Watch, Read, Listen

Best-selling author Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman; The Men Who United the States) explores the origins of “precision” and the invisible role it plays, for good or for ill, in the way we live our lives. The lecture is drawn from his new book, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World.

David Baltimore, President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, discusses the challenge of globally controlling technology when potentially 200 different jurisdictions might be involved.

Art historian Katharina I-Bon Suh of the Seoul National University discusses how the Garden of Seyeonjeong’s design and layout served practical purposes but also alluded to philosophical metaphors and fantastical worlds in this East Asian Garden Lecture.

Daniel Eisenstein, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and director of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, discusses the sound waves that propagated through the Universe after the Big Bang is this Carnegie Astronomy Lecture Series.

Author Matt Ritter, professor of botany at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, takes readers on a visual “tour” through the state’s most iconic flora in a lecture based on his new book, California Plants.