Afleveringen
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Saul Permutter won the Nobel Prize for his eventual role in the discovery of dark energy. In 1996 when I was lecturing at LBL he bet me that he would show dark energy didn't exist. His group had been measuring supernova distances for years, in hopes of determining the deceleration rate of the universe. Instead, after recalibrating some of his earlier data, his group and an independent group discovered the universe was actually accelerating.
That is the beauty of science, it supersedes any individual prejudices, and scientists actually change their minds if the data requires it. This is one of the many important characteristics of science that Saul and his collaborators discuss in their recent book, Third Millennium Thinking. It is a good read, full of useful examples about how scientific thinking is important in the world beyond just science.
Saul and I had a lively conversation about science, the scientific method, and his own experiences as a scientists. It was an enriching and enlightening discussion, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.
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PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING NOW TO SAVE THIS FAMILY!
There are many tragedies in Afghanistan, and thousands of people who need help. We cannot right all the wrongs, but we can save these 8 people. We can save a woman who fought for human rights and now faces execution in Afghanistan if she were to return. We can save 5 young girls who have no access to education, or freedom if they were to return to Afghanistan. Already, during the past 2 years in Afghanistan, they have learned much English, and one of the young girls has been selected for a prestigious online scholarship to study at an English speaking Afghan University now run outside of that country. We can do something concrete and positive to help them.
It isn’t everything, but it is something. I can tell you from my last experience of saving the life of a young girl from Afghanistan so she could study in the United States and eventually pursue and advanced degree that not a day goes by when I don’t think about how that feels to me like one of the most important things I have done.
I hope you will consider donating, and if you cannot, that you will pass this podcast along to others who may be interested.
DONATIONS:
The JIAS has kindly created two different direct PayPal donation links.
* The first is specifically linked to the family, and if for some horrible reason the family were not able to arrive in Canada under this program, all funds would be returned to donors. Because the funding relates to this family uniquely, any donations made to this site are not tax deductible for Canadian residents. This is the preferred site for all those who are not concerned about receiving a Canadian tax receipt for their donations.
Here is the direct link: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=VBKBGBFZ5G5FE
* The second is a link to a fund which will provide for the family if they arrive, but if for some reason they cannot arrive, the funds will not be returned but will be allocated to others on the sponsor’s waiting list. Donations to this fund are however tax deductible for Canadian residents, and donors will receive a tax receipt.
Here is the link: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=H49YGR3E5QMBY
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Helen Pluckrose has been a formidable voice in the cultural and intellectual debates surrounding critical social justice, liberalism, and free speech. I've admired her work for some time, particularly her rigorous analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of these movements. In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Helen about her new book, "The Counterweight Handbook," which offers practical strategies for those navigating the challenges posed by critical social justice ideologies in the workplace and beyond.
As with all Origins Podcasts, we spent some time learning about Helen’s own origins, which are just as compelling as her work. From her early years, where she balanced a career in care with a passion for English literature, to her later involvement in the Grievance Studies Affair, which exposed the weaknesses in certain academic fields, Helen has consistently demonstrated a concern for the wellbeing of others and a commitment to liberal values and intellectual honesty.
In our discussion, we covered the origins and evolution of critical social justice, the impact of postmodern thought on modern social theories, and the ongoing challenges of promoting free speech in an increasingly polarized world. Helen shared insights from her work with Counterweight, an organization she founded to support individuals facing ideological pressure in their professional lives. We worked through her new book, which provides remarkably useful guides for dealing with challenges that misplaced critical social justice pressures might impose upon you in the workplace and elsewhere.
This conversation was both enlightening and engaging. It offers valuable perspectives for anyone interested in the intersection of culture, politics, and philosophy. Helen is a wonderfully clear thinker, a sympathetic presence and a powerful advocate for the principles of liberalism, and it was a pleasure to spend time discussing her work and writing. I hope you find this episode as insightful and useful as I did.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.
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Wendy Freedman, the former director of the Carnegie Observatories and now distinguished professor at University of Chicago, has been a leading figure in observational cosmology and astronomy for over 30 years. I have known her as a friend and colleague, and have learned much from her over the years, and was very excited to be able to snag her amidst her busy schedule to record a podcast a week or two before the release of a new blockbuster result her team had produced. I am very happy that Critical Mass listeners will be among the first to get the detailed lowdown on the likely resolution of a problem that has been plaguing cosmology for the past decade.
