Perimeter Institute brings great thinkers from around the world to Canada to share their ideas on a wide variety of interesting and topical subjects. These lectures and debates are aimed at non-specialists. No mathematical or scientific knowledge is necessary or assumed. Each event is explicitly tailored for the general public and everyone is welcome to attend.
Based on her book, The Calculus Diaries, join, Jennifer Ouellette as she shows how calculus can be applied to everything from gas mileage, diet, the rides at Disneyland, surfing in Hawaii, shooting craps in Vegas and warding off zombies. Even the mathematically challenged, can-and-should learn the fundamentals of the universal language.
What is time? Is our perception of time passing an illusion which hides a deeper, timeless reality? Or is it real, indeed, the most real aspect of our experience of the world? Einstein said that "the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion," and many contemporary theorists agree that time emerges from a more fundamental timeless quantum universe. But, in recent cosmological speculation, this timeless picture of nature seems to have reached a dead end, populated by infinite numbers of imagined unobservable universes.
Gravitational waves are "ripples of space-time" that were predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity almost a century ago. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) now pushes the frontiers of science and engineering to try and catch these waves for the first time. This will allow us to explore the last dance of pairs of neutron stars colliding to give birth to a black hole and other astrophysical events in a way humans never have before. Dr.
Curiosity is often said to drive science, but until the seventeenth century – the age of
the so-called Scientific Revolution – it was regarded with suspicion and
condemnation. What happened to liberate curiosity? Why did no question seem too
vast or trivial to be ruled out of bounds? And what does the freedom to be
curious really mean for science today?
Albert Einstein wrote that “The most beautiful experience we can
have is the mysterious.” In his talk, Dr. Epp will explore how the process of
science—wonder & curiosity coupled with imagination & reasoning—has led
to some of the greatest discoveries and deepest mysteries about the structure,
evolution and origin of the universe. This
lecture will celebrate the power of science to deepen our sense of cosmic
wonder as we stand before the present-day mysteries of Dark Matter, Dark Energy
and the Big Bang.
