As you may know, Kip is reeeally good at public speaking (as well as
reeeally good at doing cool physics).
*) This talk contains quite a lot of recent results, new within the
last year or so.
*) There are lots of pretty pictures. Quantitatively-correct pretty
pictures, coming from numerical simulations.
*) The talk is aimed at a physics audience.
-- Anybody at the level of junior or senior physics majors should
be able to follow most of the details. It is assumed the audience
knows about the second law of thermodynamics, and knows about the
Maxwell equations.
-- The general public should be able to appreciate the pretty pictures,
but not the details.
If you want the next level of detail on the physics, try this:
Robert Owen, Jeandrew Brink, Yanbei Chen, Jeffrey D. Kaplan,
Geoffrey Lovelace, Keith D. Matthews, David A. Nichols,
Mark A. Scheel, Fan Zhang, Aaron Zimmerman, and Kip S. Thorne
"Frame-Dragging Vortexes and Tidal Tendexes Attached to Colliding
Black Holes: Visualizing the Curvature of Spacetime"
Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 151101 (2011) http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v106/i15/e151101
Or just google for it:
www.google.com/search?q="tendex+lines"
About halfway through the talk, Kip makes a point that I like to emphasize
at every opportunity, namely the /iterative/ way that data visualization
supports theory and vice versa:
++ experiment, simulation and visualization tell you what theory to do;
++ theory tells you what experiments and simulations to do;
... and so on, iteratively.