In the 1990’s Wendy led a major international team of astronomers in carrying the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was named in part because of this project, to establish the distance scale of the universe and measure its current expansion rate, a quantity not coincidentally called the Hubble Constant, first measured by Edwin Hubble in 1929.
Since that time, different groups have measured this most important single observable in our universe and gotten widely different values. In the 1980’s and early 90’s two different groups got values that differed by a factor of 2, even though each claimed errors of less than 10%. In 2001, Freedman’s team published their result, truly accurate to 10%, and the value, perhaps not surprisingly, fell right in the middle between the previous two discrepant values.
All was good, until inferences based on the Cosmic Microwave Background, the most precise observable in modern cosmology suggested that measurements at a time when the universe was 300,000 years old, when extrapolated forward using the best current theory of cosmology today, would give a value that different from the HST value.
The difference was statistically significant, and as time proceeded, and error bars got smaller, the discrepancy between the HST (and then the James Web Space Telescope (JWST)) measurement, and the CMB measurement got more significant. Was our current model of cosmology simply wrong?
Such was the claim in various places over the past few years. Most recently, Wendy led a team to measure cosmic distances in 3 different ways using JWST, and as she describes in our discussion, it looks like the problem may now be solved, although not without leaving other mysteries.
We talked about a lot more than this though. Wendy’s background, what got her into astronomy, her experiences throughout her career, and her leadership in a new project building the Giant Magellan Telescope, what will be the largest telescope in the world in Chile.
The discussion was as fun as it was exciting. Wendy is a wonderful popular expositor, and as always, I really enjoyed talking to her. Tune in to hear, for the first time, about the newest and most important recent result in cosmology from one of my favorite colleagues and a world class scientist.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.
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I was very happy to finally have the opportunity to have an extended conversation for our podcast with renowned theoretical physicist Lenny Susskind. Lenny has been a friend and colleague for many years. I remember first attending a lecture he gave at a conference when I was an undergraduate and recognizing what a powerful intellect he was, and also how he combined mathematical sophistication within an intuitive framework that reminded me a bit of Richard Feynman. Years later, when I went jogging with him along a beach in California, I also discovered that, he strove for excellence in everything he did, and it nearly killed me to keep up with him.
Lenny has been involved over the past 50 years in many of the forefront developments in particle physics, including string theory, the standard model, the matter-antimatter symmetry of the universe, and the mysteries of black hole physics and quantum gravity, to name just a few. It was enlightening to explore his own intellectual development, and also his perspectives on how these major developments in physics fit into our evolving understanding of the universe.
Lenny is also an accomplished popularizer of science, something he turned to somewhat late in his career, and I learned something fascinating about what caused him to turn to writing. It was entirely unexpected. I am glad he was motivated, because his semi-popular books following The Theoretical Minimum, covering the essential ideas necessary for someone to have a grasp of modern theoretical physics, are, in my opinion classics.
Anyone who is interested in understanding how we got to where we are today, and what the key outstanding questions in theoretical physics are, and where the likely answers may be found, will find our discussion enlightening, and, fascinating. I hope you enjoy this in depth discussion with one of the most accomplished theorists around today, and one of the most enjoyable and thought provoking scientists one might hope to have a conversation with.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.
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This is my second dialogue with filmmaker extraordinaire and force of nature, Werner Herzog. But after I read his amazing new memoire Every Man for Himself, and God Against All, which takes its name for the German title of his 1974 film The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, I had to have Werner back.
I have known Werner for almost 20 years. We met when I was a judge at Sundance and we gave his film Grizzly Man an award, and Werner, his wife Lena, and I have been fast friends ever since. He even allowed me to be a villain in the movie Salt and Fire, which we shot in Bolivia with Michael Shannon and Veronica Ferres. So, after all of this time I thought I really had a good handle on him. I was wrong.
So many people ask me about Werner, who has a reputation of being larger than life, and I always say what a kind, generous, pleasant man he is. All of that is true, but after reading his new autobiography, I realize that he IS larger than life!!
