Here’s a blast from the somewhat-recent past: a set of five lectures I gave at CERN in 2005. It looks like the quality of the recording is pretty good. The first lecture was an overview at a colloquium level; i.e. meant for physicists, but not necessarily with any knowledge of cosmology. The next four are blackboard talks with a greater focus; they try to bring people up to speed on the basic tools you need to think about modern early-universe cosmology.
Obviously I’m not going to watch all five hours of these, so I’ll just have to hope that I’m relatively coherent throughout. (I do remember being a bit jet-lagged.) But I do notice that, while it was only a few years ago, I do appear relatively young and enthusiastic. Ah, the ravages of Time…
Lecture One: Introduction to Cosmology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUNtO2r_-eo
Lecture Two: Dark Matter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq-lGX2PRrc
Lecture Three: Dark Energy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYVj2RhXxeU
Lecture Four: Thermodynamics and the Early Universe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=178mMnGvWs0
Lecture Five: Inflation and Beyond
and… have we learned anything about cosmology and particle physics since then? 🙂
Also, in a previous post you eluded to a “classical contribution to dark energy” in addition to the usual (hypothesized) vacuum energy from quantum effects. I’ve never heard this before; what did you have in mind?
Sam Gralla: The cosmological constant, maybe?
I dunno; people usually pick one or the other. Since we have no idea how to compute the quantum contribution, anyway, it’d seem weird to believe that x % of the true lambda was due to quantum effects and (100 – x) % was due to some new constant in the Lagrangian for the universe.
Thanks, these will hopefully be really great. I love video lectures because I can pause and rewind whenever I (inevitably) get distracted, want to spend a few moments thinking about a certain point, or work something out. I notice I take about 50% extra time watching a lecture vs attending a class.
I wish all lectures were recorded, it would be such a useful resource for homework/studying. Going to skip the 1st lecture and go through the rest.
Finally I have something interesting to view on Sundays. Thank you very much.
As much as I loved the look and feel of the old auditorium, the refurbished version is so much nicer. The upshot, though, is that there is no longer a wall of blackboards.
I just started watching the first one last night and noticed how young you look!
@#3 Steven Weinberg believes that there is the huge particle-physics contribution to the vacuum energy and an almost equally huge but negative classical cosmological constant, so that they almost cancel, thus providing the observed value—unlikely perhaps, but justified on anthropic grounds.
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Can someone put a back-of-the-envelope number on the fluctuation that gets us back to inflation? I don’t know if there is any value in this. I just like these kind of numbers. 10^-1000 per m^3 per year ?
gee -an hour goes by really quick when having fun. Many thanks for posting that video.
Charlie– the rate of a fluctuation that would take you from our current vacuum “1” to some inflationary state “2” is essentially exp(S2–S1), where “exp” means exponential and Si is the entropy of vacuum state i. In fact the entropy of the inflationary state is so much tinier than the entropy of ours that this is basically equal to exp(-S1). The entropy of our current state is approximately S1 = 10120, so the rate is about exp(-10120).
If you play around a bit you can convince yourself that the units don’t really matter — per Planck volume per Planck time is basically the same as per Hubble volume per Hubble time on these scales.
Thanks! That’s a satisfyingly small number. I can see that the difference between a mm and the universe isn’t much to a number like that.
Is there room here for friendly competition? Though I’m not nearly at Sean’s level as an expert I delivered a 5-lecture series on intro cosmology for physicists in 2007, which was pretty well received. The video is publicly available, though in an obscure location. Interestingly, completely unknown to me someone picked up one of the segments, edited it down a bit and re-posed it on YouTube. It’s ten minutes long, taken from the section on “Why Brooklyn Is Not Expanding,” pivoting off from a classic bit in an old Woody Allen movie. The reposted segment is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLhl2MSQ1R0
If the public demands it, I can link to the whole series, or maybe even get them up on the ‘Tube. ** End of self-promotional announcement **
Sean , are all CERN lectures on youtube? CERN has a great collection of videos, but its very hard to search for them.
shantanu
I don’t know. You might leave a comment on the YouTube page.
Sean,
Wonderful lex ! I am taking a course in the early universe & these are an immense help. Best of all is that the vids forego factors O(1), concentrating on concepts, but the TASI lex fill in those details. Primo.
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I can honestly say that 15 minutes into your talks I was lost. You spouted in-the-know jargon like a con-artist!
Sean, I have an M.S degree in electronics. I love science and everything we are discovering. But I often don’t understand what you say, as much as I want to. Have you ever thought about “dumbing down” your lectures or your posts? At least to the degree that us slobs not versed in the gargon could still be enlightened?
I have always wondered why we can’t explain galaxy rotation curve as a result of “screening” phenomenon of some sort with some characteristic screening distance……then maybe it’s possible for stars to move at constant speed over large distances from the center of galaxy …..or galaxy wouldn’t hold together if we do this???
I think there’s an error on the 5th lecture in terms of the history of science. You claim inflation was created to solve the horizon and flatness problem. Yet in Alan Guth’s book “The Inflationary Universe” he claims that inflation was actually motivated by the monopole problem. It was only afterwards that it was realised that it solves other cosmological problems.
Wow. The breadth, The Clarity, The Perspective.
Many thanks for bringing the lectures to our attention.
I haven’t watched the lectures yet, but I sure hope you mentioned that Catholic priest, Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, was the first to propose the Big Bang theory origin of the universe, and preceded Hubble in deriving Hubble’s Law in 1927.
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