Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist and one of the bloggers at Cosmic Variance, gave a talk at The Amaz!ng Meeting 2012 in July, regarding the nature of scientific unknowns and how this translates to our confidence in physical reality. The video of his talk is now available online, and I’m embedding it here, because it’s a damn good one. Atheists and secular humanists don’t have priests, but there are a few people who are solidly inspirational anyway, and Carroll is one of them.
By doing this, I know, I just dragged the page loading times down into the gutter, since YouTube’s thumbnail server sucks royally, but again, it’s worth it. Carroll is remarkably good at distilling things down into very efficient dialogue, and while little of the content is new to any serious skeptic, the approach may well be, and fosters the ability to communicate a different perspective, always a valuable tool. I also have to give him credit for suddenly making it clear to me what Feynman Diagrams illustrate…
He planted a couple of other ideas that will appear in at least one forthcoming blog post, as well, specifically an expansion of the whole ‘meaning‘ question. And the ‘universe is made of stories’ concept deserves some examination too. Wouldn’t it be great if even one television program could elicit this kind of contemplation?
I will also admit to some jealousy that he has more titles is his list of favorite blog posts, I think, than I have throughout this site…