore. Let's Speaker 4: talk about the challenges inherent in that. What do you think about the debate about the risk? How should that debate be framed? [00:18:00] The risks are higher, which means that likelihoods failure that you engineer into the system, it would be much lower, have to have backups in defense and depth and people who actually know they're doing the question is, will we in fact do it before we have a disaster? Don't tell me you think it's safe. Show me and demonstrate to me is that demand has not happened here in the u s yet. [00:18:30] I'm very concerned. For us, I think the government changed some of the permitting process. Is that window dressing? What does it have some real impact on how people behave in the field? It depends on geographically where you're ant Alaska has been very demanding at the Alaskan state level relative to oil and gas operations and when you see a signature [00:19:00] go home or permit, you can pretty well bet that there's sufficient documentation demonstration to justify that signature. Speaker 4: Other parts of the u s are less diligent and so it depends geographically where you're at and what you're dealing. Well, it's not actually reasonable to expect to be able to appropriately regulate, govern and industry [00:19:30] as powerful as the oil and gas industry was spotting governance. Governance needs to be consistent and when the signature goes on to a form that says, yes, I have the ability to immediately abate the source of a blow out. You have the ability the fire engine is built, it's in this station with trained people. Let's ring the bell and see if that fire engine can run. That hasn't happened yet. I [00:20:00] remain personally very concerned for these Oltra high risk operations we're considering in the United States wars. Does the same spottiness occur with fracking in terms of the application of best practices, everything up and able to learn is, yes. Speaker 4: By the way, franking has been underway for many decades. Industry actually hit this kind of work underway intensely in the 1970s [00:20:30] it says spottiness we're back to. That becomes crucial if the regulation governance and that's both internal governance within the industry and external governance on behalf of the public. If it is demanding, insightful and capable, we're okay, but if it's not, we're not. Okay. The systems that you have to have an interesting ability to slip to the lowest common denominator. [00:21:00] By this point, my career, I've worked in 73 different countries. I've lived in 11 different countries, I've seen a company I have a lot of respect for at Shell, operate internationally, some areas, gold standard, Norwegian sector, North Sea, and then I go to work with them in Angola. It's not a very good standard at all and [00:21:30] that's because the regulatory environment with local and national Franco relative to oil and gas is very poor, so the system seems to adopt the lowest sort of common denominator. Can. Strong industry requires strong governance to this man at the end of that experience. Bobby, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Very much pleasure for that integration. Speaker 2: [00:22:00] Mm Mm Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 3: If you are interested in a center for catastrophic risk management, visit their website at cc r m. Dot. berkeley.edu Speaker 10: [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 7: Brad swift joints me to present the calendar. Have you ever been interested in learning Mat lab? If so, [00:23:00] this event is for you. Next Wednesday, December 4th math works is sponsoring a technical seminar. Some of the highlights include exploring the fundamentals of the language writing programs to automate your workflow and leveraging tools for efficient program development. This event will take place Wednesday December 4th from nine to 11:00 AM in 100 Lewis Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Make sure to register online@mathworks.com click on [00:23:30] events. Speaker 3: Research on mobile micro robots has been ongoing for the last 20 years, but no micro robots have ever matched the 40 body lengths per second speed of the common ants on our picnic tables and front lawns. Next University of Maryland Speaker 7: Mechanical Engineering Professor Sarah Berg Brighter will discuss the challenges behind micro robotic mobility as well as mechanisms and motors they have designed to enable robot mobility at the insect sized scale. The colloquium is [00:24:00] open to all audiences and will take place on December 4th at 4:00 PM in three Oh six soda hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Every Thursday night, a new adventure unfolds at the California Academy of Sciences. December 5th Cal Academy of Sciences presents its holiday themed. Tis the season nightlife featuring class acts such as slide girls and DJ set by Nathan Blazer of geographer. Whether you're dancing underneath snow flurries in the piazza, or [00:24:30] enjoying the screening of back to the moon for good in the planetarium, this nightlife will be one to remember. Tis the season will take place. Thursday, December 5th from six to 10:00 PM at the California Academy of Sciences located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Remember for this event, you must be 21 years or older, so make sure to bring your ids for alcohol enriched fun. Speaker 7: For more information, go to cal academy.org is the future deterministic [00:25:00] and unalterable or can we shape our future? Marina Corbis suggests the latter. Wednesday, December 12th citrus at UC Berkeley is hosting a talk by executive director of the Institute of the future Marina Corbis. Marina Corpus's research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries. In this talk, she will discuss her research along with her insight to our society's future. The talk will take place Wednesday, December 11th [00:25:30] from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM is the target Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus and now Brad swift joints. Me for the news. UC Berkeley News Center reports the funding of a new institute to help scholars harness big data, the Berkeley Institute for data science to be housed in the campuses. Central Library building is made possible by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, which together pledged 37.8 [00:26:00] million over five years to three universities, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and New York University to foster collaboration in the area of data science. Speaker 7: The goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery with implications for our understanding of the universe, climate and biodiversity research, seismology, neuroscience, human behavior, and many other areas. Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics [00:26:30] and Nobel laureate will be the director of the campuses. New Institute. David Culler, chair of UC Berkeley is the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science and one of the co-principal investigators. The data science grant said computing is not just a tool. It has become an integral part of the scientific process. Josh Greenberg, who directs the Sloan Foundation's digital information technology program said this joint project will work to create examples [00:27:00] at the three universities that demonstrate how an institution wide commitment to data scientists can deliver dramatic gains in scientific productivity. Speaker 3: NASA's newest Mars bound mission maven blasted off while faculty, students and staff assembled at the space sciences laboratory to watch their handiwork head to the red planet. More than half of the instruments of board the spacecraft were built at UC Berkeley. After a 10 month trip, it will settle into Mars orbit in September, 2014 where it will study the remains [00:27:30] of the Martian atmosphere. Maven was designed to find out why Mars lost its atmosphere and water. Scientists believe that Mars once had an atmosphere, oceans and rivers, very similar to Earth. From its Martian orbit. The spacecraft will collect evidence to support or refute the reigning theory that the loss of its magnetic field allowed solar, wind, and solar storms to scour the atmosphere way of operating any water not frozen under the surface. The answer to this question will give planetary scientists a hint of [00:28:00] what the future may bring for other planets, including earth. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:28:30] the music heard during the show was written by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. Speaker 9: [00:29:30] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dr. Bea worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. His research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is co-founder of Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UCB.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon and welcome to spectrum. My name is Chase Jakubowski and I'll be the host of today's show. Today we present part two of our two interviews with Robert B professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Dr B served as an engineer for the U S Army Corps of Engineers, Shell oil, shell development and Royal Dutch Shell. His work has taken them to more than 60 locations around the world. Has Engineering work, has focused on marine environments, is research and teaching, have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is cofounder of the Center for catastrophic risk management at UC Berkeley in part two. Brett swift asks professor B about the California Delta balancing development and environmental conservation and shoreline retreat. [00:01:30] Is civil engineering misunderstood Speaker 4: or do people simply have a love hate relationship with the built environment? I think a mixture of civil engineering has been changing, so people's preconceived views in many cases are out of date and it's also low of, hey, when the built in art man bite you, it hurts and [00:02:00] hurt, encourages. Hey, there is a big reliance on it though at the same time as well. Yes. Airports, bridges, tunnels, water supply system, sewage supply, large ill NGS. That's our game. We're out of Egypt and Rome. That's where we got our start. And now the new term is infrastructure. Yes. To sort of put all that together into one idea. Yes. [00:02:30] Are there landscapes scale projects out there that people should be aware of and cognizant of? Yeah, that are underway or have recently completed? Yes. One we've been watching carefully is location than the other lunch and it's what's called the water works and the reason we zoom in closely is it's an excellent laboratory test bed for a comparable [00:03:00] problem we face here in California with aren't California Delta infrastructure systems. Speaker 4: Now the Lens, much more comeback, but it deals with an unforgiving test that's the North Sea. And so they've been learning actually over a period of 3000 years. How would it work in a constructive collaborative way with water? We face the same problem here at home. [00:03:30] Often the attention associated with civil engineering projects is due to the tension between environmental degradation and economic gain. Is it possible to have balance when you're doing something on this kind of scale? Answer is yes and it's a term bounce. Nature itself can be extremely destructive to itself. Watch an intense [00:04:00] storm attack, a sensitive reef area in the ocean. The tension and it can be constructive if it's properly managed, is we need to develop these systems, some of which need to make money and at the same time we need to ensure that what is being achieved there is not being degraded, destroyed by unintended consequences [00:04:30] to the environment. Speaker 4: One of the very good things that happened to civil engineering here at Berkeley is we changed our name. We're known as civil and environmental and that's to bring explicit this tension between built works, the natural works, and for God's sakes, remember we have a planet that