Big Ideas (Audio)

What killed the dinosaurs? And is humanity headed for a similar fate? These questions are addressed by H. Jay Melosh, a Professor of Theoretical Geophysics at the University of Arizona, in this lecture entitled, Death of the Dinos: Giant Impacts and Biological Crises. With the help of sophisticated computer simulations Melosh presents his "hot" new theory on the KT extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

Natalia Toro explains how complex collision data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being digested and examined and how it may set the course for the science of the future. Her lecture was delivered at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, on September 18, 2011.

Seth Llyod is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His talk, "Programming the Universe", is about the computational power of atoms, electrons, and elementary particles.

Adam Gopnik, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, discusses W. H. Auden, William Emerson and Lewis Carroll in a lecture entitled, The Morning Star is the Evening Star: Christian Writers and Liberal Readers.

Robert Morrison, Associate Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College, on Islam, Science and the Importance of History. Morrison cites Islamic religious scholars from historical times and from the present in order to show how Islam and science are compatable.

Physicist Paul Steinhardt discusses the creation of "Impossible crystals": quasi-crystals with five-fold symmetry previously believed impossible.

National Post columnist, Andrew Coyne, presents a lecture entitled Post-Economic Politics in Canada. In Coyne's opinion, the state of the economy, contrary to popular belief, will not be the defining issue in our public policy debates. His lecture was produced in collaboration with the Literary Review of Canada and was delivered at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto on May 14th, 2012.

Simon Winchester discusses his book The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Marc D. Lewis answers questions following his lecture based on his book Memoirs of an Addicted Brain.

Dr. Marc D. Lewis discusses the story and the science behind his book Memoirs of an Addicted Brain. Lewis is a professor at the Behavioral Science Institute, part of Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Lewis's book documents the years he spent addicted to drugs including morphine and heroin, and links his first-hand drug experiences to his current behavioral science research into the interaction between drugs and brain chemistry.