8. Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan — Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal The Cosmos
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2016
⏱️ 93 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan is a cosmologist and theoretical astrophysicist from Yale University, specializing in dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. She also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship of the Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is passionate about sharing science with the general public and in her new book she provides a tour of the "greatest hits" of cosmological discoveries—the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan is at the forefront of this research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. In the book, she not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance. The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations |
| 0:10.4 | with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time. |
| 0:17.0 | I thought maybe before we get into the book, which we will, of course, in great detail, |
| 0:24.8 | maybe you could give us a little bit of your pathway from India and into the sciences where |
| 0:30.3 | you did your work, how you got interested in cosmology and physics and so forth. |
| 0:35.0 | So first of all, thank you for inviting me and delighted to be here. |
| 0:39.7 | So first of all, Californiaian sun is amazing. |
| 0:43.0 | It's gray and gloomy in Connecticut and cold already. |
| 0:46.0 | So I grew up in India, my parents are academics, |
| 0:51.0 | and I was a very curious and sort of inquisitive child and I guess the sort of you know turning moment |
| 0:59.6 | there isn't really one moment when things, you know, you fall in love with science. |
| 1:06.0 | But for me it was possibly the time that I looked through a telescope for the first time. |
| 1:12.7 | And before that, when I was a young kid, |
| 1:15.4 | so my parents lived in this house, |
| 1:16.9 | which had a very large garden in the back, |
| 1:19.4 | and the water would be, they would have water would be shut off for most of the day |
| 1:25.6 | and it would be three hours or something that they would, you would have water. |
| 1:28.7 | So you would have to store it. |
| 1:30.1 | So there were these water tanks behind the house, little tanks in which we would store the water for watering the garden. |
| 1:36.0 | And I vividly remember this, that I would be doing experiments, science experiments, by dunking into the tanks. |
| 1:46.3 | And I would dunk in with different dolls and toys and see what floated and you know, it sort |
| 1:51.8 | of figure out |
... |
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