Just found this - incredible stuff!

[johnb]

[QUOTE=Gordon;269399]Not sure about the drums!! /QUOTE]

Feynmann playing the bongo drums: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=HKTSa...%3DHKTSaezB4p8
or http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qWabhnt91Uc

I agree with what you say about BC, though no doubt the producers are responsible for the style on the programmes. And, importantly, he has certainly raised the profile of science on the TV.

PS There are quite a few clips of Feynmann talking about physics on YouTube, something I hadn't realised.

[johncorrigan]

PS There are quite a few clips of Feynmann talking about physics on YouTube, something I hadn't realised.

The first time I heard about overtone singing was in this wonderful Horizon from ages ago about Richard Feynmann - it's here in 5 parts about his planned trip to Tannu Tuva - what a wonderful human being.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5Pgmx2WCsY

[johnb]

There is a programme on BBC2 this evening at 9:00pm which portrays Feynmann's role in the enquiry into the Challanger disaster.

It should be well worth watching.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

indeed! thanks for the pointer - it stars William Hurt as Feynman according to Tgraf

[johnb]

indeed! thanks for the pointer - it stars William Hurt as Feynman according to Tgraf

Ye Gods, that's pretty ominous - I was hoping to see the man himself.

Going by Google, Images William Hurt looks very bland - more suited to playing a bureaucrat than someone like Feynmann:

Richard Feynmann

William Hurt

[Gordon]

I was hoping to see the man himself.

I think there is some footage [You Tube?] of the actual press conference at which RF used a glass of iced water to demonstrate the effect of cold on the shuttle seals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAi_9quzUY

[johncorrigan]

Going by Google, Images William Hurt looks very bland - more suited to playing a bureaucrat than someone like Feynmann:

I thought Hurt made a very credible Feynmann, world weary about Washington politics - it played out like an old X-files episode at times but I had been unaware that he was being fed clues along the way - very enjoyable film about a fascinating man.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

most enjoyable ...

[johnb]

I've just noticed that there is a programme about "The Fantastic Mr Feynman" on BBC2 tomorrow at 21:30.

Feynman was a remarkable physicist and a brilliant communicator - not just of woolly 'big ideas' but of core physics and science.

Do watch if you get a chance.

(A repeat of "The Challenger" is also being broadcast, immediately before the programme on Feynman.)

[Bryn]

The idea of the "Big Bang" is itself decades old, first suggested by Fred Hoyle who was a Steady State man anyway! It has been studied and has evolved into a much deeper concept since the 1950s, the "bounce" being one strand of that thread.

Whilst the idea of a spatial beginning is just about tangible for human experience to get some understanding of, the "beginning" of Time I find much more difficult and no book by the magi of the business [eg Hawking and Penrose et al] has ever given me any sensible insight. The Bounce idea seems like a fudge to avoid this issue. An extended Bounce could be seen as the multiverse notion where time pervades all [?] but the spatial domain gets quantised into mutually inaccessible [?maybe] regions. This universe could have been a belch out of another but that simply extends the origin problem further.

Time seems a different entity from space and is all around and inexorable [unless you are a photon] but Einstein says that an understanding of the world can only be improved by considering them as "equals", at least mathematically.

I don't share Dave's difficulty with a spatial origin at a "point" because it does seem that the universe has a considerable degree of isotropy eg the MBR even though in its early stages it may not have been so uniform. The singularity has always been the bane of cosmology.

Who's to say that time flows at the same rate everywhere [it doesn't we know near massive objects] and wasa second at the beginning the same as a second today? If the origin was a very large concentration of energy [=mass?] then couldn't time naturally be at a standstill at that moment? Einstein implies that once space is finite then time must start to flow?

I'd be interested in what Vile Consort has to say on this one!

Not easy to see where to post this, but https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-penrose-nobel