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22 APR 2019 · It was just as well I hadn't been a student of Hoyle, because I would have been drawn into defending his steady state theory, a task which would have been harder than denying global warming.Stephen Hawking
Note: In this episode we have removed the well known pauses between each sentence of Stephen Hawkings speach pattern. This so that you will easier be able to follow his quite complex thought pattern. To let you know how he actually spoke we have kept the very first pause.
This month the world saw a black hole for the very first time, after the idea of supermassive astronomical body like this – with a gravitatonal field so strong that not even light, travelling at 300 000 km/h, can escape it – was first proposed back in 1784! It's a bit of a tradgedy that after hunting for almost 250 years, the worlds most famous, and extraordinary, black hole scientist would miss this historic event by just one year.
Stephen Hawking had a rare condition named Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS. The initial diagnosis, in his first year as a doctoral student, gave him only two more years to live. But although the illness gradually paralyzed his body, he lived for 50 more years, and his mind stayed as sharp as ever.
Before he died, on Einsteins birthday, 14 March 2018, Stephen Hawkings changed the face of theoretical physics, and gave us massive new insigths into, among other things, black holes – even though he sadly never got to see one. That speaks clearly to the power of science.
Hawking was not only a brilliant scientist, he was also a well known and loved science communicator. He wrote books, both for adults and children, held talks, and was depicted countless times in popular media.
In the talk you will hear in this episode of Kurator Hawking celebrated his 75th birthday, just a few monts before his death. He was one of the giants of science that now probably most other theoretical and astrophycisists stands on the shoulders of today, and it is well worth listening to him tell a bit of the story of his life and some of his discoveries.
Please enjoy this talk first held at Cambridge University, and streamed live by Your Discovery Science on July 2nd 2017. If you watch it on their channel you can also see the introductions by Brian Cox, Gabriela Gonzalez and Martin Rees.
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15 APR 2018 · Trough our scientific genius we made the world our neighborhood. And now, trough our moral and ethical commitment, we must make it our brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.
Note: This episodes contain two speeches: "I have a dream" and, from 16:30, "American Dream".
We recently marked 50 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He is one of the most famous fighters for freedom and justice of all time, and with good reason. Yet, too few are aware of all the interesting aspects of his activism. He did not only stand against racial segregation, but also against wealth disparity, war and all kinds of injustice.
In this episode of Kurator I wanted to showcase both his famous and groundbreaking work for racial equality in the US, and his concern for «all of God's children». Everybody has heard about his most famous speech, "I have a dream". But how many has heard it? And how many has heard his other speeches, that are just as powerful? More people should do both. So here I present two of King's speeches. First "I have a dream", held in 1963, then "The American Dream". He held many versions of this latter speech. This version is from 1961.
We must make it clear that the time to do right is now and that the time is always right to do right.
Martin Luther King's remarks in "American Dream" about time feels especially poignant. His struggle for freedom and justice for all continues to this day. Not even his famous dream of the US as a country where people "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character", has come true yet, much less has the world woken up to the fact that "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
In this light it is worth noting how the government spied on Martin Luther King, and tried to silence him with the information they found. How much easier would this not be today? Maybe you trust your government to do the right thing today, but what about in the future, what about in less free countries? As MLK reminds us again and again: "whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
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11 NOV 2017 · Each and every one of us makes a difference, each and every day. And we have a choice: What kind of difference are we going to make?
From an enthusiastic child, encouraged by her mother, to a woman who would not take "science is for men" for an answer, to a world changing scientist and science communicator – Jane Goodall's story is fascinating, and the wisdom she has picked up along the way is inspiring and hopeful.
I was first made aware of this beautiful and profound talk by Dame Goodall trough one of the many sublime videos of The Inspiration Journey (Vimeo/YouTube). If you don't have 25 minutes to hear the whole speech, the most important parts can be experienced in a beautiful way in their video.
Please enjoy this talk first held at, and published by, Concordia University on June 19th, 2014.
