Big Ideas: Science

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Daniel Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute discusses quantum computing and the cryptographic protocols that use quantum physics, and that one day will protect all that which we would want to stay secret.

The author of Struck by Lightning - and the statistician who crunched the numbers to reveal that a statistically improbable number of lottery retailers were winning major prizes in Ontario - Jeffrey Rosenthal guides us through the maze of numbers and percentages to show us to how calculate correct …

Janna Levin on her book Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the story of two great mathematicians, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. They were men who had the capacity to think about the most abstract of mathematical truths but had very limited abilities when it came to confronting the mundane aspects of l…

Nima Arkani-Hamed on the Large Hadron Collider and the Future of Fundamental Physics. Located on the Swiss-French border, the Large Hadron Collider is a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. It will allow physicists to probe the constituent parts of the proton, looking for new forms of matter and…

Ecological footprint is an idea originated by William Rees, an environmental economist from the University of British Columbia. If you need a primer in environmental economics, this lecture is for you.

Marc Abrahams, editor of The Annals of Improbably Research and one of the organizers of the annual Ig-Nobel Prize ceremonies at Harvard University, discusses the work of scientists and academics that, "first makes you laugh, and then makes you think".

Ken Cramer - Psychology, University of Windsor -on Alfred Adler: The Most Famous Personality Theorist You Likely Never Heard Of

University of Toronto Zoology researcher, Susannah Varmuza, discusses the evolving field of Epigenetics and what research into such things as mouse coat colour is telling scientists about the age-old "nature versus nurture" debate.

Clare Hasenkampf of the Biology Department at University of Toronto Scarborough presents her lecture Chromosomes Dividing: How It Is Done and Why It Matters.