If it weren’t Werner, I would never believe all of the amazing stories and events. That he is still alive is alone almost a miracle. For this dialogue I decided that rather than following his story chronologically, I would read him various quotes from the book and ask him to elaborate. What followed was a rollicking conversation that is one of the most amazing I have recorded to date, and that I think presents Werner has perhaps few other interviews ever had. In the process we covered territory from science to philosophy to history to religion and beyond. And in the end, what arose most clearly from our discussion was that while he is a world famous filmmaker, what he really is at heart, is a poet. And we are all lucky to have him. Enjoy!
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.
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Many of you will have been waiting for this podcast after my brief review of Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario on Critical Mass. I took advantage of our discussion to flesh out some of the harrowing details of her remarkable fictional account of a plausible 72 minutes which began with the launch of a single nuclear missile from North Korea and concludes effectively with the end of modern civilization on the planet. As I indicated in my review, as former Chair of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for over a decade, the horrors of nuclear war were well-known to me, but the realization of how quickly a scenario such as Jacobsen envisages might actually play out was something I had never really imagined.
Jacobsen is no stranger to thinking about defense issues and has penned numerous books on defense-related issues, including a history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. She is also a seasoned fiction writer for television, penning three episodes of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Her new book combines her interest in nuclear war related issues, and interviews with a host of military officials involved in nuclear war planning over the past five decades, with her skill in framing a tense dramatic narrative. The result is compelling.
I know from experience that most people would rather avoid thinking about the threat of nuclear war. But it is only by confronting it directly that the public might have a possibility of at least slowing the military juggernaut, powered by a combination of a huge bureaucracy that works effectively to maintain its existence, and a cold war mentality the drives efforts to continue to grow and modernize our nuclear weapons establishment—all the while in spite of the fact that everyone who has seriously thought about nuclear war knows it is unwinnable. As Einstein, who helped found the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors said over 60 years ago, with the creation of Nuclear Weapons “Everything has changed, save the way we think”. My hope is that discussions like this one may help us change even that.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.
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Michael Turner has been one of the leading pioneers in the emerging field of particle-astrophysics: the effort to understand the large scale properties of our universe by exploring the fundamental microphysics that ultimately governed the earliest moments of the big bang. It has been an area in which most of my own research has been focused, so it is not surprising that Michael I became on and off research collaborators starting about 40 years ago. In 1995 Michael and I published a paper arguing that 70% of the energy of the universe must reside in empty space if the data at the time were to be self-consistent. Three years later two groups confirmed our prediction, and were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011 for that discovery. Michael later coined the term “dark energy” to describe this completely mysterious quantity.
Michael is not only a leading scientist, he is also a leading expositor of astrophysics, having written one of the seminal books about the physics of the early universe, and he is frequently sought out by journalists to comment on current results, and by academic audiences for his popular lectures. He has a wry sense of humor, and over his more than 40 years of scientific research he has been involved in many of the key developments that have shaped astrophysics. He has also helped direct the national research effort itself, having been a deputy director of the National Science Foundation, and a former president of the American Physical Society.
Mike and I sat down for a long overdue discussion of his own perspectives on the field. We discussed his personal history, motivations, and challenges as a young scientist, and then went on to discuss many of the key areas of progress in cosmology over the past 40 years, including some puzzles which remain today, and about which one often reads in the popular press. For anyone interested in cosmology, our discussion will shed a great deal of light on which problems are real, and which are not, and also give a new perspective for how far we have come over the last half century in unraveling many of the mysteries of the universe.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube.
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Jeffrey Sachs was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history when he was promoted only a few years after receiving his PhD. And for good reason. He is one of the most remarkable intellects I know. I have always been amazed and the breadth of his reading and knowledge, and when I give him one of my physics books, he reads it in a day, and comes back with great questions.
Jeffrey has not been content to stay within the confines of academia, and for 17 years served as a senior advisor to the head of the UN, and has worked, sometimes controversially, with numerous governments to help them out of economic hardships. His interest in world affairs has caused him to write a great deal about power politics, global conflict, and diplomacy, and I wanted to sit down and talk to him about two conflicts about which he has written recently, Ukraine and Gaza.
But first, we talked about his own career, his interest in economics, and also his thoughts about the UN, an agency which of late has dropped considerably in my own estimation.
