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Dr. Mario Livio explains things so well and so completely, I’m speechless! It’s amazing to me how many times in this short interview he blows my mind. Science, made popular, is the most amazing thing.

Dr. Livio speaks about his latest book The Equation that Couldn’t Be Solved and the genius of Evariste Galois, dead at age 20 from a duel. Symmetry is found pervasively throughout existence. Dr. Livio briefly discusses mathematical symmetry before turning to the expression of symmetry through our genes. Symmetry even impacts how we pick mates! While we hope that we are more complex than peacocks in that endeavor, humans are also clearly hard coded to prefer the visually symmetric. Physical symmetry provides a kind of shorthand indicator of overall health. For example, by morphing multiple faces together, experimenters have created facial images that become more and more average and more and more symmetric with each morph. They have discovered that a 32-morph face is more attractive than any of the individual faces used to build the morph. There is, indeed, (human) beauty in symmetry!

Promo: Slice of Sci-Fi

Dr. Livio works as an astro-physicist at The Space Telescope Science Institute which runs the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble was designed to rely on the Space Shuttle for support. However, with Atlantis and Endeavor the only shuttles left in the fleet following the Columbia and Challenger disasters, it has been difficult to schedule the critically needed Servicing Mission 4. Although there is a new space vehicle planned for the return to the Moon and the exploration of Mars, there are no current plans for a shuttle replacement vehicle which leaves the Hubble’s longterm future uncertain. A new space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in 2013. Don’t count the Hubble out just yet, though. There is still plenty of science left for it to do!

Dr. Livio is the author of many scholarly and popular science works. A partial list includes: The Equation that Couldn’t Be Solved, The Golden Ratio, and The Accelerating Universe. A more complete list of Dr. Livio’s publications can be found at his site.