isaac newton was a genius. you know, there are people on this campus that can calculate how fast the cannonball would have to go. and you know what? there are people in this room who could calculate with no pencil, no paper, only their minds how fast the cannonball would have to go. and i think that 80% of the people in this room can make that calculation if i guide your thinking. can we try it? you want to see who you are? let's try. let me give you a geometrical fact. we live in a world that's curved. we know it's curved because if you put a laser one meter off the ground and you fired the laser beam out over the desert like the mojave desert in california, perfectly flat for miles and miles and miles. if you fired that laser beam, you'd find out the laser beam over here, it looks like to people it's poiing up but it's not pointing up here. it's just that the earth is curving under. let me give you a fact that a geography teacher can tell you about. if you go out 8 kilometers, that's 8,000 meters this way, yo

isaac newton was a genius. you know, there are people on this campus that can calculate how fast the cannonball would have to go. and you know what? there are people in this room who could calculate with no pencil, no paper, only their minds how fast the cannonball would have to go. and i think that 80% of the people in this room can make that calculation if i guide your thinking. can we try it? you want to see who you are? let's try. let me give you a geometrical fact. we live in a world that's curved. we know it's curved because if you put a laser one meter off the ground and you fired the laser beam out over the desert like the mojave desert in california, perfectly flat for miles and miles and miles. if you fired that laser beam, you'd find out the laser beam over here, it looks like to people it's pointing up. but it's not pointing up here. it's just that the earth is curving under. let me give you a fact that a geography teacher can tell you about. if you go out 8 kilometers, that's 8,000 meters this way,

isaac newton, physics type in 1700, figured it out like this. consider a mountain on the earth that's so high that it's up above air drag and put a cannon up there. now we're up above the drag of the air. if you fire the cannonball and there was no gravity, none, the cannonball would... [descending whistle] go in a straight line. but the cannonball doesn't go in a straight line. you know why? because there is gravity and gravity pulls it down. so what cannonball does... fooom! it maybe falls like that. do you know what would happen if i fired it faster? fooom! it would be up for a longer time but still fall, wouldn't it? let's suppose i fire it even faster, longer to hit or same time to hit or less time to hit? - longer. - longer to hit. fooom! you know what i'm gonna do now, gang? i'm gonna put all the powder in, all the powder. i'm gonna fire that thing really fast. watch this. fooom! is the cannonball falling? is it still falling? yeah. fooom! so you got to move the cannon out of the way. isaac newton realized that if you fired a cannonball f

clues in aristotle's sneaky tricks, clues in galileo's creationism, clues in isaac newton's intelligentesign, clues in einstein's pajamas, clues in john conway's game of life, clues in the new kind of science and clues in those darn six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. the stories of all these are in the god problem. the god problem sets out to solve the puzzle. clue number one, the first of the clues we'll dive into tonight comes from an obscure mathematician naped giuseppe piano. for that clue, let's get back to the clue that really counts the most: you. flash forward eight years. it's 1961. a dozen freshmen sit around a broad conference table in portland, oregon. you are one of them. statistics say that yours is the brightest class of college students in the country. your class' median scholastic aptitude tests are higher than those at the entering classes at harvard, mit or cal tech. yet what is about to come is a shock, a shock and an almost impossible challenge. you can smell your professor coming down the hall before you can see her. why? in the professor's hand is a