Hyde Park Civilizace

It is important to have crazy ideas because crazy ideas are sometimes good ideas. And a good researcher is student forever. Says Claude-Cohen Tannoudji who recieved the 1997 Nobel prize in physics for the development of method to cool and trap atoms with laser. These methods allow us for example to measure time much more accurately. He was born in Algeria where he witnessed the landing of American...

He says he had two mid-life crisis. The first one when he got an idea and the second one when he implemented it. Today he is Nobel Prize laureate - professor Eric Betzig came up with a method that makes is possible to watch throught optical microscopes things that are only few nanometers big. One nanometer equals one bilionth of a meter. Scientist can now for example see proteins responsible for d...

You should look around and pay attention to something odd, says Daniel Schetman, professor at Technion, Israeli institute of technology. And he did find something odd. He found quasicrystals and that's why he received the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2011. However, he had to fight for recognition for years, many scientists rejected his discovery. What made him absolutely sure that he was right and...

Around a quarter of million women around the world die every year of cervical cancer. Protection is vaccination. Prior to the development of vaccine it was necessary to find out what the cause of the disease is. And that is what professor Harald zur Hausen did. He discovered papilomaviruses that cause cervical cancer. Thats why he recieved 2008 Nobel prize in medicine. it was he who pushed for a d...

In a special broadcast of Hyde Park Civilisation we visit Institute of plasma physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The reason is simple - our guest is head of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. ITER should bring a revolution into harnessing of power - clean, safe and virtually inexhaustible source of energy. Instead of splitting nuclei as in nuclear power plant tokamak fuses th...

This cultural cleansing is a warcrime that is now used as a tactics of war. Says Irina Bokova, director general of UNESCO, when she described the destruction of monuments - among others - in Syria and Iraq. How to prevent terrorists from destroying thousands of years old statues or buildings? What opportunities did UNESCO use? How does the organisation help the world to develop education and how d...

After the beginnings of astronomy, after the times of Apollo programme and ISS a new era is about to start. It will include for example village on the Moon as well as journey to Mars. This is how the current of state of space exploration is decribed by the director general of ESA, professor Johan-Dietrich Wörner. He is the man who promotes the contruction of the space base on the dark side of the...

Dr. Douglas Vakoch, President of METI International – an organization that keeps pushing the SETI project. Literally further into space. He and his team are searching for extraterrestrial civilizations and are working on a message that they want to send to space. How should it be written? What should it contain? Should we worry about a potential encounter? And what if extraterrestrial intelligence...

„Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it.“ Said David Reitze, LIGO Laboratory Executive Director. And Einstein´s theory of relativity was proven. Moreover, scientists have opened a new window into space. They are comparing it to the moment when Galileo Galilei turned his telescope towards the stars and saw them in a different way than before. What could we learn? And...

Professor Jerome Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quarks – the smallest known particles in nature. He has been working at MIT for 65 years now, and one of his teachers was Enrico Fermi – one of the fathers of the first nuclear reactor and the atomic bomb. What was he like in person? What was the most important thing he learned from Enrico Fermi? And when will we learn more...

A laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physiology. A president of the British Royal Society. A pilot, biker, innovator and experimenter who failed a university entrance exam six times. Sir Paul Nurse. He researches the division of cells – the fundamental question for cancer research. Why did he research only yeast his entire life? And what genetic secret did his family hide from him? www.ceskatelevize.c...

He went to space five times. He was a part of the first US-Russian space walk. He kept improving the safety of space shuttles after the Columbia disaster. He violated NASA regulations to save equipment worth billions of dollars. How did it feel to walk in space? How did John Glenn, the first US astronaut, treat him during the spaceflight? And what did he take with him to the top of Mount Everest?...

Gerard 't Hooft. A laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physics. He described how particles behave after they collide and elucidated the quantum structure of electroweak interactions. He says that we will have intelligent computers. And that Mars should be a one-way ticket only. And that we all should build a colony on the Moon from the Earth, from our living room. How exactly? He answered all this in H...

