WSU Master Class

What are scientists looking for when searching for alien life? Could alien life develop in unimaginable ways? Astronomer and the founding director of Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative Dimitar Sasselov looks outside our solar system to examine the physical and chemical phenomenon of life.

Has neuroscience all but disproved the existence of free will? Philosopher Alfred Mele argues that free will is still alive and well as he critically analyzes experimental data.

Nobel laureate Rai Weiss is best known as one of the original creators of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Join him as he explores the history of this amazing project and the technology that made it a reality.

Nobel laureate Adam Riess walks you through his team’s incredible discovery of dark energy and our accelerating universe. Explore one of the biggest mysteries in modern cosmology.

How can we experimentally probe consciousness? Neuroscientist Christof Koch guides you through the research he conducts at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

"Gabriela González guides you through the ground-based experiments LIGO uses to search for gravitational waves. Learn about the detection process and what mysteries they hope to solve about our universe. On September 14, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected a gravitational wave for the first time. Just a few months before this groundbreaking discovery, physicist and former LIGO Scientific Collaboration spokesperson Gabriela González describes how the search for gravitational waves has been conducted and what mysteries scientists hope to solve about our universe."

Cumrun Vafa, together with fellow world-renowned string theorist Andrew Strominger, developed a new way to calculate black hole entropy in the language of string theory. Follow Vafa as he guides you through some of the more incredible things we have learned since string theory’s inception.