If Stephen Hawking could talk with Albert Einstein, what would he say?

“I would ask him why he didn’t believe in black holes,” says Hawking in this video from Time magazine. “The field equations of his General Theory of Relativity implied that a large star or cloud of gas would collapse in on itself and form a black hole. Einstein was aware of this but somehow managed to convince himself that something like an explosion would always occur to throw off mass and prevent the formation of a black hole. What if there was no explosion?”

The famous cosmologist, theoretical physicist and author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time made the remark in late 2010, when he agreed to take part in the Time’s “10 Questions” series. The magazine invited readers from around the world to submit questions for Hawking, but because of the scientist’s disability–he is fully paralyzed due to motor neurone disease and has to painstakingly compose his answers using a single cheek muscle to operate his word processor–the interview was pared down to seven questions.

One reader asks if Hawking thinks civilization will survive long enough to extend itself into deep space. “I think we have a good chance of surviving long enough to colonize the Solar System,” says Hawking. “However, there is nowhere else in the solar system anything like as suitable as the Earth, so it is not clear if we would survive if the Earth was made unfit for habitation. To ensure our long-term survival we need to reach for the stars. That will take much longer. Let’s hope we can last until then.”

Related content:

A Brief History of Time: Errol Morris’s Film of Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking’s Universe: A Visualization in Stars and Sound

Stephen Hawking: Abandon Earth or Face Extinction

Some filmmakers put storyboards, those comic book-looking shot plans you sometimes glimpse in making-of documentaries, at the center of their creative process. Terry Gilliam, he of Brazil and 12 Monkeys, has described storyboards as the one thing he can safely “lock onto” during the complicated, ever-shifting shooting process. Other filmmakers, such as the heartily improvisational Werner Herzog, have dismissed storyboards as the tool of “cowards,” of “those who lack imagination,” of “those who are bureaucratic and nothing else on the set.” Having spent seven formative years in art school, Alien and Blade Runner director Ridley Scott develops his films by thinking as much through the framework of visual art as through that of cinema. In the video above, a laid-back Scott, cigar in hand, discusses how storyboards, sketches, and other pieces of hand-drawn imagery help him make movies.

Telling how he’s found locations, envisioned scenes within them, and used drawings to build those scenes, Scott offers an insight into the look and feel of his own work and useful advice to fellow creators, whether or not they work in a visual medium. His inspiration begins with an activity as simple — but nonetheless a source of “great enjoyment” — as looking at industrial landscapes out the window of a car. Sometimes he even begins thumbnail sketches then and there, in transit. Not only does his drafting background enable him to do that, but it leads to closer working relationships with his professional storyboard artists. Conferring with them mentally prepares him to “hit the floor” and shoot the scene. He reveals that, whether you’re directing a $120 million motion picture, painting a painting, or even writing a blog post, you face the same challenge: “Get rid of the white canvas. Get something right across the canvas. Otherwise you’re always looking at that area of white, which is like a blank sheet.” He notes that his methods have led to some calling his films “overdesigned and over-thought out,” but admits that, at this point, “I’ll probably just stay with the plan.”

via @webacion

Related Content:

The Making of Blade Runner

Ridley Scott Readies a Prequel to Alien; Guy Pearce Gives Its “TED Talk”

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Great directors – unless they’re Orson Welles – rarely start off making masterpieces. Their craft evolves, reminding us that great filmmaking (like everything else) takes talent, but also hard work. In case you’re doubtful, we’re presenting the first films by five iconic directors, all featured here before, but never brought together into one place. Some first films are downright choppy; some are workmanlike; some are more refined. But none exactly soar to cinematic heights. Above, we start you off with Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 debut film My Best Friend’s Birthday, a choppy production that has something unmistakably Tarantinoesque about it, according to Colin Marshall.

In some sense, [My Best Friend’s Birthday] bears an even deeper imprint of Tarantino’s personality than his subsequent films [Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs], since he stars in it as well. To behold the early-twentysomething Tarantino portraying the good-hearted and aggressively enthusiastic but jittery and distractible rockabilly DJ Clarence Poole is to behold the Quentin Tarantino public persona in an embryonic form, a distilled form — or both.

Long before Francis Ford Coppola shot Apocalpyse Now and The Godfather in the 1970s, he made his real directorial debut with a 75-minute, black-and-white psychological horror film called Dementia 13 (1963). He had made a couple of small-time nudie films before that. But this was his first mainstream, legit effort. As Colin, our resident film critic has noted here, “To watch Dementia 13 now is to witness Coppola’s control of tension and darkness in its embryonic — but still impressive — form. Nobody involved in the production could have deluded themselves about its goal of shooting a few maximally gruesome axe murders as quickly and cheaply as possible, but even such straitened circumstances allow for pockets of artistry to bubble through.”

