The Big Bang to Humans: Purpose & Meaning in an Expanding and Evolving Universe | Prof. Karin Öberg

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given on September 14, 2022 at Iowa State University. For more information please visit thomisticinstitute.org About the Speaker: Karin Öberg is Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. Her specialty is astrochemistry and her research aims to uncover how chemical processes affect the outcome of planet formation, especially the chemical habitability of nascent planets. Dr. Öberg obtained her B.Sc. in chemistry at Caltech in 2005, and her Ph.D. in astronomy, with a thesis focused on laboratory astrochemistry, from Leiden University in 2009. She did postdoctoral work at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a NASA Hubble fellow, focusing on millimeter observations of planet-forming disks around young stars. In 2013 she joined the Harvard astronomy faculty as an assistant professor. She was promoted and named the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor in Astronomy in 2016, and promoted to full professor with tenure in 2017. Dr. Öberg’s research in astrochemistry has been recognized with a Sloan fellowship, a Packard fellowship, the Newton Lacy Pierce Award from the American Astronomical Society, and a Simons fellowship. Her recent TED talk explaining some of her research can be found here https://www.ted.com/talks/karin_oberg_the_galactic_recipe_for_a_living_planet

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:10.6	So what I want to talk about, as the title would suggest, is on the one hand, what the scientific method has taught us about what kind of universe
0:23.6	that we live in. And especially I want to talk about sort of four very successful,
0:30.6	mostly, scientific principles or ideas. That's the Big Bang Theory explaining the beginning of our universe and what the cosmos is like.
0:41.3	It's the basic laws of physics, the things like Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetism, and how that explains the formations of stars and planets.
0:52.3	It's the loss of chemistry and how that might
0:57.0	end up explaining the origins of life.
0:59.0	And it is the principle of Darwinian evolution
1:03.0	and how that has led to the kind of animals,
1:06.0	including our own animal body here on Earth.
1:09.0	So these are four, so the very,
1:11.2	for big developments in the past 100 to 200 years in science,
1:18.7	that are often put in opposition with a more traditional cosmology
1:23.4	that is imbued with meaning and purpose.
1:26.2	So the goal of this lecture is to try to bring them back together,
1:31.3	and let's see how we succeed with that.
1:35.3	But the image that I want you to have in the back of your head,
1:42.3	the image that I want you to have in the back of your head, the image that I want you to have in the back of your head,
1:45.4	the image that I will be carrying with me, is the image just presented in Dante's divine
1:50.8	comedy. For those of you who have read it or heard about it, the final book, Paradisio, is when
1:56.9	the pilgrim enters up through the different heavenly sphere. So we're in Aristotelian cosmology.
	...

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