we've got to live on for a long time. As engineers, we are still [00:05:00] learning how to deal with that tension and particularly when something's on a really large scale, best of intentions going forward, body of knowledge at the time you do the project, how do you know what the environmental impacts are going to be? Those unintended impacts reveal themselves. How do you walk these things back? How do you backtrack from having installed something on a landscape level? That clunky question. [00:05:30] That's one of the reasons for my fascination with the Netherlands, but the way I've worked there for a year, complements of previous employer [inaudible] is Royal Dutch Shell, so I was there learning all the dodge had confronted flooding from the North Sea and essentially the approach was built a big dam wall between you and at [00:06:00] water, you're on the dry site and it's on wet side. They promptly learned that was not good. The in fact heavily polluted areas that they were attempting to occupy and suddenly a new thing started to show in their thinking called give water room so that today they have actually sacrificed areas back to the open ocean [00:06:30] to get water. The room needs to do what it needs today and in the end the entire system has been improved. We've been trying to take some of those hard won lessons back to our California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 6: You were [00:07:00] listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift is interviewing Bob Bobby, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talk about the California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 7: We've talked about the delta a bit. Do you want to expand on the challenges of the Delta and [00:07:30] the downside? Speaker 4: Well, I'll start with the downside. One of the things I used to say in class when I was still teaching here is terror is a fine instructor. Okay. So the downside would be if we had what we call the ultimate catastrophe and it's foreseeable and in fact predictable [00:08:00] in our delta, we would be without an extremely important infrastructure system. For a period of more than five years. That includes fresh supply for small cities like Los Angeles and San Diego and small enterprises like the Central Valley Agricultural Enterprise. So the picture makes Katrina New Orleans look like a place [00:08:30] story. This is big time serious. You'd say hooky bomb. That's a pretty dismal picture. Why? And the answer is back to this risk crepe. The delta infrastructure systems started back in the gold rush days and we want to add some agricultural plans that we built, piles of dirt that I've called disrespectfully [inaudible]. And then we put in transportation [00:09:00] roadways, power supply, electrical power, and then we come up with a bright idea of transporting water from the north side of the delta to the South side of the Gel so we can export orders. Speaker 4: Southern California. Those people need water too. Well, it's all defend it by those same piles or hurt built back in the 1850s it's got art, gas storage under some of those islands and our telecommunications goes through there. [00:09:30] Our railroads go through air, so if you lose critical parts, those piles there, you got big problems. We can foresee it, we can in fact analyze, predict it. We've in fact quantified the risk. They are clearly unacceptable. We've talked to the people who have political insight and power. They are interested to the point of understanding [00:10:00] it and then they turn and ask, well, how do you solve the problem? Well, at this point we say we don't know yet, but we do know it's gonna take a long time to solve perhaps much like the Netherlands, 50 a hundred years. And you can see a Lee blank because there's a two to four year time window. What's this? 50 to a hundred years. Oh, can you tell me about tomorrow's problem? And tomorrow solutions [00:10:30] answer, no, this one's not that. So we've run into her stone wall. Speaker 7: So does it then become something that gets tacked on to all the other things that they want to do with the water? Because there's always a new peripheral canal being proposed. Right? Right. And the north south issue on water's not going away. So for some 50 years solution to happen in California politics, you'd have to have a pretty serious [00:11:00] consensus north and south to the shared interests there. Correct. And there's no dialogue about that really? No. Within the state, no. How about within the civil engineering community? Within the state? No. So everyone wants to ignore the obvious threat to the, so the California economy because basically you're talking about have you applied a cost to the a catastrophic event of the Delta failing? Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we thought that. Or Action Katrina, who Orleans [00:11:30] ultimately has caused the United States in excess of a hundred bill young as ours. Paul that by five or 10 because just the time extent. The population influence though we're talking about hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. So the economic consequences of doing nothing or horrible and then you'd say, [00:12:00] well, is it possible to fix it? Answer is yes. Well, do you know exactly how? No, we don't. That's going to take time to work through. It also takes key word. You mentioned collaboration. Different interests are involved and we need to learn how to constructively and knowledgeably liberate the signings to say, here's a solution that makes sense to the environmental conscience [00:12:30] in the environment. Here's a sense or a solution makes sense to the social commercial, industrial complex. Hey, we might have a solution here. Let's start experimenting it. We don't have the basis for that lot and consequently it slips back into our busy backgrounds. Much like the San Pedro LPG tanks that are still sitting air. It's in the background and the clock is ticking Speaker 7: and the Dutch model [00:13:00] doesn't help them see how it could evolve. Speaker 4: It doesn't seem to, they sort of have distanced the experience from the Netherlands and saying, well, we could never come to an agreement like that. Of course, as soon as you say that, that's the death coming to an agreement like that. Speaker 7: Well maybe they don't see the impending danger as existential as the Dutch do. Speaker 4: I think that's very true. The Dutch can just walk [00:13:30] outside of their homes. Many of them walk up one of those levees and on the other side they see what's happening. The North Sea is big and mean and ever present and they've got one common enemy, so to speak, and that set ocean and they got to stop the flooding, but yet they can't damage the environment. So they've had to come to grips one with themselves. One more the environment and the long term view. We could do it. We haven't. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 6: [00:14:00] Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l Ex Brooklyn. Brett swift is with our guests, Professor Robert B of UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talked about Shortline retreat and regulation of oil and gas extraction Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 7: [00:14:30] with the sea level rise and with storms becoming more volatile and surges from the oceans becoming real factors on shorelines. How should communities and nations approach the idea retreating from the ocean? Speaker 4: Well, again, thankful to our brothers and sisters and Europe. [00:15:00] They're several decades ahead of us in asking and answering exactly that question. They've developed three strategies. They look at existing locations. They then examine each of the three strategies to see which makes longterm sense. The first strategy is fight. A good example would be United Kingdom, the tims flood [00:15:30] barrier. Yeah, you might like to move London, but to not gonna move it very quick easily. And so the answer comes back we need to defend, but you only defend what you can defend, which means you don't try and defend the entire coast of England. You defend small parts of it that can be adequately defended. That's the fight strategy. The next one is flight. I call it get [00:16:00] out of dodge city. And so they say we need to stay age, a strategic withdrawal so that we withdrawal slowly surrendering back to the environment which needs to be surrendered back to the environment and eventually we're gone. The next one is freeze. What the mean is we'll occupy it until it's destroyed and then we're gone. As we looked at the coast, New York, [00:16:30] New Jersey after Sandy, I wish we had done some of that thinking. I hope we do some of that thinking for our California Delta. Speaker 7: I was thinking about civil engineering as it's applied in different parts of the world where a nation state is in a different stage of development. And how do you see civil engineering interacting in those environments differently and taking in risk management and how it's applied? Speaker 4: Well, I guess each society [00:17:00] has to go through its own learning experiences. You can always look at other society and say, oh they weren't very smart or they certainly could have done it this way, rather they did it. So we all into the after the game quarterbacking sort of Mo seems like each of these countries societies has to go through its own learning experience. [00:17:30] As I said earlier, those risk assessment and management businesses one damn thing after another and this learning transfer of insight forward seems to be as frustrating and difficult. Speaker 7: So offshore. Let's Speaker 4: talk about the challenges inherent in that. What do you think about the debate about the risk? How should that debate be framed? [00:18:00] The risks are higher, which means that likelihoods failure that you engineer into the system, it would be much lower, have to have backups in defense and depth and people who actually know they're doing the question is, will we in fact do it before we have a disaster? Don't tell me you think it's safe. Show me and demonstrate to me is that demand has not happened here in the u s yet. [00:18:30] I'm very concerned. For us, I think the government changed some of the permitting process. Is that window dressing? What does it have some real impact on how people behave in the field? It depends on geographically where you're ant Alaska has been very demanding at the Alaskan state level relative to oil and gas operations and when you see a signature [00:19:00] go home or permit, you can pretty well bet that there's sufficient documentation demonstration to justify that signature. Speaker 4: Other parts of the u s are less diligent and so it depends geographically where you're at and what you're dealing. Well, it's not actually reasonable to expect to be able to appropriately regulate, govern and industry [00:19:30] as powerful as the oil and gas industry was spotting governance. Governance needs to be consistent and when the signature goes on to a form that says, yes, I have the ability to immediately abate the source of a blow out. You have the ability the fire engine is built, it's in this station with trained people. Let's ring the bell and see if that fire engine can run. That hasn't happened yet. I [00:20:00] remain personally very concerned for these Oltra high risk operations we're considering in the United States wars. Does the same spottiness occur with fracking in terms of the application of best practices, everything up and able to learn is, yes. Speaker 4: By the way, franking has been underway for many decades. Industry actually hit this kind of work underway intensely in the 1970s [00:20:30] it says spottiness we're back to. That becomes crucial if the regulation governance and that's both internal governance within the industry and external governance on behalf of the public. If it is demanding, insightful and capable, we're okay, but if it's not, we're not. Okay. The systems that you have to have an interesting ability to slip to the lowest common denominator. [00:21:00] By