Video Library

Since 2002 Perimeter Institute has been recording seminars, conference talks, and public outreach events using video cameras installed in our lecture theatres.  Perimeter now has 7 formal presentation spaces for its many scientific conferences, seminars, workshops and educational outreach activities, all with advanced audio-visual technical capabilities.  Recordings of events in these areas are all available On-Demand from this Video Library and on Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive (PIRSA)PIRSA is a permanent, free, searchable, and citable archive of recorded seminars from relevant bodies in physics. This resource has been partially modelled after Cornell University's arXiv.org.

Quantum Mechanics as a Theory of Systems with Limited Information Content

Sunday Aug 09, 2009
Speaker(s):

I will consider physical theories which describe systems with limited information content. This limit is not due observer's ignorance about some “hidden” properties of the system - the view that would have to be confronted with Bell's theorem - but is of fundamental nature. I will show how the mathematical structure of these theories can be reconstructed from a set of reasonable axioms about probabilities for measurement outcomes.

Scientific Areas:

Thursday Aug 06, 2009
Speaker(s):
Collection/Series:
Scientific Areas:

Thursday Aug 06, 2009
Speaker(s):
Collection/Series:
Scientific Areas:

Quantum Physics

Wednesday Aug 05, 2009
Speaker(s):

Quantum theory is the most accurate scientific theory humanity has ever devised. But it is also the most mysterious. No one knows what the underlying picture of reality at quantum level is. This presentation will introduce you to some of the many interpretations of quantum theory that scientists have devised and discuss the infamous 'measurement problem'.

Collection/Series:
Scientific Areas:

Entanglement detection with bounded reference frames

Tuesday Aug 04, 2009
Speaker(s):

Violation of local realism can be probed by theory–independent tests, such as Bell’s inequality experiments. There, a common assumption is the existence of perfect, classical, reference frames, which allow for the specification of measurement settings with arbitrary precision. However, if the reference frames are bounded'', only limited precision can be attained. We expect then that the finiteness of the reference frames limits the observability of genuine quantum features.

Collection/Series:
Scientific Areas:

How to Know the Universe from a Hole in the Ground

Tuesday Aug 04, 2009

We understand the history of our universe very well but remain ignorant on one key question: what is most of the universe actually made of? Beautiful measurements, by satellites, balloon-basted observatories, the Hubble telescope and ground-based telescopes have allowed us to accurately trace this history of the history of the ordinary matter we are made of. Yet these measurements also show us that most of the universe is dark - that is to say it cannot be seen visibly no matter how bright a light is shone on it.

Collection/Series:
Scientific Areas:

Monday Aug 03, 2009
Speaker(s):

Physics emerged from the twentieth century with two remarkably successful descriptions of nature which stand in striking contrast. Quantum mechanics describes the subatomic realm with intrinsic uncertainties and probabilities. On the other hand, Einstein's general relativity describe gravitational phenomena in an exacting geometric arena. Theoretical physicists have struggled for over fifty years trying to combine these views in a single unified framework.

Collection/Series:
Scientific Areas:

The Beauty and Basics of BAO

Friday Jul 31, 2009
Speaker(s):

The Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) are the latest weapon in the quest for precision cosmology and dark energy. Many presentations on BAO are complicated and unclear and I will therefore present BAO with particular emphasis on trying to give the simplest theoretical description, both at the linear and nonlinear level, and will describe some of the observational challenges to measuring BAO.

Collection/Series:
Scientific Areas:

A surprising relation between N=2 gauge theory in 4 dimensions and pure quantum gravity in 3 and 2 dimensions

Tuesday Jul 21, 2009
Speaker(s):

TBA

Scientific Areas:

Non-Gaussianity from non-equilibrium physics

Tuesday Jul 21, 2009
Speaker(s):

Non-equilibrium processes such as inflationary preheating or the ekpyrotic bounce can turn fluctuations of light scalar fields into potentially highly non-Gaussian curvature perturbations. I show how these perturbations can be calculated at fully non-linear level using lattice field theory simulations. As concrete examples, I present results for preheating in chaotic inflation and resonant curvaton decay.

Scientific Areas:

Next Public Lecture

Check back for details on the next lecture in Perimeter's Public Lectures Series

RECENT PUBLIC LECTURE

Mario Livio: Brilliant Blunders

Speaker: Mario Livio