Australian child prodigy Terence Tao has matured into one of the leading mathematicians in the world today advancing, amongst other things, our understanding of prime numbers.
Here he gives a brilliant lecture on the scale of the universe and how we discovered the size of, and distance between, the various bodies that inhabit it – the Earth, Moon, Sun, planets, stars, galaxies and beyond. He takes us on a fascinating voyage of more than 2,000 years of scientific discovery: from the incredibly accurate sizing of the Earth by the ancient Greeks; through the ingenius calculations of Kepler, Newton and Gallileo; and on to the to the technological advancements on the last hundred years that have allowed us to peer further and deeper into the cosmos than we could have dared imagine.
This is all essential knowledge for beginning to understand the cosmos and our place in it.
The Cosmic Distance Ladder