I agree strongly with Jeffrey that only diplomatic solutions to military conflicts have any hope of lasting, and that nationalist politics that sustain military adventurism inevitably only causes the people within both warring countries undue hardship. But how to extricate countries from the cycle of violence is a difficult challenge, and Jeffrey doesn’t mince words in that regard. I have to say that I agree with him wholeheartedly about Ukraine. Not as completely on the Middle East, though our disagreements are subtle. We both agree that a two state solution in the middle east is essential, and detest many policies of the current Israeli government, especially on the west bank (although no more than I think we both detest the policies of the terrorist lunatics governing Gaza, who seem intent on inflicting as much or more hardship on their own populace as any external government does, most often to score political points on the world scene) I am less sanguine about the likelihood that UN troops and Arab nations could or would realistically and fairly implement and police such a situation, but I sympathize with his views that the UN may be the last resort.
I expect I may read some angry feedback about some of Jeffrey’s suggestions, but once again, reasoned discussion, especially about disagreements, is essential if we are to make progress, in science, and in the real world. As a result I feel particularly lucky to have people like Jeffrey to have such discussions with. I hope you are as stimulated and educated by the discussion as I always am when I talk to him.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube.
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You’ve probably heard of Serotonin, or Dopamine. Those are the sexy neurotransmitters that get all the press. However, you have probably not heard of Glutamate. Which is a shame because it is probably the most important neurotransmitter in the brain, responsible in large part for its growth, and also its plasticity.
Mark Mattson is a neuroscientist with a distinguished career as Director of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. While initially interested in developmental biology in animals, Mattson’s work in endocrinology led him to become to study the effect of hormones on the brain. Eventually he began to focus on the role of the Glutamate in neuroplasticity and Alzheimers disease. He realized how essential that neurotransmitter was for understanding the very formation of the brain, the growth of neurons, and the formation of axons and dendrites, as well as its key role in brain functions including learning and memory .
I first got to know Mark when we co-organized a workshop on Pattern Processing in the Human Brain, where we invited well known neuroscientists as well as computer scientists and AI researchers to come together to discuss areas of joint interest. The idea was to explore key features that may underlie consciousness, and also to explore how to ensure how to avoid the error-prone brain functioning such as one finds in Schizophrenia as AI systems are developed. The public event associated with the workshop was entitled Creativity and Madness, and involved a dialogue between me and actor Johnny Depp.
Most recently, Mark has written a fascinating book, entitled Sculptor and Destroyer, to describe and explain the importance of Glutamate in brain formation and functioning. We had a fascinating discussion about that, and also how he became interested in the brain after initially planning to become a veterinarian. I hope you find the discussion as enlightening as I did.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube.
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I admit I was somewhat intimidated when the prospect of hosting Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist Charles Duhigg on the podcast was raised. What caused my angst was the subject matter we would discuss: Communication.
Hosting this podcast has been a learning experience, in so many ways. Since listeners are very free with advice, especially when they don’t like the conversational aspect of the dialogues, and would prefer an interview format, I have often had to come face to face with my own failures of communication. Charles had just completed a book, Supercommunicators, which has since become a New York Times bestseller about the tools that so-called ‘supercommunicators’ use to bring out the best in conversations. It includes interviews with, and stories about, people from a wide varieties of occupations and experiences, from a former FRB recruiter, to two people on opposite sides of the current gun-control debate, and even to the creators of Big Bang Theory, about how they achieved their goals of communication.
The techniques revealed in the book, and in our conversation, are remarkably illuminating. Perhaps the most important tool, which sounds remarkably simple, but nevertheless is often absent in conversations is to decide in advance what type of conversation one is about to be engaged in: practical, emotional, or social. Without this recognition, the ultimate success of any subsequent conversation is unlikely to be profound.
In our subsequent podcast discussion, I wanted to engage in all three types of conversations, with some clarity in advance about where we were going, beginning as always with what took Charles to the starting point of his writing, and concluding with what the impact on his own personal life had been by all he had learned when researching the book. Thinking about the skills he discussed certainly had an impact on my own efforts during the podcast, and I hope will improve discussions on all future podcasts. You, the listeners, will be the judges of course.