this point, my career, I've worked in 73 different countries. I've lived in 11 different countries, I've seen a company I have a lot of respect for at Shell, operate internationally, some areas, gold standard, Norwegian sector, North Sea, and then I go to work with them in Angola. It's not a very good standard at all and [00:21:30] that's because the regulatory environment with local and national Franco relative to oil and gas is very poor, so the system seems to adopt the lowest sort of common denominator. Can. Strong industry requires strong governance to this man at the end of that experience. Bobby, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Very much pleasure for that integration. Speaker 2: [00:22:00] Mm Mm Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 3: If you are interested in a center for catastrophic risk management, visit their website at cc r m. Dot. berkeley.edu Speaker 10: [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 7: Brad swift joints me to present the calendar. Have you ever been interested in learning Mat lab? If so, [00:23:00] this event is for you. Next Wednesday, December 4th math works is sponsoring a technical seminar. Some of the highlights include exploring the fundamentals of the language writing programs to automate your workflow and leveraging tools for efficient program development. This event will take place Wednesday December 4th from nine to 11:00 AM in 100 Lewis Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Make sure to register online@mathworks.com click on [00:23:30] events. Speaker 3: Research on mobile micro robots has been ongoing for the last 20 years, but no micro robots have ever matched the 40 body lengths per second speed of the common ants on our picnic tables and front lawns. Next University of Maryland Speaker 7: Mechanical Engineering Professor Sarah Berg Brighter will discuss the challenges behind micro robotic mobility as well as mechanisms and motors they have designed to enable robot mobility at the insect sized scale. The colloquium is [00:24:00] open to all audiences and will take place on December 4th at 4:00 PM in three Oh six soda hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Every Thursday night, a new adventure unfolds at the California Academy of Sciences. December 5th Cal Academy of Sciences presents its holiday themed. Tis the season nightlife featuring class acts such as slide girls and DJ set by Nathan Blazer of geographer. Whether you're dancing underneath snow flurries in the piazza, or [00:24:30] enjoying the screening of back to the moon for good in the planetarium, this nightlife will be one to remember. Tis the season will take place. Thursday, December 5th from six to 10:00 PM at the California Academy of Sciences located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Remember for this event, you must be 21 years or older, so make sure to bring your ids for alcohol enriched fun. Speaker 7: For more information, go to cal academy.org is the future deterministic [00:25:00] and unalterable or can we shape our future? Marina Corbis suggests the latter. Wednesday, December 12th citrus at UC Berkeley is hosting a talk by executive director of the Institute of the future Marina Corbis. Marina Corpus's research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries. In this talk, she will discuss her research along with her insight to our society's future. The talk will take place Wednesday, December 11th [00:25:30] from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM is the target Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus and now Brad swift joints. Me for the news. UC Berkeley News Center reports the funding of a new institute to help scholars harness big data, the Berkeley Institute for data science to be housed in the campuses. Central Library building is made possible by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, which together pledged 37.8 [00:26:00] million over five years to three universities, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and New York University to foster collaboration in the area of data science. Speaker 7: The goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery with implications for our understanding of the universe, climate and biodiversity research, seismology, neuroscience, human behavior, and many other areas. Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics [00:26:30] and Nobel laureate will be the director of the campuses. New Institute. David Culler, chair of UC Berkeley is the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science and one of the co-principal investigators. The data science grant said computing is not just a tool. It has become an integral part of the scientific process. Josh Greenberg, who directs the Sloan Foundation's digital information technology program said this joint project will work to create examples [00:27:00] at the three universities that demonstrate how an institution wide commitment to data scientists can deliver dramatic gains in scientific productivity. Speaker 3: NASA's newest Mars bound mission maven blasted off while faculty, students and staff assembled at the space sciences laboratory to watch their handiwork head to the red planet. More than half of the instruments of board the spacecraft were built at UC Berkeley. After a 10 month trip, it will settle into Mars orbit in September, 2014 where it will study the remains [00:27:30] of the Martian atmosphere. Maven was designed to find out why Mars lost its atmosphere and water. Scientists believe that Mars once had an atmosphere, oceans and rivers, very similar to Earth. From its Martian orbit. The spacecraft will collect evidence to support or refute the reigning theory that the loss of its magnetic field allowed solar, wind, and solar storms to scour the atmosphere way of operating any water not frozen under the surface. The answer to this question will give planetary scientists a hint of [00:28:00] what the future may bring for other planets, including earth. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:28:30] the music heard during the show was written by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. Speaker 9: [00:29:30] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Berkeley Lab astrophysicists and Nobel laureates, George Smoot and Saul Perlmutter -- joined by Berkeley Lab physicist Eric Linder and UC anthropologist Gerardo Aldana -- explore the cultural and scientific connections between Mayan astronomers and modern cosmologists as they look to the skies for answers to how the universe evolved, how it might end, and our place in it. The fundamental human curiosity about our origins and fate, a quest that persists across time and cultures, has been enriched by recent discoveries about dark energy, the Big Bang, and the accelerating universe. New knowledge has only increased our sense of wonder about the cosmos and deepened our appreciation for what the Mayans achieved using only the naked eye. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Show ID: 25370]

Berkeley Lab astrophysicists and Nobel laureates, George Smoot and Saul Perlmutter -- joined by Berkeley Lab physicist Eric Linder and UC anthropologist Gerardo Aldana -- explore the cultural and scientific connections between Mayan astronomers and modern cosmologists as they look to the skies for answers to how the universe evolved, how it might end, and our place in it. The fundamental human curiosity about our origins and fate, a quest that persists across time and cultures, has been enriched by recent discoveries about dark energy, the Big Bang, and the accelerating universe. New knowledge has only increased our sense of wonder about the cosmos and deepened our appreciation for what the Mayans achieved using only the naked eye. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Show ID: 25370]

Berkeley Lab's Science at the Theater traveled across the Bay to San Francisco's Herbst Theater for a star turn by two of the Lab's Nobel laureates. George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for the "discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." Saul Perlmutter received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." The host for the conversation was KQED's Michael Krasny. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24902]

Berkeley Lab's Science at the Theater traveled across the Bay to San Francisco's Herbst Theater for a star turn by two of the Lab's Nobel laureates. George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for the "discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." Saul Perlmutter received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." The host for the conversation was KQED's Michael Krasny. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24902]

Berkeley Lab's Science at the Theater traveled across the Bay to San Francisco's Herbst Theater for a star turn by two of the Lab's Nobel laureates. George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for the "discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." Saul Perlmutter received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." The host for the conversation was KQED's Michael Krasny. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24902]

Berkeley Lab's Science at the Theater traveled across the Bay to San Francisco's Herbst Theater for a star turn by two of the Lab's Nobel laureates. George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for the "discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." Saul Perlmutter received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." The host for the conversation was KQED's Michael Krasny. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24902]

Berkeley Lab's Science at the Theater traveled across the Bay to San Francisco's Herbst Theater for a star turn by two of the Lab's Nobel laureates. George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for the "discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." Saul Perlmutter received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." The host for the conversation was KQED's Michael Krasny. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24902]

Berkeley Lab's Science at the Theater traveled across the Bay to San Francisco's Herbst Theater for a star turn by two of the Lab's Nobel laureates. George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for the "discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." Saul Perlmutter received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." The host for the conversation was KQED's Michael Krasny. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24902]

