A simple question from his wife – Does physics really allow people to travel back in time? – propelled physicist Richard Muller on a quest to resolve a fundamental problem that had puzzled him throughout his 45-year career: Why does the arrow of time flow inexorably toward the future, constantly creating new "nows"? That quest resulted in a book to be published Sept. 20, NOW: The Physics of Time (W. W. Norton), that delves into the history of philosophers' and scientists' concepts of time, uncovers a tendency physicists have to be vague about time's passage, demolishes the popular explanation for the arrow of time and proposes a totally new theory."Time has been a stumbling block to our understanding of the universe," said Muller, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus who for many years taught a popular introductory course, "Physics for Future Presidents," which he turned into a 2008 book of the same name. "Over my career, I've seen a lot of nonsense published about time, and I started thinking about it and realized I had a lot to say from having taught the subject over many decades, having thought about it, having been annoyed by it, having some really interesting ways of presenting it, and some whole new ideas that have never appeared in the literature." In commenting on the theory and Muller's new book, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the 2014 TV miniseries “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” wrote, "Maybe it's right. Maybe it's wrong. But along the way he's given you a master class in what time is and how and why we perceive it the way we do." Muller’s new idea: Time is expanding because space is expanding. "The new physics principle is that space and time are linked; when you create new space, you will create new time," Muller said. ...

Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents. Spring 2006. Professor Richard A. Muller. The most interesting and important topics in physics, stressing conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events. Topics covered may vary and may include energy and conservation, radioactivity, nuclear physics, the Theory of Relativity, lasers, explosions, earthquakes, superconductors, and quantum physics. [courses] [physics10] [spring2006] Credits: lecturer:Professor Richard A. Muller, producers:Educational Technology Services

Washington Post polling director Jonathan Cohen shares the latest data on how war and terrorism are affecting the 2008 campaign as part of the Choosing the President series sponsored by UC Berkeley. http://igs.berkeley.edu/

The 2012 CLARK KERR LECTURES Lecture 3: Contemporary Trends: Diagnoses and Conditional Predictions The third lecture turns to the present and future. The lecturer initially sketches a """"perfect storm"""": a confluence of adverse economic, political, and institutional changes that, to many, spell revolutionary transformation if not doom for higher education. In the remainder he assesses the most salient of these changes in the context of what our institutions of higher education have become. The selected themes are (a) budgetary starvation, imposition of accountability, loss of autonomy, and resulting paradoxes of governance; (b) the """"corporatization"""" of academic life, including the language and culture of managerialism, consumerism, the economizing imperative, and university-industry cooperation; (c) on-line distance instruction and the rise of for-profits; and (d) the spectacular growth of non-tenure-track and part-time faculty, with its implications for academic tenure and academic freedom. ~~~ The lecture series was established in 2001 under the auspices of the Center for Studies in Higher Education on the Berkeley campus. Initial funding for the lectures was provided by the University of California's Office of the President, and subsequently major complementary funding has been received from the Carnegie Corporation. The Center for Studies in Higher Education has established an agreement with the University of California Press for publication of the second and future lectures. The 2012 Clark Kerr lecturer will be Neil Smelser, one of the most distinguished and accomplished leaders of American Higher Education and recognized as a profound observer of higher education. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1958 and has authored eighteen books, including "Theory of Collective Behavior". He is a University Professor Emeritus of Sociology for the University of California. His distinguished career has been entirely at the Berkeley campus except for a period in which he was Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His research has focused on what he calls the """"macroscopic social structural level"""" of social life, including economic sociology, social change, social movements, and the sociology of education. He is also a trained psychoanalyst. His most recent book, published by the University of California Press in 2010, is "Reflections on the University of California: From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University". Smelser is a former president of the American Sociological Association, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Professor Smelser's three lectures in the series will be given January 24th and 31st, and February 7th, 2012, on the Berkeley campus, with the third lecture also being given February 14th on the Riverside campus. His subject is "Higher Education: The Play of Continuity and Crisis." In the lectures he will present a general view of social change, especially in universities, and interpret contemporary problems, controversies, and enigmas. ...