I hope you will enjoy and be enlightened by the ground we covered. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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I have had the privilege of working closely with Frank Wilczek for over 40 years, on and off, and we have written perhaps a dozen scientific papers together over that time. Our collaborations together were always a source of joy, and often of wonder, and I am pleased to say that a number of them had significant impact on our fields of study.
While I have had the privilege of working with many talented scientists during my career, Frank is unique. He is one of the most broadly read, deep, and creative scientists I have known. To first approximation, he has read everything in science, and one of the characteristics of our own collaborations that has been so much fun is entering an entirely new field of study and learning how much is known about it, and how that knowledge might be used in new contexts.
Frank is likely the most significant theoretical physicist of my generation, and along with Ed Witten, perhaps the intellectually most gifted. That he won the Nobel Prize for work performed as a graduate student with David Gross to develop the theory of one of the four known forces in nature is notable, but it just scratches the surface of his interests and accomplishments.
While Frank and I have appeared onstage together on numerous occasions, I was waiting for the opportunity to sit down with him for an extended period to discuss his life in science, and the areas of study that reflect the most significant developments of recent times, and the outstanding challenges in our field. It was a pleasure to be able to do so for this podcast. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and that it inspires your interest in the world around us.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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I first stumbled upon the journalist Katherine Brodsky, who has been a commentator and writer for various media outlets, when I heard about her new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage. The title intrigued me but I admit I was a bit skeptical. Having written and spoken about co-called cancel culture in the academic world, I expected I might find nothing new in her book, but I was wrong.
Katherine was motivated to write her book after her own experience of being mobbed online after having defended a colleague in an online media group she helped moderate, for the crime of having posted a job opportunity at Fox News. While she had become aware of the growing social intolerance she was witnessing around her, it was her own experience that caused to make a crucial decision. These kind of experiences can be debilitating, as she had discovered, and she decided to explore the experiences of others, to see how they had recovered their voices, fought back against the mob, or otherwise moved on.
The stories in No Apologies are poignant, and fascinating. Katherine is a clear and compelling writer, and an eloquent expositor, as I discovered during our discussion. We explored her own experience, her interests in journalism, and her own takeaways from the stories she explored as a journalist, which form the basis of the book. It was a fascinating and provocative discussion, and in many ways uplifting rather than depressing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and that it helps others to deal with the a society that seems to be becoming increasing intolerant to free and open discussion about important issues.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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Irwin Shapiro is a remarkable human being by almost any standard. Following his education in physics at Cornell and Harvard, he had a job at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory working on various problems in planetary dynamics, and radar ranging, when he went to a lecture and realized that a completely new phenomenon could occur in General Relativity that no one had proposed in the half-century since Einstein first proposed it. For objects traveling near a massive object like the Sun, the travel time to go from one point to another would be slightly longer than it would be if one simply divided the distance traveled by the speed of light. One might think this is simply due to the fact that light takes a curved trajectory near a massive object, rather than traveling in a straight line. But as Shapiro showed, there is an additional time delay, due to the fact that clocks tick somewhat slower in a gravitational field than they would otherwise.
This effect, now known as the Shapiro Effect has become known as the 4th test of General Relativity, a test the theory passed when Shapiro and collaborators used the Haystack Observatory to carefully measure reception times for radar signal that passed near the sun.
Irwin went from that triumph to Chair the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, and from there to Harvard to lead the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory. He remains at Harvard, where at 94 years old, as Timkin University Professor, he still teachers classes, is doing research in biology, and plays tennis several times a week!
Besides all of this, Irwin is one of the most lovely and gentle scientists I have known in my career, which continued after my stint at Harvard largely because of encouragement he gave to me at a very difficult time for me. As a result, it was a pure delight to reconnect with him after many years, and have a conversation about his long career, the evolution of science in the 60 odd years that he has been doing it, and about life in general. I hope you enjoy it, and find it as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as I did.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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I first became aware of Jonathan Kay through his writing for the online magazine, Quillette. And for full disclosure, I got to know him better because he is one of their editors, and he has edited several of my own pieces for that magazine. Before that, however, I had been a fan of his writing, and was happy to be able to have an extended conversation with him about writing, journalism, false news, and politics, to name a few of the topics we discussed.
