Lectures for a New Year: God, the Universe, and Everything Else

Ready for a spectacular late-80s treat? Here we have Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Arthur C. Clarke in discussion with Magnus Magnusson shortly after Hawking's A Brief History of Time was published. This discussion was sparked by the book (Sagan wrote the introduction), and it shows three visionaries at a time in history when Hawking's book was a massive bestseller. In addition to the men on stage, Sagan joins via satellite (which we're reminded was nominally invented, or at least envisioned in great detail, by Clarke in his writing), and a desktop computer (possibly an Amiga?) sits next to Clarke, displaying the Mandelbrot set -- and he gives a demo of his favorite regions of the set at one point during the discussion. This is geeky in the extreme.

I should point out that during this discussion, the men continually refer to the possible impending doom of the human species. They frequently discuss future work as being possible "if we don't destroy ourselves." It's important to understand that in 1988, the world was still gripped by the Cold War, Soviet forces were in Afghanistan, and the USSR was on the brink of collapse. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen. It was a tense time. You can perceive a mixture of wonder, hope, and mild existential dread in the faces of these luminaries.

Topics: how Hawking's voice synthesizer works (remember when that had to be explained?), the school system discouraging fundamental questions, the Big Bang, the scientific method applied to the science of cosmology, astrology (briefly), infinity, black holes, imaginary time, fun with mathematics at their most abstruse, fiddling with fractals, is there a limit to the small-scale complexity of the universe?, the role of science fiction, Voyager's Golden Record, optimism from an emerging civilization, the Cold War, Mars, religion, and poetry.

For: anyone interested in science. Really -- if Sagan, Hawking, and Clarke in the same program doesn't interest you, this isn't your thing. If the concept does interest you, it's fifty minutes of wondrous contemplation.

Representative quote:

"We are the product of a grand evolutionary sequence -- cosmic evolution -- about which we are only occasionally aware. One of the great accomplishments of Doctor Hawking is to plug us better in to the knowledge of this long evolutionary sequence." -Carl Sagan

Further Reading

All three of these men wrote extensively, and I could point to dozens of books here. But the relevant one for this particular discussion is the (updated) classic The Illustrated Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded Edition.

Transcript

I haven't located a transcript, and for some reason the YouTube/Google auto-caption function is disabled for this video. That's a shame, as the audio here is quite good, so auto-captions should work well if they could be enabled. It would be amusing to see how well the system could re-convert Hawking's speech synthesis back into text, but alas, not today.

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