{"id":529,"date":"2004-03-16T18:44:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-17T02:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/odyssey\/"},"modified":"2004-03-16T18:44:00","modified_gmt":"2004-03-17T02:44:00","slug":"odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/16\/odyssey\/","title":{"rendered":"Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow (Weds) I’ll be a guest on Odyssey<\/a>, a syndicated program from WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station. We’re supposed to be talking about the “early universe”; of course, what’s early to one person may be pretty late to another. I think we’ll be covering a lot of ground, from 10^(-35) seconds (inflation) through one minute (nucleosynthesis) and 400,000 years (the cosmic microwave background) up to 500 million years (the earliest galaxies). The other guest will be Bob Kirshner<\/a> from Harvard, a supernova expert and one of the co-discoverers of dark energy. Bob is an engaging speaker and a great scientist; I reviewed<\/a> his popular-level book for Nature, and we managed to remain friends.<\/p>\n

If your local public radio station doesn’t get Odyssey, you can easily listen on the web. (I’ve been on a few times before, the shows are available in the archive.) But even better, you should call your local station and demand they get the program. It’s an hour-long discussion, typically with two or three guests, about every sort of topic you can think of, with a decided emphasis on high-level (but accessible) intelligent discourse. The host, the glamorous and charming Gretchen Helfrich, does an amazing job of keeping the dialogue lucid and amusing no matter what the topic is.<\/p>\n

[Update: here’s the audio<\/a>. The metaphor of the moment was that of a movie in which the first reel is mostly missing except for a few frames. Personally, given that our universe is pretty clever, but prone to violence and self-indulgence, I’m thinking it’s a Tarantino film.]
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow (Weds) I’ll be a guest on Odyssey, a syndicated program from WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station. We’re supposed to be talking about the “early universe”; of course, what’s early to one person may be pretty late to another. I think we’ll be covering a lot of ground, from 10^(-35) seconds (inflation) through one minute […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}