Our dialogue occurred shortly after the appearance of a comprehensive 15,000 word piece of investigative journalism piece by Kay about a supposed organized sex-ring in the Psychology Department at McMaster University in Canada. Outrageous claims had surfaced, which ignited the university, and the local media, destroying the careers of various faculty and others, all of which eventually turned out to be false. Kay carefully explored how the original story developed, what factors prompted the University to act, and how local media played up the salacious claims without much investigation. It was a typical example of how false news can propagate, and also an indictment of the way Universities handle such claims, and local media may promote them.
The appearance of this story gave us the opportunity to talk about the state of journalism in general. Jonathan has had a unique career and background, which made him a particularly interesting dialogue partner about this issue. He actually was educated as a metallurgical engineer, and following that he pursued a law degree at Yale University, and was a tax lawyer before eventually becoming disenchanted and deciding to pursue a career in writing and journalism.
He also defies easy labelling. While he was a founding editor of the conservative Canadian newspaper The National Post, he also helped Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau write his memoirs. It is Jonathan’s non-ideological bent, perhaps due to his early training as a scientist and engineer that makes his perspective on today’s news so refreshing. We discussed his own background, what got him into writing, his experiences, and stories including the recent claimed Indigenous Residential School scandal in Canada, and the controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope in the U.S.
When I contacted Jon this week to let him know the podcast is coming out, I learned that he had just completed a lengthy investigative piece about University of New Hampshire astrophysicist/gender studies social justice warrior Chanda Prescod Weinstein who, in the process of claiming victimization for herself and others, has apparently been bullying, harassing, and intimidating a host of others online, leading to complaints recently being filed at her institution. It coincidentally just came out yesterday, so this podcast is particularly timely. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I enjoyed talking to this fascinating man.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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In mid October the Origins Project Foundation ran two public events in California. The second event was held at the Air and Space Museum in San Diego. I had asked my colleague Brian Keating, who teaches at UCSD and is a Trustee of that museum, whether he might be interested in doing a public dialogue together that we could later both broadcast on our respective podcasts. He and I have each appeared before on each other’s podcasts, and I knew that we could have the kind of comfortable, informative, and fun conversation that might appeal to a live audience, which would make for a different kind of podcast.
I am happy to present here the video record of that live-audience podcast, and the Q&A with the audience that was recorded right after it. Brian and I discussed many things, from forefront cosmology, to the nature of teaching and doing research, as viewed by an experimentalist and a theorist respectively, as well as broader questions associated with science in society today. The questions afterwards were equally interesting. I hope you enjoy both as you listen to or watch the podcast.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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Greg Lukianoff is a First Amendment lawyer by training. During his education he began to see how, even among organizations ostensibly created to help protect free speech, how actual free speech was improperly being conflated with harassment or bullying. When he went to work as a legal director of the nascent Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in around 2000, he quickly discovered that in academia, the one place where free speech and open inquiry should be valued above all else, actual free speech was under attack. In the intervening two decades, during which he rose to become director of that Foundation, now renamed to encompass the fact that the attacks on free speech that began in academia have proliferated throughout our society, he has actively worked to fight these attacks. Beyond his legal work, he has become a prolific writer. His 2018 book, co-written with Jonathan Haidt, entitled The Coddling of the American Mind, was influential in encouraging debate and discussion regarding the origins of the victimization mentality that was becoming prevalent in Western Society.
I have been admirer of Greg’s for some time, and have wanted to have a dialogue with him on the podcast. This year, with Rikki Schlott, Greg published The Canelling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions and Threatens us All, and it provided us the ideal opportunity to get together to discuss both his own personal experiences , and also the general concerns we both have about the issues that form the heart of the new book.
What followed was a fascinating conversation about issues we should all care about. Regular readers of Critical Mass and listeners to The Origins Podcast will be aware of some of the examples and concerns we discussed, but I expect will nevertheless be surprised by the ubiquitous infiltration of cancel culture ideas into our society. We actually begin by defining Cancel Culture, a term that has often been misused and misunderstood in the popular media, and then discuss a variety of examples, before closing with a brief discussion of the ways that we can possibly combat it to produce a more tolerant, democratic society, and to save higher education as well. I hope you are provoked, enlightened, and energized by the conversation.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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Scott Aaronson is one of the deepest mathematical intellects I have known since, say Ed Witten—the only physicist to have won the prestigious Fields Medal in Mathematics. While Ed is a string theorist, Scott decided to devote his mathematical efforts to the field of computer science, and as a theoretical computer scientist has played a major role in the development of algorithms that have pushed forward the field of quantum computing, and helped address several thorny issues that hamper our ability to create practical quantum computers.
