As a TED fan, I love watching the videos on the main site, but I love sharing them with my friends and family even more. This is why, after more than a year of regularly sharing videos via Facebook, I was quite disappointed when I told everyone that I’d gotten the license to hold TEDxRochester. Their response of “What’s TED?” was a bit unexpected.
I hadn’t intended to share any videos on this blog as I figure most visitors to the site have already seen as many as I have. But, last night, I finally got around to watching “George Smoot on the design of the universe“. As a lifelong astronomy geek, I’m really not sure why it took so long for me to finally watch it, but I’ve already watched it twice to make up for it.
Mr. Smoot’s talk is a fascinating and detailed overview of what we know about the nature and structure of the universe and how we’ve learned it. Starting about 10 minutes in, though, the real action starts as an animation of a tour of the universe. It begins far out at the edges and moves slowly inward to zoom in on a super cluster of galaxies. This is easily the most exhilarating view of our universe I’ve ever seen. It is humbling in its simple visualization of the scales involved…scales I once thought I understood.
My own love of science began at a very young age, and that spark was fanned when I was ten and a charismatic poet named Carl Sagan expanded my consciousness via a series called Cosmos. A scientific dilettante, astronomy was always my first love. But, even after all of these years, nothing in my imagination or experience could compare to the grandeur and majesty glimpsed in George’s animation.
In the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes a torture device called the Total Perspective Vortex:
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”
George Smoot has given me an indication of what it must be like inside that insidious machine. When the talk was over, I sat and just stared at the screen, my mind unable to come back to the base reality it deals with every day. Being this powerful when viewed on a small, two-dimensional display I can easily understand how someone placed in that terrible machine would lose their minds.
This is hands down one of my most favorite talks I’ve seen so far. And for that reason, I decided to share it via the blog. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Geva Theatre Center
RACF
RIT