Nicholas McConnell, PhD candidate in Astrophysics at UCB summer 2012, and Jeff Silverman, PhD of Astrophysics from UCB in 2011, part one of three, talk about their work with supernovae and black holes. To help analyze astronomy data go to www.galaxyzoo.org or www.planethunters.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology [00:00:30] show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by a spectrum of contributors, Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. Our interview is with Jeff Silverman, a recent phd in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and Nicholas McConnell, a phd [00:01:00] candidate unscheduled to be awarded a phd in astrophysics by UC Berkeley this summer. Jeff and Nicholas have generously agreed to help spectrum present a three part astronomy survey explaining the big ideas, recent experiments, collaborations and improvements in observation technology that are transforming astronomy. This is part two of three and in it we discussed Super Novi and black holes. Jeff, would you please start part two explaining Super Novi [inaudible] Speaker 4: observations [00:01:30] of exploding stars. These supernovae have been going on for thousands of years. Whether or not we knew what we were looking at for most of that time, we now know that those were exploding stars. Something that I did my phd thesis work on as well. I want to talk about a two exploding stars in particular that were found in 2011. The first one I'll talk about was found in late May, early June last year. It was founded by a handful of amateur astronomers, which is they find maybe hundred supernova per year. This has been going on for about a decade [00:02:00] or so. Uh, this one in particular, however, was so young and knew that somebody had emailed somebody who had emailed somebody who had actually tweeted about this new supernova. And so I got forwarded a tweet that said there's a new supernova in this very nearby galaxy and I happen to be using the Keck telescope, one of the biggest optical telescopes in the world, controlling it from UC Berkeley. Speaker 4: Saw this in my inbox. And we pointed at this supernova. We were the first ones to classify what kind of exploding start was confirmed that it was indeed [00:02:30] an exploding star and not some other, uh, asteroid that was just along the line of sight in the way or something else. Uh, and so that was as far as I know, the first time that a supernova was ever classified based on a tweet. The other Supernova, I want to talk about sort of the opposite end of having amateurs looking at a handful of galaxies. I'm part of a large international collaboration known as the Palomar transient factory PTF. And this collaboration uses a telescope down in San Diego to automatically monitor a bunch of these galaxies, [00:03:00] run these big computer programs to try and find if there is a new supernova, new bright spot in any of the images. Speaker 4: And this has been running for about two years now and we've been tweaking the algorithms to get faster and faster detections of these new spots. And so in August of last year there was some images taken in San Diego. Dr Peter Nugent, a professor in the astronomy department, was going through some of the newest candidates of what the computer program spit out and saw what looked like a very good supernova candidate and another very nearby galaxy, [00:03:30] a different one, but about the same distance, 20 or so million light years. We had an image from the night before that was very good and there was absolutely nothing at that position. So this clearly looked like a brand new spot. It couldn't be that old. So he immediately gets on the email list for this international collaboration. This was sort of the afternoon in California, but it was already nighttime in the eastern hemisphere. And we have collaborators who use telescopes in the Canary Islands. Speaker 4: So they point to it. They got not a great observation, but an observation that confirmed there was something there. And it was probably one of these [00:04:00] exploding stars by the time that they had worked on their data and emailed us. It was already nighttime in California and Hawaii. So we had the lick observatory telescopes out in San Jose as well as the Kecks in Hawaii pointing at this and absolutely confirming that it, it was a supernova. And within a few weeks we had already written a bunch of papers looking at the data very carefully. And we had actually found this supernova 11 hours after it exploded. So one of the earliest detections of an exploding star ever. People had speculated what you might [00:04:30] see that early and we actually got to throw out a lot of people's models saying we didn't see these things that you predicted possibly confirming some other predictions at this early time. Speaker 4: And this thing is still bright at its brightest. You could see it in a small backyard telescope are good binoculars from the Oakland hills. Uh, I saw it with my own eyes through a telescope, which was awesome. I think just an amazing, amazing proof of concept or success story of this huge collaboration without the the algorithms to, to run this quickly, we wouldn't have realized it was there until [00:05:00] days later without an international collaboration of friends expanding the globe. We wouldn't have been able to track it and confirm that it was the supernovas so quickly and so early and easily. So if I can ask, what's the biggest mystery about the way stars explode that you help solve by knowing about a supernova? Just a few hours after an explosion is actually happened. We'll solve as a strong word in science, but we can at least help get towards the truth. Speaker 4: As my advisor likes to say, this one that was discovered by the Palomar transient [00:05:30] factory in August is a specific kind of supernova that should have very consistent amount of energy. Sort of, you can think of it as a a hundred watt light bulb. It has the same amount of energy output always basically. So if you see it's very, very faint, it must be very, very far away. If you see it's very, very bright, it must be very, very close because it's sort of each of these objects has the same amount of light coming out of it and so we can measure very accurately how bright they are. We can compare to what we know they should be, how bright they should be, and we get a very accurate distance measurement to [00:06:00] all of these different supernova and figure out very accurate distances. How that distance has changed with time, and this is in fact how the accelerating expansion of the universe was discovered in the late nineties using these types of supernovae, which I will plug did win the Nobel Prize last year for physics and we're all very proud of that. Speaker 4: Saul Perlmutter up at the Berkeley lab was one of the winners and many of our group here at Berkeley and other places have collaborated on those projects over the years. So one thing that we aren't quite sure of, even though these are very, very consistent [00:06:30] explosions, we've observed them for a long time. We don't actually know the details of what stars are involved in the original explosion. We have some idea that a very dense star called a white dwarf made of mostly carbon and oxygen is blowing up. What exactly is around that star that's helping it blow up by actually feeding it some extra material and then pushing it over a limit to explode? We're a little bit unclear and so since this star that is feeding the mass to the white dwarf should be very close by. [00:07:00] They should be right near each other. One of the best ways you're going to observe it is right after the explosion, the explosion goes off. Speaker 4: The light and energy from that explosion could interact with the donor star that's right next door and then very quickly the explosion has expanded much further beyond that neighboring star and then it's sort of just hidden until either much, much later or perhaps never. And so by observing this supernova back in August 11 hours after the explosion and then taking subsequent observations sort of for the following few days, [00:07:30] we could rule out certain ideas of what that other star could be. There are very strong predictions. You should see some extra light in certain ways. If you had a certain type of star sitting there and we didn't see that, so it must be a very small star. Maybe something like the sun, maybe something like two times the mass of the sun. Speaker 2: Nope. This is spectrum k l x Berkeley. And you boys have been talking with Jeff Silverman [00:08:00] and Nicholas McConnell about supernova and black holes. So the Supernova is an issue. Speaker 4: Delusion of carbon and oxygen. You were saying that's great. What's the relationship of those explosions? Supernova to the black holes that were now discovered to be at the heart of every galaxy. So black holes come in a few different flavors, a certain kinds of supernovae uh, not the, the white [00:08:30] door of carbon oxygen ones. I was talking about a different flavor of Supernova that come from very massive stars that have 10 times the mass of the center bigger. They do explode as the different kinds of supernova collapse on themselves and can create black holes. The black holes end up weighing something like a few times the mass of the sun, maybe up to 20, 30 times the mass of the sun at the most. But those are sort of just kind of peppered throughout galaxies. What we've found over the past few decades and did a lot of work on lately is the supermassive black holes that can get up to hundreds of [00:09:00] millions or billions of times as massive as the sun. And those are found in the cores of galaxies as opposed to kind of peppered throughout them. And so there probably is a different formation mechanism that's still a very open question, how you make these giant black holes. But there are many, many orders of magnitude bigger than the ones that come from supernovae. Uh, and, and I'd actually say this is possibly a good segue that some interesting observation, right? Speaker 5: Progress is being made on which the most likely mechanisms are for forming these so-called seed [00:09:30] black holes that eventually grew into the monsters that we now observe at the senators of most galaxies in our own universe, in our current universe. Speaker 4: So was that a big shift then the, the idea of these supermassive black holes, Speaker 5: there's possibly a, a complicated relationship between the black hole at the center of the Galaxy and the galaxy itself, the black holes. Gravity is not sufficient to hold the entire galaxy together even though it is an extremely massive object and very near [00:10:00] to it. There's extremely powerful gravitational forces. Galaxies are so large and so extended that out in the the normal regions of the galaxy out near where the sun orbits in the Milky Way Galaxy. The fact that our Milky Way has a central black hole doesn't have any direct impact on our lives as the sun orbiting in the galaxy. On the other hand, if you consider the life cycle of a black hole starting from when it is formed from some seed object or birth process relatively early in the universe and evolving all the way toward [00:10:30] our present day universe over more than 10 billion years, black holes have very interesting variations in what they're doing over the course of their lifetimes. Speaker 5: In particular, when a black hole comes into proximity with a lot of gas, the gas spirals down and is funnel basically into the black hole and whereas some of the gas goes into the black hole and has never heard from again and increases the mass of the black hole. A lot of the guests on its way down heats up and releases tremendous amounts of light [00:11:00] because it takes time for light to travel. The distance between the object of meeting the light and us some of the furthest and therefore youngest things that we see of corresponding to very early times in the universe are in fact black holes that are swallowing tremendous amounts of gas. And some interesting discoveries that have happened recently is astronomers have been using different observational techniques to push further and further back into the universe's past, finding more and more distant black holes, swallowing [00:11:30] gas and learning about the universe at earlier and earlier times based on these observations. Speaker 5: And I think the current record holder now is a black hole that lived about 800 million years after the big bang, which translates to almost 13 billion years, 13,000 million years before our present day now. So looking that far back in time, we can no, first of all that these tremendous black holes exist that early in the universe. And we [00:12:00] can actually using techniques that follow up on the initial discovery and try to get more detailed analysis of them, we can make estimates of how massive they are. And in the case of the one that occurred when the universe was only 800 million years old, we learned that that black hole is far more massive than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy bowed as massive as some of the most massive black holes that we've observed today. Um, so at least in some cases, black holes appear to have been seated by things that were relatively small, bigger than the tens of solar [00:12:30] masses that Jeff mentioned, but maybe a few thousand solar masses. And yet in the very earliest stage of the universe, they were able to grow tremendously fast and actually gain a