Tonight I went to see Lenny Susskind give a public lecture at UCDavis. The lecture was in the ballroom of the ARC, and I knew that it was going to be interesting when he got to the second slide. On it, there was a picture of Darwin, a picture of a tree and a picture of Woody Allen, among other things. It was a really interesting lecture by a prominent physicist and I must admit that by the end of the talk he had me convinced on the subject of the anthropic principle (the wikipedia link is below, for those of you that aren’t Neil and want to see what’s up with the anthropic principle)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Maybe it was his use of an example of fish-icits and cod-mologists, but he was pretty damn convincing. Other highlights include:

At one point he was explaining the Cosmological Constant, and ended up talking about Weinberg. He decided to explain that Weinberg was the most famous living physicist. He then took it back, and said that Lee Smolin was the most famous living physicist (I giggled). Susskind then explained to the crowd that it was a joke, and they laughed awkwardly….probably because they were sociology majors who didn’t realize that physicists too can be catty.

During one question, he decided to use Ice-Nine as an example, and told everyone to go and read Cat’s Cradle. I’ve been telling everyone to read Cat’s Cradle for almost a decade now. Sheesh, read it already.

I thought the question period was going to be interesting. I was hoping for some super smart turns of words, and maybe a bit of action. Instead, it was all philosophy students who had theories about physics that made me cringe. Though, the first question was stated so incoherently that Susskind interrupted the questioner and stated that he “didn’t speak the language of philosophy” and then the questioner stammered “I understand science” and left, crying, I think.

Well. I guess that is all for now.