Great Courses

Narrated by Dan Hooper

These twelve half-hour lectures are about what Einstein got wrong. He may have kindled a scientific revolution with his famous theory of relativity and his proof that atoms and light quanta exist, but he balked at accepting the most startling implications of these theories-such as the existence of black holes, the big bang, gravity waves, and mind-bendingly strange phenomena in the quantum realm. In a course that assumes no background in science and uses very little math, research physicist Dan Hooper of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago focuses on Einstein's personal qualities that made him a heavy hitter with relativity but also a strikeout king in many of his other ideas. You start with two lectures on Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, and in a later lecture you cover his founding role in quantum theory. All are titanic achievements. The balance of the course deals with his false starts, blind alleys, and outright blunders, which are fascinating for what they reveal about the give-and-take conduct of science. Dr. Hooper closes with a lecture on the missteps of other great physicists-Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton-proving that Einstein is in good company. Even geniuses struggle to find the truth. All Lectures: 1. What Einstein Got Right: Special Relativity 2. What Einstein Got Right: General Relativity 3.Einstein's Rejection of Black Holes 4. Einstein and Gravitational Waves 5. Cosmology and the Cosmological Constant 6. The Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy 7. What Einstein Got Right: Light Quanta 8. Does God Play Dice with the Universe? 9. Quantum Entanglement 10. The Search for a Unified Field Theory 11. Problems with Time Travel 12. What Other Giants Got Wrong

Mode of access: World Wide Web