Loud and clear

Last Tuesday, I went to listen to Simon Singh talk about the subject of his latest book Big Bang. I had read part of his most famous book Fermat's Last Theorem, so I expected quite an informative talk. It was quite entertaining too. Singh put on a very interesting slideshow going over the key elements of the Big Bang theory in the last 50 years, though for anyone who has read the relevant sections in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, it was not unfamiliar.

As had been promised in the publicity flyers, Led Zeppelin ("Stairway to Heaven" played in reverse and words sounding like a hymn to Satan, to illustrate the human mind's penchant for sometimes contriving patterns out of nothing and) why the Teletubbies are evil showed up. He also started the evening by acknowledging the existence of a book with the same title but dealing with the kinds of issues that Eccentrica Gallumbits was known to have written about according to "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe".

Slightly ironic about the evening was the fact that the venue for this event was at the IUCAA whose head Jayant Narlikar's guru, Fred Hoyle, was the foremost opponent of the "Big Bang" theory. It was quite a decent 101 to the theory. Coincidentally, I even found a copy of this book at the British Library today, so let's see how that turns out.