20 January 2013

Weekend Video: What is Time?


One question that boggles the mind of physicists is the question, What is time? Time is experienced by everyone and everything in the Universe. Everyone has an innate notion of what it is but when it comes to science, something as simple as time can be very complicated to explain and understand.

Einstein in his theories of relativity has proven that time can slow down or even speed up. He theorized that two factors can influence the passage of time; motion and gravity. But can time, as all dimensions do, go in the reverse direction? What is the significance of space-time?

In this video, an episode of the PBS series, The Fabric of the Cosmos, well known physicist Brian Greene, shows us how scientists are trying to study and understand the concept of time.

Brian Greene is an American theoretical physicist and a proponent of string theory. He is a well known science communicator specializing on popularizing theoretical physics, in particular string theory and the search for a unified theory of physics.

He has written many books on the subject and his first book, The Elegance of the Universe was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a TV series in which it won the 2003 Peabody Award.

Greene has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996.

Video: The Illusion of Time


The video above is part of a four hour series and is based on his second book, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality.

A Program Description of the Show:

Brian Greene is going to let you in on a secret: We've all been deceived. Our perceptions of time and space have led us astray. Much of what we thought we knew about our universe—that the past has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that exists—just might be wrong.

Interweaving provocative theories, experiments, and stories with crystal-clear explanations and imaginative metaphors like those that defined the groundbreaking and highly acclaimed series "The Elegant Universe," "The Fabric of the Cosmos" aims to be the most compelling, visual, and comprehensive picture of modern physics ever seen on television.

RELATED LINKS

The Fabric of the Cosmos
Brian Greene
Light Pulses From Quark Gluon Plasma To Accurately Measure Time in Septillionths of a Second
What is String Theory?
What Is Antimatter?
CERN Announces Discovery of Higgs Boson
Brain Neurons In The Lateral Intraparietal Area Discovered To Keep Track Of Time
Photonic Chip Using Quantum Nonlocality To Explain Wave Particle Duality
How the Hippies Saved Physics, A Book About California Physicists in the 1970s Is Physics World's Book of the Year
Simulating Molecules Through Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics
Famous Scientists of the 21st Century