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18 JUN 2017 · It's frighting to see how quickly you can repeat the ills of the past when enough people are afraid and hungry
As a kid he was literally a crime in one of the most unjust societies in the world. As an adult he has become one of the most well known voices in the world. The story of Trevor Noah is interesting and inspiring. Not inspiring as in ‘you too can become a TV star', but as in ‘even in bleak times things can change for the better, and no matter who you are you can be a part of that!'
Please enjoy this conversation with Trevor Noah, first published by Al Jazeera on February 11th, 2017.
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12 MAR 2017 · The reality of death is something we're all going to have to face.
Since the last two episodes where talks from great men who died too young this is a good time to meditate a bit on life and death.
Sam Harris is a well known atheist with some controversial ideas and statements, but you don't have to agree with him on anything to find something worth contemplating in this talk about how to handle death, and life, as an atheist.
At about 30 minutes in you might want to find a chair and sit down for about 7 minutes.
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7 FEB 2017 · My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, "Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library."
The world just lost another great mind and communicator. Hans Rosling was unique in his ability to make statistics fun and fascinating – both by the enthusiasm in his voice and the spring in his step and by his fantastic way of visualizing otherwise hard to grasp numbers about the fate of billions of people.
His truly eye opening and funny talks needs to be seen to be appreciated fully, but we feel like we've found one talk, maybe his only, that works pretty well with audio only (But if you want the best experience you can watch it here). When you've listened to this you should definitely go over to TED.com to watch his other nine talks.
Rosling was always the optimist, showing us that the world is a much better place than most of us thinks. But in this short talk he also warns that climate change is a real risk to our future and that we need to reduce our energy consumption and make more of it green.
There might be no better way to understand why he is so optimistic than to watch these 5 minutes of his beautiful statistics:
And when you've realized the power of his data visualizations go to the website of the organization he started, Gapminder, to play with them yourself.
His vision of a fact-based world view that everyone can understand lead hime not only to talk with conviction and compassion, but also to share all the data from Gapminder under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which lets anyone use, mix and spread them as much as they like.
This is a vision and ethos we share here at Kurator, which is why we are so saddened by this great loss, but also so thankful for what Hans Rosling did to make the world less ignorant – and so sure that he would be delighted if we all remember him by sharing his message of hope, joy and responsibility to keep making the world a better place for those who are still kept down in poverty.
So remember to tell someone you care about that you love them today, and share one of Roslings talks with them 🙂
This presentation was Hans Rosling's talk at the TEDWoman 2010 conference and shared by the TED foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives 4.0 license.
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12 JAN 2017 · You got the sense that, deep down, they didn’t even think the First Amendment applied when copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through. And that was especially terrifying, because copyright is everywhere.
Aaron Swartz was an activist who dedicated his life to bettering the world trough sharing information over the internet. He helped make the RSS and Creative Commons and he was very clear: Sharing vital information is often more important than following copyright laws.
It feels very apt to start the Kurator podcast out with a talk by Aaron. It comes to you trough RSS and all texts and images will be Creative Commons licensed. And yeah, that other copyright thing…
Today, four years ago, the world woke up to the news that Aaron had committed suicide the evening before. He faced 35 years in prison and being labeled a felon for the "crime" of systematically downloading academic journal articles he had access to through his studies at MIT. All he wanted to do was to share knowledge – already paid for by universities – with those less fortunate than himself, so they could use it to improve the world. As he said in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto:
Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
This first Kurator talk is not about this, but it is related: It is a story about how incredibly powerful companies wanted to use copyright to censor the internet, and how the internet fought back. It is the amazing story about how ordinary people can make the world a better place, in the face of overwhelming odds:
You don’t just introduce a bill on Monday and then pass it unanimously a couple days later. That just doesn’t happen in Congress. But this time, it was going to happen.
In these times, when things seem bleak, it is crucial to remind ourselves that even when all the most powerful people are against us, the most powerful people are still We, the people. Aaron Swartz reminds us of this from beyond the grave, and in the end this truth might be what saves our lives.
The senators were right: The Internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work and it’s our job just to go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to
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