When you think Coppola, you think Scorsese too, another director who put his stamp on 1970s and 1980s cinema with Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. We recently revisited Scorsese’s NYU film school days during the early 1960s, when he first cut his teeth as a director. We showed you several of his early shorts (find them all here), but highlighted one of his earliest works, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This (1963). Scorsese would later describe the film as “nine minutes of visual nonsense,” while also saying “it had no depth at all, but it was a lot of fun. And it won me a scholarship, so my father was able to use it for the tuition for the next year.”

Whereas Martin Scorsese went to NYU and leisurely studied the history and aesthetics of cinema, Stanley Kubrick, a poor student, skipped college, started working as a photographer for Look magazine, and eventually began making movies to eke out a living. In the early 1950s, Kubrick started shooting newsreel documentaries, hoping to turn a tidy profit. And here you’ll find his first effort, Day of the Fight, a 1951 noirish documentary on middleweight boxer Walter Cartier and his match with Bobby James. It’s a workmanlike film, yes. But not exactly an obvious prelude to 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Mike Springer has more on Kubrick’s early documentaries here.

The 1957 film, Les Mistons (The Brats), was technically François Truffaut’s second film but the first that ever satisfied him. Senses of Cinema has elsewhere called it “the director’s first short film of any real consequence.” Relative to the early efforts of other directors, this short demonstrates a more mature set of filmmaking skills, the kind that would be on display two years later when Truffaut released Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), one of the defining films of French New Wave cinema. Colin Marshall takes a closer look at Les Mistons right here.

All films showcased above appear in our collection of 475 Free Movies Online.

Not long ago we posted the only known recording of Sigmund Freud’s voice. Today we present rare home movies of the founder of modern psychology, captured during the last decade of his life.

The scenes are narrated by Freud’s youngest daughter Anna, who allowed the footage to be shown only within the psychoanalytic community before her death in 1982. The first scenes in the clip above were filmed in 1932 at Freud’s summer home in Pötzleinsdorf, a suburb of Vienna. He is shown visiting with his old friend Emanuel Löwy, an archaeologist, and petting his dog Jofi. The next sequence was shot between 1934 and 1937 at Freud’s later summer home in Grinzing, now a district of Vienna. It shows Freud relaxing with a book while his wife Martha and her sister, Minna Bernays, do their sewing. The movies were made by Freud’s friend and patient Mark Brunswick, husband of the psychoanalyst Ruth Mack Brunswick, a close associate of Freud’s.

You can watch the complete 24-minute film from which these scenes were taken on YouTube. And you can view or download a series of annotated clips at the Freud Museum Web site.

Open Culture readers know that, whenever Alain de Botton looks into traditional intellectual fields, he finds tools for better living. His quest for the founts of happiness has got him reinterpreting philosophy, rethinking home architecture, and repurposing religion. Retooling the physical, intellectual, and aesthetic structures and practices with which we’ve grown complacent all comes in his day’s work. But he’s found a new object of retooling that, in its sheer distance from anything like a traditional intellectual field, will surely earn him more press than practical Socrates, modern dwellings, and and atheist faith combined: pornography. Reactions came flying as soon as his School of Life issued a press release calling for “better porn,” porn “in which sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values.” In the New Statesman, Nichi Hodsgson agrees: “Right now, we may have the porn we deserve but we can make better. [ ... ] Blaming poor porn on atavistic urges is lazy and historically inaccurate. Better porn just requires letting our brains, rather than consideration for our bank balances, lead our late-night Google searches.” This all rides on a particular premise: porn is bad. Perhaps you consider porn ethically bad, and de Botton shares your concerns, diagnosing in the stuff “a threat not just to those who make it in terms of the exploitation involved, but also to those who consume it, in terms of the conflict it can set up between the values encoded in the porn and their responsibilities and values in the rest of their lives.”