ton of mass early in the universe. And then may have lived more peacefully throughout most of the duration of the universe. Speaker 2: You're listening to spectrum on k a l x, Berkeley, 90.7 FM. Today we're talking with Jeff Silverman and [00:13:00] Nicholas McConnell, both astrophysicists. We're discussing supernova. I am black homes. This is part two of a series three. Speaker 5: Another interesting outcome of looking at supermassive black holes early in the universe is it's often easier to see them far away than it is nearby because when they're far away and we see them, that's because they're swallowing a lot of gas. Many of the galaxies in today's universe [00:13:30] don't have gas near their black holes of the black holes are quiet. Uh, and in fact, you have to make very, very precise measurements of stars orbiting in their gravitational field to even know that a black hole is there. So one of the mysteries that had been going around for awhile is if you believe the masses of black holes very early in the universe, and you see these tremendously early things, but you want to know where are they now? They've had 13 billion years to evolve. What kind of galaxy is do these black holes live in today? Speaker 5: [00:14:00] Then you need to look in the nearby universe and try to find their quiet, ancient remnants. And recently, along with a couple other researchers at UC Berkeley, some other researchers around the country, my team discovered the two most massive black holes that we know about in today's universe. Black holes more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun, more than 2000 times the mass of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. And because these are the most massive black holes that we know about in today's universe, [00:14:30] and they're roughly correspond to the estimated masses of the most massive black holes that we observe very, very early in the universe. We think we're beginning to answer the question of what kind of environment do these very young black holes actually end up in after the entire history of the universe between them. If I could ask a question, do you other properties of the galaxies that are now hosting these most massive black holes that are different than other nearby galaxies [00:15:00] that may have less massive black holes, something like the Milky Way size. Speaker 5: One interesting thing about the galaxies that we looked at is that they're also anchoring large galaxy clusters. And so specifically we found the most massive black holes at the centers of galaxy clusters. Now that's not a perfectly robust result because to be perfectly honest, we started by looking in the centers of galaxy clusters. And so we haven't done a wide sample of other galaxies and other environments, but it's possible that there is an environmental effect [00:15:30] based on not only the galaxy that the black hole resides in, but the overall neighborhood of how many galaxies are around that central object that may have something to do with the final massive its black hole. And where do you go with this research now, Nicholas, are there specific experiments? Are you relying on certain data? Where are you drawing this information from? And so we use data from a few different telescopes because these galaxies are distant and we're trying to look at stars in a very [00:16:00] small region of space. Speaker 5: We rely on very large telescopes to give us good light collecting power and good spatial resolution. So we use the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. We also use the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Sheila and there is a telescope in Texas that we've done some work with and we are trying to use these telescopes to find black holes in as many galaxies as the telescope committees will allow us to look at. Uh, so each semester with the generosity of, of getting, observing time, we're able to look at [00:16:30] two or three more galaxies and hopefully over a few years we'll have a good dozen or so objects that we can search directly for the most massive black holes in addition to a few dozen that have been discovered by other teams throughout the world over the last 10 years or so. And that really is one of the big limiting factors, isn't it? Speaker 5: The access to the equipment because there's so much going on in astronomy. Everybody's in the queue. Yeah, that's right. A, just like most scientists apply for amounts of funding from [00:17:00] various organizations, astronomers do that. In addition to applying for telescope time, the oversubscription rates for many of the biggest telescopes, the Hubble space telescope, the Keck telescopes is something like eight to one 10 to one. So the total number of requested hours is something like eight or 10 times the number of nighttime hours. There are in a semester or in a year, so it's, it's very much like a funding situation and there is so many nighttime hours and there's so many telescopes in the world. It's very competitive and we're very lucky when we do get access to [00:17:30] these huge telescopes with amazing instruments and computing power. How does that allocated time work when you want to make observations within a couple of hours of something that you've just heard about? So that's a great question. There's been something that has been used by astronomers over sort of the last decade but really a lot in the last five years called target of observations Speaker 4: too is as we call them and it's sort of in addition to or separate from your standard classically scheduled nights where you will use the telescope on this night. You can [00:18:00] also apply if you have a good science case, which many of us do, especially for these kinds of exploding stars that go off and we want to look at it very quickly, you can apply for time that is allocated through this t o program. And basically what it is is the telescope committees have said, okay, you get so many times to interrupt any observer and say you have to go look at this. And as an observer at that observatory, you know that that's part of the program and that at any point somebody could call you and say, drop what you're doing and go move over to [00:18:30] this. And many times people want to do the best science and are very happy to help out. And oftentimes there'll be offered co-authorship or at least acknowledged to, you know, thanking them for their help. Uh, certainly for these two Supernova I spoke about earlier, we definitely used our target of opportunity and they did turn out to be these very interesting supernovae Speaker 6: [inaudible]. That concludes part two of our astronomy series. Be sure to join us in two weeks [00:19:00] when we discuss dark energy or dark matter. Part three a regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next few weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Kovich join me for the calendar. Speaker 7: The fix-it clinic will be held on Sunday, March 25th at the Lawrence Hall of science in Berkeley from one to 4:00 PM bring your broken non-functioning [00:19:30] things, electronics, appliances, computers, toys, and so on. For assessment, disassembly and possible repair. We'll provide workspace specialty tools and guidance to help you take apart and troubleshoot your item. Whether we fix it or not, you'll learn more about how it was manufactured and how it worked. This is a family friendly event. Children are hardly invited. This event is included in admission to the Lawrence Hall of Science. Speaker 3: The Mount Diablo Astronomical Society [00:20:00] holds its general monthly meetings the fourth Tuesday of each month, except for November and December. At the March 27th meeting, UC Berkeley Professor Jeff Marcy will speak about the future directions in extra solar planet investigations. The meeting begins at 7:15 PM and lasts until 9:30 PM the event will be held at the Concord Police Association facility. Five zero six zero Avi Law road in Concord. The society website is m [00:20:30] d a s. Dot. N. E. T. The computer history museums Speaker for March 28th will be New York Times magazine writer John Gardner who will talk about his book, the idea factory bell labs and the great age of American innovation to cake. Speaker 8: You edis Dave Iverson Bell labs was the most innovative production and research institution from the 1920s to the 1980s at its peak, bell labs employed nearly 15,000 people. [00:21:00] 1200 had PhDs. 13 would go on to win Nobel prizes. These ingenious, often eccentric men would become revolutionaries and sometimes legends, whether for inventing radio astronomy in their spare time and on the company's dime, riding unicycles through the corridors or pioneering the principles that propelled today's technology. Bell labs combined the best aspects of academic and corporate worlds, hiring the brightest and usually the youngest minds creating a culture and even architecture that [00:21:30] forced employees in different fields to work together in virtually complete intellectual freedom with little pressure to create moneymaking innovations in Gartner's portrait. We come to understand why both researchers and business leaders look to bell labs as a model and long to incorporate its magic into their own work. The talk starts at seven at the Computer History Museum, 14 Zero One north shoreline boulevard and mountain view. Visit www.computer history.org to register Speaker 7: [00:22:00] Thursday April 4th from three to 4:00 PM Andy Grove, Co founder and former CEO of Intel will speak on the UC Berkeley campus. His talk is titled of microchips and Men Tales from the translational medicine front. Andy Grove had a major influence on the ascent of micro electronics. Can a similar technological advance be achieved in medicine? He will discuss how we might open the pipeline to get life changing technologies to market without increasing the cost of care. [00:22:30] This event will be at the Sibley auditorium in the Bechdel engineering center. On the UC Berkeley campus. Speaker 8: The Marine Science seminar brings local engineers, physicians, computer programmers, and research scientists to speak to high school students and other interested people. It happens six Wednesdays per semester, seven 30 to 8:30 PM at the Terra Linda High School in San Rafael in the physiology lab. Two zero seven the guests for April 4th to meeting is the lead [00:23:00] of Pixars research and future spectrum guest, Tony rose. He will present on math in the movies. Film making is undergoing a digital revolution brought on by advances in areas such as computer technology, computational physics, geometry, and approximation theory. Using numerous examples drawn from Pixars feature films. This talk will provide a behind the scenes look at the role that math plays in the revolution. Visit www.marinescienceseminar.com [00:23:30] now news with Rick, Lisa and myself last September, the opera experiment located under the Grand Sazo Mountain in central Italy reported measuring neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light from cern in Switzerland. Speaker 8: The Icarus experiment located in meters away from opera has published a preprint on the archive on March 15th showing that neutrinos move at speeds close to the speed of light, but that there is no evidence that they exceeded [00:24:00] opera is measurement was conducted with 10 microsecond pulses while Icarus was conducted with pulses that were only four nanoseconds, 2,500 times shorter. This led to far more accurate timing measurements. Opera head claim neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds before it would be predicted, but scientists had remained skeptical in part due to issues with timing [inaudible], Icarus, LVD, and opera. We'll all be making new measurements with pulse beams from cern in May to give us the final verdict Speaker 7: [00:24:30] according to technology review.com and the I a. E. A website. The disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant a year ago prompted nations that generate atomic power to reexamine the safety of their reactors and even reevaluate their nuclear ambitions. Several countries have completely changed course. Japan has taken offline 52 of its 54 reactors and the future of nuclear power there is extremely uncertain. Germany shutdown seven reactors, [00:25:00] also elected not to restart another that had been down for maintenance and plans to decommission its remaining nine reactors by 2022 Italy, Switzerland and Mexico have each retreated from plans to build new nuclear plants and Belgium's government which took over in 2011 wants to make the country nuclear free by 2025 several other economically developed countries including the u s the United Kingdom and France are still generating roughly the same amount as they were before the Fukushima disaster and maintain [00:25:30] modest plans for future construction of additional reactors. But the future of nuclear power in the developing world is a different story. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency or I, a 45 countries are now considering embarking on nuclear power programs as Vietnam, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Belarus are likely to start building this year and Jordan and Saudi Arabia following in 2013 as of this week, the I a report [00:26:00] 63 new reactors under construction in 15 countries. The top constructors are China with 26 Russia with 10 India with seven and South Korea with three. The remaining 11 countries are building one or two reactors. Speaker 3: Technology review.com reports that researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice and then use it to speak a language that you don't. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more [00:26:30] personal or to make tools for travelers. In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus in early March, Microsoft research scientist Frank soon showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts in a second demonstration soon used his software to grant Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, the ability to speak Mandarin. [00:27:00] Frank soon created the system with his colleagues at Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research lab in Beijing, China. The system needs around an hour of training to develop a model, able to read out any text in a person's own voice. That model is converted into one able to read out text in another language by comparing it with a stock text to speech model for the target language. Individual sounds used by the first model to build up words using a [00:27:30] person's voice and his or her own language are carefully tweaked to give the new texts to speech model, a full ability to sound out phrases. In the second language, someone says that this approach can convert between any pair of 26 languages including Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Italian Speaker 8: nature. News reports that researchers from the University of California, San Francisco and the Howard Hughes Medical Institutions Janelia Farm Research Center [00:28:00] near Ashburn, Virginia. I found that male fruit players are more likely to choose to consume alcohol if they have been sexually rejected by females. The key seems to be in Neuropeptide F, which is generated as a reward for either sex or alcohol consumption. When fly's denied of sex are given neuropeptide f they avoid alcohol and mammals. No transmitter y might act similarly for more information. You can see their article in the March 15th issue of Science Speaker 6: [00:28:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] spectrum shirts are gradually being made available online at iTunes university. Go to itunes.berkeley.edu and click through to Berkeley on iTunes. Then search for Calex 99.7 FM to finer the spectrum podcasts. [inaudible] [00:29:00] music heard during the show is from a low stone at David's album titled the Folk in Houston made available by creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum [00:29:30] dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nicholas McConnell, PhD candidate in Astrophysics at UCB summer 2012, and Jeff Silverman, PhD of Astrophysics from UCB in 2011, part one of three, talk about their work with supernovae and black holes. To help analyze astronomy data go to www.galaxyzoo.org or www.planethunters.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology [00:00:30] show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by a spectrum of contributors, Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. Our interview is with Jeff Silverman, a recent phd in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and Nicholas McConnell, a phd [00:01:00] candidate unscheduled to be awarded a phd in astrophysics by UC Berkeley this summer. Jeff and Nicholas have generously agreed to help spectrum present a three part astronomy survey explaining the big ideas, recent experiments, collaborations and improvements in observation technology that are transforming astronomy. This is part two of three and in it we discussed Super Novi and black holes. Jeff, would you please start part two explaining Super Novi [inaudible] Speaker 4: observations [00:01:30] of exploding stars. These supernovae have been going on for thousands of years. Whether or not we knew what we were looking at for most of that time, we now know that those were exploding stars. Something that I did my phd thesis work on as well. I want to talk about a two exploding stars in particular that were found in 2011. The first one I'll talk about was found in late May, early June last year. It was founded by a handful of amateur astronomers, which is they find maybe hundred supernova per year. This has been going on for about a decade [00:02:00] or so. Uh, this one in particular, however, was so young and knew that somebody had emailed somebody who had emailed somebody who had actually tweeted about this new supernova. And so I got forwarded a tweet that said there's a new supernova in this very nearby galaxy and I happen to be using the Keck telescope, one of the biggest optical telescopes in the world, controlling it from UC Berkeley. Speaker 4: Saw this in my inbox. And we pointed at this supernova. We were the first ones to classify what kind of exploding start was confirmed that it was indeed [00:02:30] an exploding star and not some other, uh, asteroid that was just along the line of sight in the way or something else. Uh, and so that was as far as I know, the first time that a supernova was ever classified based on a tweet. The other Supernova, I want to talk about sort of the opposite end of having amateurs looking at a handful of galaxies. I'm part of a large international collaboration known as the Palomar transient factory PTF. And this collaboration uses a telescope down in San Diego to automatically monitor a bunch of these galaxies, [00:03:00] run these big computer programs to try and find if there is a new supernova, new bright spot in any of the images. Speaker 4: And this has been running for about two years now and we've been tweaking the algorithms to get faster and faster detections of these new spots. And so in August of last year there was some images taken in San Diego. Dr Peter Nugent, a professor in the astronomy department, was going through some of the newest candidates of what the computer program spit out and saw what looked like a very good supernova candidate and another very nearby galaxy, [00:03:30] a different one, but about the same distance, 20 or so million light years. We had an image from the night before that was very good and there was absolutely nothing at that position. So this clearly looked like a brand new spot. It couldn't be that old. So he immediately gets on the email list for this international collaboration. This was sort of the afternoon in California, but it was already nighttime in the eastern hemisphere. And we have collaborators who use telescopes in the Canary Islands. Speaker 4: So they point to it. They got not a great observation, but an observation that confirmed there was something there. And it was probably one of these [00:04:00] exploding stars by the time that they had worked on their data and emailed us. It was already nighttime in California and Hawaii. So we had the lick observatory telescopes out in San Jose as well as the Kecks in Hawaii pointing at this and absolutely confirming that it, it was a supernova. And within a few weeks we had already written a bunch of papers looking at the data very carefully. And we had actually found this supernova 11 hours after it exploded. So one of the earliest detections of an exploding star ever. People had speculated what you might [00:04:30] see that early and we actually got to throw out a lot of people's models saying we didn't see these things that you predicted possibly confirming some other predictions at this early time. Speaker 4: And this thing is still bright at its brightest. You could see it in a small backyard telescope are good binoculars from the Oakland hills. Uh, I saw it with my own eyes through a telescope, which was awesome. I think just an amazing, amazing proof of concept or success story of this huge collaboration without the the algorithms to, to run this quickly, we wouldn't have realized it was there until [00:05:00] days later without an international collaboration of friends expanding the globe. We wouldn't have been able to track it and confirm that it was the supernovas so quickly and so early and easily. So if I can ask, what's the biggest mystery about the way stars explode that you help solve by knowing about a supernova? Just a few hours after an explosion is actually happened. We'll solve as a strong word in science, but we can at least help get towards the truth. Speaker 4: As my advisor likes to say, this one that was discovered by the Palomar transient [00:05:30] factory in August is a specific kind of supernova that should have very consistent amount of energy. Sort of, you can think of it as a a hundred watt light bulb. It has the same amount of energy output always basically. So if you see it's very, very faint, it must be very, very far away. If you see it's very, very bright, it must be very, very close because it's sort of each of these objects has the same amount of light coming out of it and so we can measure very accurately how bright they are. We can compare to what we know they should be, how bright they should be, and we get a very accurate distance measurement to [00:06:00] all of these different supernova and figure out very accurate distances. How that distance has changed with time, and this is in fact how the accelerating expansion of the universe was discovered in the late nineties using these types of supernovae, which I will plug did win the Nobel Prize last year for physics and we're all very proud of that. Speaker 4: Saul Perlmutter up at the Berkeley lab was one of the winners and many of our group here at Berkeley and other places have collaborated on those projects over the years. So one thing that we aren't quite sure of, even though these are very, very consistent [00:06:30] explosions, we've observed them for a long time. We don't actually know the details of what stars are involved in the original explosion. We have some idea that a very dense star called a white dwarf made of mostly carbon and oxygen is blowing up. What exactly is around that star that's helping it blow up by actually feeding it some extra material and then pushing it over a limit to explode? We're a little bit unclear and so since this star that is feeding the mass to the white dwarf should be very close by. [00:07:00] They should be right near each other. One of the best ways you're going to observe it is right after the explosion, the explosion goes off. Speaker 4: The light and energy from that explosion could interact with the donor star that's right next door and then very quickly the explosion has expanded much further beyond that neighboring star and then it's sort of just hidden until either much, much later or perhaps never. And so by observing this supernova back in August 11 hours after the explosion and then taking subsequent observations sort of for the following