In addition to his research, Scott has, for a number of years, written a wonderful blog about issues in computing, in particular with regard to quantum computing. It is a great place to get educated about many of these issues.
Most recently, Scott has spent the last year at OpenAI thinking about the difficult issue of AI safety, and how to ensure that as AI systems improve that they will not have an unduly negative or dangerous impact on human civilization. As I mention in the podcast I am less worried than some people, and I think so is Scott, but nevertheless, some careful thinking in advance can avert a great deal of hand wringing in the future. Scott has some very interesting ideas that are worth exploring, and we began to explore them in this podcast.
Our conversation ran the gamut from quantum computing to AI safety and explored some complex ideas in computer science in the process, in particular the notion of computational complexity, which is important in understanding all of these issues. I hope you will find Scott’s remarks as illuminating and informative as I did.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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Richard Dawkins and I have appeared together onstage many times, been the subject of the documentary The Unbelievers, and have collaborated on various writing projects as well. Thus it may come as a surprise to you to learn that each time we get together, we find new things to discuss and learn from each other. It surprises us as well.
This fall we agreed to appear onstage together at two separate events co-sponsored by The Origins Project. The events, entitled Changing Minds in Changing Times were coordinated by Atheist UK and were in London and Birmingham. In both events I gave short presentations, and at the end of the event Richard and I appeared together onstage for a dialogue. At the first event I was able to discuss with Richard his latest book, Books do Furnish a Life, and at the second event, for the first time, Richard interviewed me, for his new podcast, The Poetry of Reality.
We have combined these two dialogues here into a single podcast. Together they cover a broad collection of subjects, from science, to science communication, and finally to the threats to free inquiry now occurring in higher education.
As always, I find it an absolute pleasure to spend time conversing with Richard. He is charming, eloquent, and insightful. I hope you enjoy these newest discussions as much as I did.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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Carlo Rovelli is well known as a popularizer of science. His short book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, was an international bestseller. I have known Carlo as a physicist ever since he used to visit my Physics Department colleague, Lee Smolin, at Yale, when I was a Professor there. Carlo and Lee were part of a small group of physicists pioneering an idea called ‘Loop Quantum Gravity’ as a way to try and unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Less well known among the public than its chief competitor, String Theory, and also less popular among physicists as a whole, Loop Quantum Gravity is nevertheless an equally serious attempt to address the vexing paradoxes associated with of quantizing General Relativity.
Black Holes are the place in physics where the various problems of quantum gravity become manifest. If Stephen Hawking was correct, and black holes do completely evaporate through quantum processes that result in the emission of thermal radiation, then it appears that the information about what fell into the black hole in the first place will be forever lost. But this violates a central feature of quantum mechanics, which preserves information. At the same time, the final state of classical black hole collapse involves a singularity of infinite density. Most physicists expect this singularity to be removed in a quantum theory of black holes.
Rovelli argues that near the singularity of a black hole quantum processes can change a black hole to be a ‘white hole’, the time reversed version of a black hole. While anything that falls into a black hole stays there, everything inside a white hole eventually reappears. If Carlo’s ideas were correct, they could go a long way toward potentially resolving black hole paradoxes.
It is a big ‘If” however, and I remain skeptical. Nevertheless I wanted to discuss these ideas with Carlo on this podcast for a variety of reasons. First, any such discussion will illuminate a lot about the physics of black holes. Secondly, I think it is useful for laypeople to listen to physicists debate and discuss ideas at the forefront, presenting challenges to each other, being willing to openly question, and doing all of this with a sense of mutual respect.
At the same time, because I share Carlo’s great interest in both popularizing science, as well as connecting science and culture, I was extremely interested in discussing his motivations and thoughts about these important areas, and I was not disappointed. I hope listeners will find our discussions about science, literature, and politics equally enlightening.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.
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