Join P. J. E. Peebles as he explores the big questions about the nature of science, and how we are discovering the nature of reality in successive approximations through increasingly rigorous scrutiny. Watch the Q&A here:    • Q&A: The search for objective reality...  

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Scienists have questioned how reality could agree with physical theories that keep changing. Today, concepts like dark matter and dark energy further complicate and enrich the search for objective reality.

In this talk, Peebles will draw on a lifetime of experience as a leading physicist and using cosmology as an example for this personal reflection. Discover if the concept of objective reality is meaningful.

This livestream was recorded on 13 October 2022.

0:00 Introduction
1:16 Constructions in natural science
5:13 The objective reality of the speed of light
8:32 Is all of our physics technically wrong?
13:56 The inevitability of inventions
16:52 The expanding universe
23:01 Thermal radiation in the universe
27:55 Evidence for the evolution of the universe
46:20 Acoustic oscillations in the early universe
52:06 Exciting discoveries that haven't been discovered yet

Philip James Edwin Peebles is a CanadianAmerican physicist and theoretical cosmologist who is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is widely regarded as one of the world's leading theoretical cosmologists in the period since 1970, with major theoretical contributions to primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.

Peebles was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019 for his theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. He shared the prize with Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star.


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