Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Brian Greene at TED 2005

The TED talks are constantly giving an arenea to breathtaking ideas, and outstanding speakers. Indeed of the spokespeople in string theory, they don't come much more audience friendly than Brian Greene. In this 20 minute talk Brian gives a very quick overview of where string theory came from and where it may be going. Of course he glosses over technicalities which many may argue about and my views are less positive in terms of seeing extra dimensions at CERN than he makes out, but it's still one of the clearest explanations of the subject in such a short time than I've seen online.

Having had a large number of couchsurfers here over the last couple of months I've been trying to refine my explanation of what I do, something which I repeat with some frequency these days. People seem to nod at the right times and claim that they understand the idea, if not the details - well, that's pretty good in my book.

Anyway, the above video is worth a watch if you know nothing about the subject of string theory, or want a few tips on good techniques for explaining science to the public.

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