#100 - Alexander Fridman

Episodes Categories Books Stats Articles Schedule

328 results

99 - Karl Friston
Karl Friston is one of the greatest neuroscientists in history, cited over 245,000 times, known for many influential ideas in brain imaging, neuroscience, and theoretical neurobiology, including the fascinating idea of the free-energy principle for action and perception.
98 - Kate Darling
Kate Darling is a researcher at MIT, interested in social robotics, robot ethics, and generally how technology intersects with society. She explores the emotional connection between human beings and life-like machines, which for me, is one of the most exciting topics in all of artificial intelligence.
97 - Sertac Karaman
Sertac Karaman is a professor at MIT, co-founder of the autonomous vehicle company Optimus Ride, and is one of top roboticists in the world, including robots that drive and robots that fly.
96 - Stephen Schwarzman
Stephen Schwarzman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone, one of the world's leading investment firms with over 530 billion dollars of assets under management. He is one of the most successful business leaders in history.
95 - Dawn Song
Dawn Song is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley with research interests in security, most recently with a focus on the intersection between computer security and machine learning.
94 - Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever is the co-founder of OpenAI, is one of the most cited computer scientist in history with over 165,000 citations, and to me, is one of the most brilliant and insightful minds ever in the field of deep learning. There are very few people in this world who I would rather talk to and brainstorm with about deep learning, intelligence, and life than Ilya, on and off the mic.
93 - Daphne Koller
Daphne Koller is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, a co-founder of Coursera with Andrew Ng and Founder and CEO of insitro, a company at the intersection of machine learning and biomedicine.
92 - Harry Cliff
Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge working on the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment that specializes in searching for hints of new particles and forces by studying a type of particle called the "beauty quark", or "b quark". In this way, he is part of the group of physicists who are searching answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics. He is also an exceptional communicator of science with some of the clearest and most captivating explanations of basic concepts in particle physics I've ever heard.
91 - Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey is the co-founder and CEO of Twitter and the founder and CEO of Square.
90 - Dmitry Korkin
Dmitry Korkin is a professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he specializes in bioinformatics of complex disease, computational genomics, systems biology, and biomedical data analytics. I came across Dmitry's work when in February his group used the viral genome of the COVID-19 to reconstruct the 3D structure of its major viral proteins and their interactions with human proteins, in effect creating a structural genomics map of the coronavirus and making this data open and available to researchers everywhere. We talked about the biology of COVID-19, SARS, and viruses in general, and how computational methods can help us understand their structure and function in order to develop antiviral drugs and vaccines.
9 - Stuart Russell
Stuart Russell is a computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco.
89 - Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, a company behind Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, and the new Wolfram Physics project. He is the author of several books including A New Kind of Science, which on a personal note was one of the most influential books in my journey in computer science and artificial intelligence.
88 - Eric Weinstein
Eric Weinstein is a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host of The Portal podcast, a part of which, he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of Geometric Unity that is at the center of his lifelong efforts in arriving at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics.
87 - Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, The Greatest Show on Earth, and his latest Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea. He is outspoken, bold, and often fearless in his defense of science and reason, and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time.
86 - David Silver
David Silver leads the reinforcement learning research group at DeepMind and was lead researcher on AlphaGo, AlphaZero and co-lead on AlphaStar, and MuZero and lot of important work in reinforcement learning.
85 - Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose is physicist, mathematician, and philosopher at University of Oxford. He has made fundamental contributions in many disciplines from the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology to the limitations of a computational view of consciousness.
84 - William MacAskill
William MacAskill is a philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. His research focuses on the fundamentals of effective altruism - the use of evidence and reason to help others by as much as possible with our time and money, with a particular concentration on how to act given moral uncertainty. He is the author of Doing Good Better - Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference. He is a co-founder and the President of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) that encourages people to commit to donate at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. He co-founded 80,000 Hours, a non-profit that provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career.
83 - Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at University of Oxford and the director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He has worked on fascinating and important ideas in existential risks, simulation hypothesis, human enhancement ethics, and the risks of superintelligent AI systems, including in his book Superintelligence. I can see talking to Nick multiple times on this podcast, many hours each time, but we have to start somewhere.
82 - Simon Sinek
Simon Sinek is an author of several books including Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, and his latest The Infinite Game. He is one of the best communicators of what it takes to be a good leader, to inspire, and to build businesses that solve big difficult challenges.
81 - Anca Dragan
Anca Dragan is a professor at Berkeley, working on human-robot interaction -- algorithms that look beyond the robot's function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that accounts for interaction and coordination with human beings.

Search by

#100
Alexander Fridman - My Dad, the Plasma Physicist

Wed, Jun 3, 2020 ·

N/A

Alexander Fridman is a professor at Drexel University and the director of the Nyheim Plasma Institute. He is one of the top plasma physicists and plasma chemists in the world. And most importantly to me, he is my dad.

Timestamps

6:57 - Einstein and beautiful ideas in physics
10:03 - Simple, powerful ideas
12:57 - Falling in love with science
19:45 - Gagarin and space race
21:29 - Poetry
29:31 - Early school days
38:33 - Soviet education
43:31 - A stressful experience
51:49 - Childhood
54:26 - Losing dad
1:02:30 - World War II
1:12:21 - Soviet Union
1:13:50 - Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
1:24:18 - Theoretical physics
1:26:29 - Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy
1:37:34 - Meeting mom
1:45:16 - Becoming a father
2:06:28 - Chernobyl nuclear disaster
2:17:35 - What is plasma?
2:26:54 - Hot plasma and cold plasma
2:31:24 - Mysteries in plasma
2:36:38 - Plasma physics and plasma chemistry
2:39:42 - Plasma medicine
2:45:12 - Nobel prizes in plasma
2:50:17 - Cold fusion
2:54:16 - Journey to America
2:59:43 - Nyheim Plasma Institute
3:12:10 - Artificial intelligence
3:21:43 - Mortality
3:27:59 - Meaning of life
3:35:32 - Toast

Listen on Spotify

Hide video

#physics #drexel #professor #chemistry

← 99 - Karl Friston 101 - Joscha Bach →

#100 Alexander Fridman - My Dad, the Plasma Physicist

Timestamps

Listen on Spotify

Hide video

#100
Alexander Fridman - My Dad, the Plasma Physicist