Can't Really Blame Them

Cosmic Variance
By Sean Carroll
May 5, 2011 5:46 PMNov 20, 2019 2:39 AM

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Very excited to learn that my talk from TEDxCaltech is featured on the TED home page today. They have their own comment thread, and in a couple of weeks we'll have a live call-in "conversation with the speaker" deal. If the Twitters are to be believed, these TED talks are pretty darn popular. The talk is a punchy, 15-minute version of my usual cosmology-and-the-arrow-of-time schtick. Glad to see the arrow of time get some more publicity; sophisticated Cosmic Variance readers know all about it, but not everyone is so lucky. When Brian Cox did an episode of Wonders of the Universe that discussed the arrow of time, the comments were all "Wow, what an amazing concept, never heard of that!" Obviously reading the wrong blogs. But I can't help but notice something about the presentation on the TED home page...

Each talk is advertised by an image from the video; in most cases it's a picture of the speaker actually giving the talk. But for mine, they (wisely) went with the Hubble Deep Field. Lesson: you can't compete with the universe! It's bigger, smarter, and prettier, too.

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