Graham Farmelo: The Universe Speaks In Numbers ​(#199)

Graham Farmelo is an award-winning biographer and science writer. Based in London, he is a Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge and a regular visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was a lecturer in physics at the Open University, 1977-1990. Briefly the youngest tenured academic in the UK. Quickly specialized as a teacher, chaired the team that produced the Science Foundation Course in the late 1980s and conceived its inter-disciplinary science course ‘Science Matters’.

Farmelo is author of 'The Universe Speaks in Numbers', published in May 2019. It explores the relationship between mathematics and the search for the laws of physics, and highlights the contributions of several theoretical physicists, natural philosophers and mathematicians, notably Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon Laplace, James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac.

Farmelo's Dirac biography ‘The Strangest Man’ won the 2009 Costa Prize for Biography[1] and the 2009 'Los Angeles Times Science and Technology Book Prize'.[2] The book was chosen by Physics World as the physics book of the year in 2009,[3] when it was selected as one of Nature’s books of the year.

Farmelo's 2013 book 'Churchill's Bomb' focuses on Winston Churchill's role in British nuclear research 1939-53, with hitherto unpublished information on its influence by Churchill's science adviser Frederick Lindemann. The book emphasizes conflicts between scientific opportunity and political direction. Farmelo is critical of Churchill's wavering attention and changes of policy as he aged.

https://grahamfarmelo.com/

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:02:12 Do we need a theory of everything?
• 00:04:33 Fundamental Physics is a small part of the whole field.
• 00:06:55 What is the mathematical language of the Universe? Intergers? Rationale numbers? Other?
• 00:10:10 We're at an odd time in physics! The standard model works better than expected!
• 00:16:21 Never say never! What is untestable today may be testable tomorrow.
• 00:17:04 Bridging Maxwell, Yang-Mills and Chern-Simons and the view of Ed Witten
• 00:24:19 Is there a role for "beauty" in physics and math?
• 00:26:50 What rubric could be used to grade candidates for theories of everything?
• 00:32:22 How to break the standard model.
• 00:38:41 Is string theory already falsified? What can it tell us now?
• 00:47:57 How do you engage young people to get inspired in physics today? Where should our resources go?
• 00:52:51 What mysteries are you currently most engaged with? What did Freeman Dyson mean to you?
• 00:58:14 Discussing Nima Arkani-Hamed.
• 01:04:00 What do you think about the work of Gerard 't Hooft?

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