few days, [00:07:30] we could rule out certain ideas of what that other star could be. There are very strong predictions. You should see some extra light in certain ways. If you had a certain type of star sitting there and we didn't see that, so it must be a very small star. Maybe something like the sun, maybe something like two times the mass of the sun. Speaker 2: Nope. This is spectrum k l x Berkeley. And you boys have been talking with Jeff Silverman [00:08:00] and Nicholas McConnell about supernova and black holes. So the Supernova is an issue. Speaker 4: Delusion of carbon and oxygen. You were saying that's great. What's the relationship of those explosions? Supernova to the black holes that were now discovered to be at the heart of every galaxy. So black holes come in a few different flavors, a certain kinds of supernovae uh, not the, the white [00:08:30] door of carbon oxygen ones. I was talking about a different flavor of Supernova that come from very massive stars that have 10 times the mass of the center bigger. They do explode as the different kinds of supernova collapse on themselves and can create black holes. The black holes end up weighing something like a few times the mass of the sun, maybe up to 20, 30 times the mass of the sun at the most. But those are sort of just kind of peppered throughout galaxies. What we've found over the past few decades and did a lot of work on lately is the supermassive black holes that can get up to hundreds of [00:09:00] millions or billions of times as massive as the sun. And those are found in the cores of galaxies as opposed to kind of peppered throughout them. And so there probably is a different formation mechanism that's still a very open question, how you make these giant black holes. But there are many, many orders of magnitude bigger than the ones that come from supernovae. Uh, and, and I'd actually say this is possibly a good segue that some interesting observation, right? Speaker 5: Progress is being made on which the most likely mechanisms are for forming these so-called seed [00:09:30] black holes that eventually grew into the monsters that we now observe at the senators of most galaxies in our own universe, in our current universe. Speaker 4: So was that a big shift then the, the idea of these supermassive black holes, Speaker 5: there's possibly a, a complicated relationship between the black hole at the center of the Galaxy and the galaxy itself, the black holes. Gravity is not sufficient to hold the entire galaxy together even though it is an extremely massive object and very near [00:10:00] to it. There's extremely powerful gravitational forces. Galaxies are so large and so extended that out in the the normal regions of the galaxy out near where the sun orbits in the Milky Way Galaxy. The fact that our Milky Way has a central black hole doesn't have any direct impact on our lives as the sun orbiting in the galaxy. On the other hand, if you consider the life cycle of a black hole starting from when it is formed from some seed object or birth process relatively early in the universe and evolving all the way toward [00:10:30] our present day universe over more than 10 billion years, black holes have very interesting variations in what they're doing over the course of their lifetimes. Speaker 5: In particular, when a black hole comes into proximity with a lot of gas, the gas spirals down and is funnel basically into the black hole and whereas some of the gas goes into the black hole and has never heard from again and increases the mass of the black hole. A lot of the guests on its way down heats up and releases tremendous amounts of light [00:11:00] because it takes time for light to travel. The distance between the object of meeting the light and us some of the furthest and therefore youngest things that we see of corresponding to very early times in the universe are in fact black holes that are swallowing tremendous amounts of gas. And some interesting discoveries that have happened recently is astronomers have been using different observational techniques to push further and further back into the universe's past, finding more and more distant black holes, swallowing [00:11:30] gas and learning about the universe at earlier and earlier times based on these observations. Speaker 5: And I think the current record holder now is a black hole that lived about 800 million years after the big bang, which translates to almost 13 billion years, 13,000 million years before our present day now. So looking that far back in time, we can no, first of all that these tremendous black holes exist that early in the universe. And we [00:12:00] can actually using techniques that follow up on the initial discovery and try to get more detailed analysis of them, we can make estimates of how massive they are. And in the case of the one that occurred when the universe was only 800 million years old, we learned that that black hole is far more massive than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy bowed as massive as some of the most massive black holes that we've observed today. Um, so at least in some cases, black holes appear to have been seated by things that were relatively small, bigger than the tens of solar [00:12:30] masses that Jeff mentioned, but maybe a few thousand solar masses. And yet in the very earliest stage of the universe, they were able to grow tremendously fast and actually gain a ton of mass early in the universe. And then may have lived more peacefully throughout most of the duration of the universe. Speaker 2: You're listening to spectrum on k a l x, Berkeley, 90.7 FM. Today we're talking with Jeff Silverman and [00:13:00] Nicholas McConnell, both astrophysicists. We're discussing supernova. I am black homes. This is part two of a series three. Speaker 5: Another interesting outcome of looking at supermassive black holes early in the universe is it's often easier to see them far away than it is nearby because when they're far away and we see them, that's because they're swallowing a lot of gas. Many of the galaxies in today's universe [00:13:30] don't have gas near their black holes of the black holes are quiet. Uh, and in fact, you have to make very, very precise measurements of stars orbiting in their gravitational field to even know that a black hole is there. So one of the mysteries that had been going around for awhile is if you believe the masses of black holes very early in the universe, and you see these tremendously early things, but you want to know where are they now? They've had 13 billion years to evolve. What kind of galaxy is do these black holes live in today? Speaker 5: [00:14:00] Then you need to look in the nearby universe and try to find their quiet, ancient remnants. And recently, along with a couple other researchers at UC Berkeley, some other researchers around the country, my team discovered the two most massive black holes that we know about in today's universe. Black holes more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun, more than 2000 times the mass of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. And because these are the most massive black holes that we know about in today's universe, [00:14:30] and they're roughly correspond to the estimated masses of the most massive black holes that we observe very, very early in the universe. We think we're beginning to answer the question of what kind of environment do these very young black holes actually end up in after the entire history of the universe between them. If I could ask a question, do you other properties of the galaxies that are now hosting these most massive black holes that are different than other nearby galaxies [00:15:00] that may have less massive black holes, something like the Milky Way size. Speaker 5: One interesting thing about the galaxies that we looked at is that they're also anchoring large galaxy clusters. And so specifically we found the most massive black holes at the centers of galaxy clusters. Now that's not a perfectly robust result because to be perfectly honest, we started by looking in the centers of galaxy clusters. And so we haven't done a wide sample of other galaxies and other environments, but it's possible that there is an environmental effect [00:15:30] based on not only the galaxy that the black hole resides in, but the overall neighborhood of how many galaxies are around that central object that may have something to do with the final massive its black hole. And where do you go with this research now, Nicholas, are there specific experiments? Are you relying on certain data? Where are you drawing this information from? And so we use data from a few different telescopes because these galaxies are distant and we're trying to look at stars in a very [00:16:00] small region of space. Speaker 5: We rely on very large telescopes to give us good light collecting power and good spatial resolution. So we use the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. We also use the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Sheila and there is a telescope in Texas that we've done some work with and we are trying to use these telescopes to find black holes in as many galaxies as the telescope committees will allow us to look at. Uh, so each semester with the generosity of, of getting, observing time, we're able to look at [00:16:30] two or three more galaxies and hopefully over a few years we'll have a good dozen or so objects that we can search directly for the most massive black holes in addition to a few dozen that have been discovered by other teams throughout the world over the last 10 years or so. And that really is one of the big limiting factors, isn't it? Speaker 5: The access to the equipment because there's so much going on in astronomy. Everybody's in the queue. Yeah, that's right. A, just like most scientists apply for amounts of funding from [00:17:00] various organizations, astronomers do that. In addition to applying for telescope time, the oversubscription rates for many of the biggest telescopes, the Hubble space telescope, the Keck telescopes is something like eight to one 10 to one. So the total number of requested hours is something like eight or 10 times the number of nighttime hours. There are in a semester or in a year, so it's, it's very much like a funding situation and there is so many nighttime hours and there's so many telescopes in the world. It's very competitive and we're very lucky when we do get access to [00:17:30] these huge telescopes with amazing instruments and computing power. How does that allocated time work when you want to make observations within a couple of hours of something that you've just heard about? So that's a great question. There's been something that has been used by astronomers over sort of the last decade but really a lot in the last five years called target of observations Speaker 4: too is as we call them and it's sort of in addition to or separate from your standard classically scheduled nights where you will use the telescope on this night. You can [00:18:00] also apply if you have a good science case, which many of us do, especially for these kinds of exploding stars that go off and we want to look at it very quickly, you can apply for time that is allocated through this t o program. And basically what it is is the telescope committees have said, okay, you get so many times to interrupt any observer and say you have to go look at this. And as an observer at that observatory, you know that that's part of the program and that at any point somebody could call you and say, drop what you're doing and go move over to [00:18:30] this. And many times people want to do the best science and are very happy to help out. And oftentimes there'll be offered co-authorship or at least acknowledged to, you know, thanking them for their help. Uh, certainly for these two Supernova I spoke about earlier, we definitely used our target of opportunity and they did turn out to be these very interesting supernovae Speaker 6: [inaudible]. That concludes part two of our astronomy series. Be sure to join us in two weeks [00:19:00] when