I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had […]
Episode 24: Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar Read More
Brains are important things; they’re where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of “embodied cognition” posits that it’s better
Episode 23: Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy Read More
There’s no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet’s environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to
Episode 22: Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth Read More
We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently
Episode 21: Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind Read More
Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he’s been quite successful at the
Episode 20: Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery Read More
Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it’s natural for economists to occasionally
Episode 19: Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future Read More
String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a
Episode 18: Clifford Johnson on What’s So Great About Superstring Theory Read More
The job of science fiction isn’t to predict the future; it’s to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring
Episode 17: Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis Read More
Aging — everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her
Episode 16: Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future Read More
Language comes naturally to us, but is also deeply mysterious. On the one hand, it manifests as a collection of
Episode 15: David Poeppel on Thought, Language, and How to Understand the Brain Read More