Thursday, October 6, 2011

2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

Saul Perlmutter was one of the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Here he is trying to explain his research:



Pondering the cosmos is mind boggling. It is hard to appreciate that what we understand as "matter" is only 4% of what is out there. That "dark energy" is 73% of the "stuff" of the universe and "dark matter" is 23%. We are in the 4% "minority" of our universe.

Perlmutter gets into the more exotic speculations at 08:00 into the video when he touches on the extra dimensions of string theory. If these speculations bear out, then our 4% will shrink to negligible. The stuff "out there" in the dimensions hidden from us will be so much more that what we know.

Yes... the universe is a very, very strange place.

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