In “Scientists Who Turned the World Upside Down,” mathematician Bart Adrian takes audience members on a trip through the history of game-changing discoveries by Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Richardson and Lorenz – but not always the breakthroughs you’ve heard about. Feel first-hand what radical idea Galileo discovered without a telescope. Take a spin, courtesy of Sir Isaac Newton and see what angular momentum is all about. Find out who Edward Lorenz and Lewis Richardson were, and then explore the scientific concept of stability in a demonstration with a tennis ball and a large salad bowl. Finally, Bart leads an investigation of the “missing mass” that Albert Einstein referred to in his famous description of the relationship between energy and mass, E = mc2.
A Survey of Spacetime
Jolien Creighton — Geometry was invented to measure the Earth—to survey plots of land and to find distances between towns. We now use the same surveying methods to measure the distances to stars and the shape of the universe. But geometry is now understood to be the essence of space and time and the origin of gravity. Ripples in the geometry of spacetime produced by colliding black holes or by the big bang are now being sought with new types of observatories that are giving us our most precise survey of spacetime.
Space, Time, Einstein, and Spacetime
Beginning with the flat earth of Ancient Egypt, where tax collectors developed the principles of geometry, John L. Friedman moves through the centuries to show us how science has effected our understanding of concepts such as up or down, of two events happening in the same place at the same time, of space as being flat, and also our sense of what is in the past and what is in the future. Suitable for use at both the high-school and college levels, “Space, Time, Einstein, and Spacetime” provides a fascinating twist on how science has changed how we understand the physical universe.
No Exit! Black Holes, Neutron Stars, and Gravitational Collapse
The sun, moon, and stars are brought to earth in vivid action in this look at the physics of our universe. Professor John Friedman, a world-recognized expert in relativistic astrophysics and quantum gravity, takes the highly complex — the speed of light; the role of electrons, protons, and neutrons in the life cycle of a star; and the workings if a black hole — and makes it both accessible and interesting.