we discuss dark energy or dark matter. Part three a regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next few weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Kovich join me for the calendar. Speaker 7: The fix-it clinic will be held on Sunday, March 25th at the Lawrence Hall of science in Berkeley from one to 4:00 PM bring your broken non-functioning [00:19:30] things, electronics, appliances, computers, toys, and so on. For assessment, disassembly and possible repair. We'll provide workspace specialty tools and guidance to help you take apart and troubleshoot your item. Whether we fix it or not, you'll learn more about how it was manufactured and how it worked. This is a family friendly event. Children are hardly invited. This event is included in admission to the Lawrence Hall of Science. Speaker 3: The Mount Diablo Astronomical Society [00:20:00] holds its general monthly meetings the fourth Tuesday of each month, except for November and December. At the March 27th meeting, UC Berkeley Professor Jeff Marcy will speak about the future directions in extra solar planet investigations. The meeting begins at 7:15 PM and lasts until 9:30 PM the event will be held at the Concord Police Association facility. Five zero six zero Avi Law road in Concord. The society website is m [00:20:30] d a s. Dot. N. E. T. The computer history museums Speaker for March 28th will be New York Times magazine writer John Gardner who will talk about his book, the idea factory bell labs and the great age of American innovation to cake. Speaker 8: You edis Dave Iverson Bell labs was the most innovative production and research institution from the 1920s to the 1980s at its peak, bell labs employed nearly 15,000 people. [00:21:00] 1200 had PhDs. 13 would go on to win Nobel prizes. These ingenious, often eccentric men would become revolutionaries and sometimes legends, whether for inventing radio astronomy in their spare time and on the company's dime, riding unicycles through the corridors or pioneering the principles that propelled today's technology. Bell labs combined the best aspects of academic and corporate worlds, hiring the brightest and usually the youngest minds creating a culture and even architecture that [00:21:30] forced employees in different fields to work together in virtually complete intellectual freedom with little pressure to create moneymaking innovations in Gartner's portrait. We come to understand why both researchers and business leaders look to bell labs as a model and long to incorporate its magic into their own work. The talk starts at seven at the Computer History Museum, 14 Zero One north shoreline boulevard and mountain view. Visit www.computer history.org to register Speaker 7: [00:22:00] Thursday April 4th from three to 4:00 PM Andy Grove, Co founder and former CEO of Intel will speak on the UC Berkeley campus. His talk is titled of microchips and Men Tales from the translational medicine front. Andy Grove had a major influence on the ascent of micro electronics. Can a similar technological advance be achieved in medicine? He will discuss how we might open the pipeline to get life changing technologies to market without increasing the cost of care. [00:22:30] This event will be at the Sibley auditorium in the Bechdel engineering center. On the UC Berkeley campus. Speaker 8: The Marine Science seminar brings local engineers, physicians, computer programmers, and research scientists to speak to high school students and other interested people. It happens six Wednesdays per semester, seven 30 to 8:30 PM at the Terra Linda High School in San Rafael in the physiology lab. Two zero seven the guests for April 4th to meeting is the lead [00:23:00] of Pixars research and future spectrum guest, Tony rose. He will present on math in the movies. Film making is undergoing a digital revolution brought on by advances in areas such as computer technology, computational physics, geometry, and approximation theory. Using numerous examples drawn from Pixars feature films. This talk will provide a behind the scenes look at the role that math plays in the revolution. Visit www.marinescienceseminar.com [00:23:30] now news with Rick, Lisa and myself last September, the opera experiment located under the Grand Sazo Mountain in central Italy reported measuring neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light from cern in Switzerland. Speaker 8: The Icarus experiment located in meters away from opera has published a preprint on the archive on March 15th showing that neutrinos move at speeds close to the speed of light, but that there is no evidence that they exceeded [00:24:00] opera is measurement was conducted with 10 microsecond pulses while Icarus was conducted with pulses that were only four nanoseconds, 2,500 times shorter. This led to far more accurate timing measurements. Opera head claim neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds before it would be predicted, but scientists had remained skeptical in part due to issues with timing [inaudible], Icarus, LVD, and opera. We'll all be making new measurements with pulse beams from cern in May to give us the final verdict Speaker 7: [00:24:30] according to technology review.com and the I a. E. A website. The disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant a year ago prompted nations that generate atomic power to reexamine the safety of their reactors and even reevaluate their nuclear ambitions. Several countries have completely changed course. Japan has taken offline 52 of its 54 reactors and the future of nuclear power there is extremely uncertain. Germany shutdown seven reactors, [00:25:00] also elected not to restart another that had been down for maintenance and plans to decommission its remaining nine reactors by 2022 Italy, Switzerland and Mexico have each retreated from plans to build new nuclear plants and Belgium's government which took over in 2011 wants to make the country nuclear free by 2025 several other economically developed countries including the u s the United Kingdom and France are still generating roughly the same amount as they were before the Fukushima disaster and maintain [00:25:30] modest plans for future construction of additional reactors. But the future of nuclear power in the developing world is a different story. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency or I, a 45 countries are now considering embarking on nuclear power programs as Vietnam, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Belarus are likely to start building this year and Jordan and Saudi Arabia following in 2013 as of this week, the I a report [00:26:00] 63 new reactors under construction in 15 countries. The top constructors are China with 26 Russia with 10 India with seven and South Korea with three. The remaining 11 countries are building one or two reactors. Speaker 3: Technology review.com reports that researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice and then use it to speak a language that you don't. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more [00:26:30] personal or to make tools for travelers. In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus in early March, Microsoft research scientist Frank soon showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts in a second demonstration soon used his software to grant Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, the ability to speak Mandarin. [00:27:00] Frank soon created the system with his colleagues at Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research lab in Beijing, China. The system needs around an hour of training to develop a model, able to read out any text in a person's own voice. That model is converted into one able to read out text in another language by comparing it with a stock text to speech model for the target language. Individual sounds used by the first model to build up words using a [00:27:30] person's voice and his or her own language are carefully tweaked to give the new texts to speech model, a full ability to sound out phrases. In the second language, someone says that this approach can convert between any pair of 26 languages including Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Italian Speaker 8: nature. News reports that researchers from the University of California, San Francisco and the Howard Hughes Medical Institutions Janelia Farm Research Center [00:28:00] near Ashburn, Virginia. I found that male fruit players are more likely to choose to consume alcohol if they have been sexually rejected by females. The key seems to be in Neuropeptide F, which is generated as a reward for either sex or alcohol consumption. When fly's denied of sex are given neuropeptide f they avoid alcohol and mammals. No transmitter y might act similarly for more information. You can see their article in the March 15th issue of Science Speaker 6: [00:28:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] spectrum shirts are gradually being made available online at iTunes university. Go to itunes.berkeley.edu and click through to Berkeley on iTunes. Then search for Calex 99.7 FM to finer the spectrum podcasts. [inaudible] [00:29:00] music heard during the show is from a low stone at David's album titled the Folk in Houston made available by creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum [00:29:30] dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Saul Perlmutter. Supernova, Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe with introduction by Dr Eng Lim Goh - Chief Technology Officer, SGI

Granskningen för tre år sedan verkar ha lett till förändringar inom nobelkommittéerna och Nobelföretagen. Avslöjandena handlade bland annat om bjudresor till Kina och om en professor som arbetade för Astra Zeneca samtidigt som han satt i medicinkommittén och röstade fram nobelpriset som gick till upptäckten av att HPV-viruset ger livmoderhalscancer. Astra Zenca hade utvecklat ett vaccin mot HPV. Staffan Normark som är kungliga Vetenskapsakademins ständige sekreterare och sitter i Nobelstiftelsens styrelse säger att man efter rapporteringen skärpt reglerna och ger som exempel att man inte ska sitta i ett bolags styrelse som kan gynnas av ett pris och samtidigt rösta och att han välkommnar att vi uppmärksammade bristerna. Två veckor har gått av de internationella klimatförhandlingarna i FN:s regi i sydafrikanska Durban. Den stora frågan har varit hur världen ska kunna minska sina utsläpp av växthusgaser för att på så vis kunna undvika en katastrofal klimatförändring. Nu tar mötet slut och stämningen är dyster, rapporterar Malin Olofsson, Sveriges Radios utsända. Lars Broström har besökt nobelpristagarna Saul Perlmutter i Kalifornien och Bruce Beutler i Texas. Två olika forskningsmiljöer, den ena rik på kreativitet, den andra på pengar. Imorgon är det alltså dags för utdelningen av årets Nobelpris i Konserthuset i Stockhholm - men en av pristagarna fattas. Ralph Steinman, mottagare av ena halvan av årets medicinpris, avled i cancer bara några dagar före nobelkomitténs tillkännagivande. Hans pris tas emot av hustrun Claudia - och för hela familjen Steinman har tiden efter faderns död varit omtumlande. Det berättar Lesley Steinman, som vår reporter Therese Bergstedt fick tag på mitt under nobelyran.

2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Special. In this show, we talk supernovae, cosmic acceleration, dark energy and the history and implications of this year's physics award to Perlmutter, Schmidt, and Riess, with Professor Ofer Lahav.

Listen to the announcement of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Following the formal announcement comes an explanation of the research, which tracked type Ia supernovae to discover that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, and a phone conversation with new Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt

Meet one of the three winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, Lawrence Berkeley Lab astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter. He explains how dark energy, which makes up 70 percent of the universe, is causing our universe to expand.