There are bloodlands between Hitler’s empire and Stalin’s empire. The victims of the biggest demographic and humanitarian catastrophe that man has ever caused in human history. A total of 14 million people died in less than two decades due to the politics of two leaders. History professor Timothy Snyder at Yale University describes this in his books Bloodlands and Black Earth. The expert on the Ho...

A superstar among Egyptologists, a real Indiana Jones. This is how Dr. Zahi Hawass, the former Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, has been dubbed. He is one of the world’s prominent Egyptologists and has lately become internationally recognized even outside of archeological circles thanks to his frequent appearances in documentary shows about the Egyptian civilization. www.ce...

If you want to do good, you should think about how to do the most good you can. The philosophy and attitude of an ever-growing number of people. This idea could be summed up into two words: effective altruism. How to do the most good? For whom? And how to live with the fact that we cannot spread ourselves completely thin? The philosopher Peter Singer, the author of the book The Most Good You Can D...

He was a Jew who survived the war only because his dad hid him in a closet when the Gestapo came. She was the daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier. He was a French lawyer. She was a German journalist. They met in the 1960s and fell in love. They started hunting war criminals and those who collaborated with the Nazi regime in France and Germany. Mr. and Mrs. Klarsfeld will answer your questions. www.ces...

Professor Roger Griffin, an Oxford historian, is considered the top expert on fascism. He also researches contemporary extremism and terrorism. What are the general elements of fascism? Is it only about the myth of regeneration and new creation? Why do some of its forms exist even today? And how has the perception of terrorism and the thinking of society changed after 11 September? Professor Griff...

Documentary films for millions of dollars or short videos on Youtube. Two ways to popularize science. Two enthusiastic scientists who go “out there” to convince people that “Science is beautiful. Science is important. Science is for everybody.” The anthropologist Niobe Thompson researches and explains evolution in the documentary series The Great Human Odyssey. The physicist Derek Muller tries to...

The world’s most famous evolution biologist: Richard Dawkins. He claims that genes are selfish and that God does not exist. In his opinion, religion contaminates the mind just like a computer virus. Richard Dawkins popularizes biology, criticizes religion and provokes. The interview was broadcasted live from the deconsecrated Corpus Christi Chapel of the Olomouc Seminary. Richard Dawkins was the m...

One of the twelve people who walked on the Moon. Charles Duke. The pilot of the lunar module of Apollo 16. He spent 71 hours on the Moon. He was the voice of NASA when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and communicated with Neil Armstrong during critical moments. And as a backup member of the Apollo 13 crew, he caught the German measles, which caused a change in the prime Apollo 13 crew. Charles Duke w...

In his opinion, the current education system is not perfect: children memorize dates or lists of literary works, receive information in a passive way and have very little room for creativity and activity. This and many other traditional teaching methods do not allow children to utilize all their potential. Steve Hughes, the director of the Center for Research on Developmental Education and the for...

Robert Woodrow Wilson, a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physics – an exclusive guest of Hyde Park Civilization. “How was the universe created? By the Big Bang. And here is the proof – we measured the cosmic microwave background radiation,” Robert W. Wilson could say in 1964. He and his colleague Arno Penzias thus confirmed the answer to one of the key questions of mankind: “What was at the very be...

Andrei Zubov was dismissed this spring from his post at the State Institute of International Relations after he wrote an article criticizing Russia’s conduct during the Crimean crisis. Officially for “immoral behavior.” Professor Zubov is the head of the authors of the book The History of Russia in the 20th Century. He replaced Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the editor-in-chief. What is modern-day Russ...

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, the largest science center on the Earth is celebrating 60 years of its existence. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the CEO of CERN, came to Prague for a short time. What is elementary particle physics about? What tools does it use? What image of the micro world does it provide? What are its future prospects and what is the role of CERN in all this? Take a peep int...