Nov 8, 2022
Leading theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla visits Google to
discuss his new book, "Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A
Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity." The book is a combination of
popular and cutting-edge science, as well as a lively,
entertaining, and even funny exploration of the most fundamental
truths about the universe.
For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk
Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for
mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the
ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the
mysterious numbers that explain the universe? In Fantastic Numbers
and Where to Find Them, Antonio takes us on an irreverent cosmic
tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering
a startling picture of how the universe works.
These strange numbers include Graham’s number, which is so large
that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would
collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never
be definitively proved, because to do so would take a near-infinite
amount of time; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely
balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more
than just a moment and to extend beyond the size of a single
atom―in other words, the mystery of our unexpected universe.
Leading us down the rabbit hole to a deeper understanding of
reality, Antonio explains how these unusual numbers are the key to
understanding such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes,
relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant―that the
two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the
universe contradict one another.
Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.