But he also summons a fresher, richer critique: “The real problem with current pornography is that it’s so far removed from all the other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have [ ... ] As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it.” Porn, put bluntly, has grown unnecessarily tacky, harsh, dumb, and disconnected from life itself. The actual form of de Botton’s “Better Porn” remains unclear — putting production into the hands of “normal” people, outside the grotesqueness of the industry? Reviving to the artistically sound yet sexually daring “foreign film” of the early sixties? — but the complaint rings familiar as one we’ve been making to for years. Hearing de Botton say publicly it must startle his more casual followers, but those of us who have read his early books as well as his later ones and closely follow his prolific media output, including the clip above on the “strange eroticism” of offices, shouldn’t feel surprised. De Botton has, in his diligent avoidance of ivory towers, always held to Terence’s famout line, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”: “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.”

Related content:

Socrates on TV, Courtesy of Alain de Botton (2000)

Alain de Botton Wants a Religion for Atheists: Introducing Atheism 2.0

Alain de Botton’s Quest for The Perfect Home and Architectural Happiness

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Pico Iyer once called Charles Bukowski the “laureate of American lowlife,” and that’s because he wrote poems for and about ordinary Americans — people who experienced poverty, the tedium and grind of work, and sometimes frayed relationships, bouts of alcoholism, drug addiction and the rest. Bukowski could write so eloquently about this because he came from this world. He grew up in a poor immigrant household with an abusive father, took to the bottle at an early age, worked at a Los Angeles post office for a decade plus, and had a long and tumultuous relationship with Jane Cooney Baker, a widow eleven years his senior, who drank to excess and died at 51, leaving Bukowski broken. And then there’s the depression. Bukowski experienced that too. But he knew how to channel it, how to turn days of darkness into sources of personal and creative renewal. He explains it in some characteristically NSFW detail above.

To gain a more in-depth understanding of depression and its biological basis, we’d recommend watching this lecture by Stanford’s Robert Sapolksy. Also see the revealing documentary, Stephen Fry: The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive.

via Biblioklept

Related Bukowski:

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski

The Last Faxed Poem of Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

Throughout 2010 and 2011, the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) developed a series of catchy videos that feature the words of thought leaders accompanied by the fast-moving animation of Andrew Park. Along the way, we have highlighted RSA talks by Stephen Pinker, Slavoj Zizek, Barbara Ehrenreich, Daniel Pink, Sir Ken Robinson, and Renata Salecl. Now, after a fairly long hiatus, the series returns — this time with Manuel Lima (senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing) explaining how networks helps us map and create knowledge in our modern world. You can watch the full  unanimated) lecture here.

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We’ll let you spot the typo to end all typos. Needless to say, the school has issued its mea culpa on Twitter and started printing new commencement brochures. Now they’ll wait with bated breath to see if their goof becomes fodder for The Daily Show. We all make mistakes and then we move on. via Jim Romanesko

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Neil Gaiman, considered one of the top ten living post-modern writers, never went to college. He neither started nor finished his advanced studies, but rather put himself into the world and started writing. And write he did. He’s now the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, and American Gods, among others, and he’s also the winner of the 2009 Newbery Medal and 2010 Carnegie Medal in Literature. (We have gathered free versions of Gaiman’s writing in audio & text here.) This weekend, Gaiman spoke at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and told the graduating class all the things he wish he knew at their age. The talk runs 19 minutes. The distilled version appears below.

1. Embrace the fact that you’re young. Accept that you don’t know what you’re doing. And don’t listen to anyone who says there are rules and limits.
2. If you know your calling, go there. Stay on track. Keep moving towards it, even if the process takes time and requires sacrifice.
3. Learn to accept failure. Know that things will go wrong. Then, when things go right, you’ll probably feel like a fraud. It’s normal.
4. Make mistakes, glorious and fantastic ones. It means that you’re out there doing and trying things.
5. When life gets hard, as it inevitably will, make good art. Just make good art.
6. Make your own art, meaning the art that reflects your individuality and personal vision.
7. Now a practical tip. You get freelance work if your work is good, if you’re easy to get along with, and if you’re on deadline. Actually you don’t need all three. Just two.
8. Enjoy the ride, don’t fret the whole way. Stephen King gave that piece of advice to Neil years ago.
9. Be wise and accomplish things in your career. If you have problems getting started, pretend you’re someone who is wise, who can get things done. It will help you along.
10. Leave the world more interesting than it was before.

via Metafilter

If you missed the big solar eclipse and its strange shadows last night, not to worry. Cory Poole, a science teacher in Redding, California, has you covered. Above, you’ll find his video that brings together 700 images (view them individually in high res here) into a 60 second time-lapse film. The images were viewed/taken through a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stacked Hydrogen Alpha Solar Telescope. The music was composed in Abelton Live. Find courses on Astronomy in our collection of Free Online Courses. via Gizmodo

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