MIT physicist Cesar Hidalgo is experimenting with a new television program that gets scientists talking about their research and the wonders of discovery. He's not really like Jon Stewart, much more like TED, but his vision is to make the physical sciences accessible and exciting to the general public. Season two is on its way.
The article featuring the show appeared in the New York Times 1/09/12.
In October, with support from two Media Laboratory videographers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams, Dr. Hidalgo began posting online a series of video interviews with local scientists. He began with Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist and network scientist who was Dr. Hidalgo’s faculty graduate adviser at Notre Dame, and then quickly added seven more interviews crossing back and forth between the natural and the social sciences.
The series, “Cambridge Nights: Conversations About a Life in Science,” is intended to allow scientists to open up about their lives, their work and their views of the world. In one episode, for instance, Marc Vidal of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School talks about systems biology. In another, Ricardo Hausmann of the Center for International Development at Harvard discusses economic development.
