Synopsis
A podcast of stories, ideas, and speculations from the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. Each month, we'll bring you into a conversation between visionaries from the worlds of arts, sciences, humanities, engineering, and medicine on the nature of the imagination and how, through speculative culture, we collaborate to create the future.
Episodes
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SETI and Beyond: A discussion with Brian Keating, Paul Davies, Jim Benford and Mat Kaplan - Replay (#289)
15/01/2023 Duration: 44minThis brain trust of SETI experts was hosted in February of 2020, back when live, in-studio conversations happened, and discussions of alien artifacts and UAPs was fringe science. The discussion includes James Benford's strategy for finding ETI artifacts and a proposition for both passive and active observations by optical and radio listening, radar imaging and launching probes. A debate on the implications of our own technosignatures. And what if we find nothing? A profound result: suggesting that, perhaps, no ET intelligence has yet come to look at Earth, or perhaps other civilizations are simply not as curious as we, good at concealing their activities, or simply lost to deep time. Many of the topics covered have now become mainstream science! The Director of National Intelligence has just released the second Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. NASA has commissioned an independent study on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) led by Professor Keating’s friend and colleague, Former chair of P
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The Problem With General Relativity with Prof. Brian Keating and Event Horizon Host John Michael Godier: Part 1 of 2 (#288)
13/01/2023 Duration: 42minDo We know if Einstein's General Relativity is right? Can We Ever Fully Solve General Relativity? There are Issues with Modern Science and Prof. Brian Keating has a unique point of view on themIs Science Ever Settled? Part one of a two-part discussion with Brian Keating. Event Horizon links https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnMichaelGodier YouTube Membership: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3q... Podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-michael-godier... Apple: https://apple.co/3CS7rjT Connect with Professor Keating:
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The Year in Astronomy & Physics! (#287)
10/01/2023 Duration: 53minWhat a year we just had in physics and astronomy! I'll review some of my top highlights and your suggestions for runner ups. 00:00 Introduction 05:00 Audience and Capture phenomena 17:00 Let the topics begin! 20:00 Astronomy’s greatest hits 35:00 New physics that wasn’t 49:00 What to look forward to in 2023 Also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Connect with Professor Keating:
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A Look Back on 2022 in Science With Brian Keating and Special Guest Eric Weinstein (#286)
02/01/2023 Duration: 01h08minHere’s a recording of my X-mas day Twitter space. It was a discussion of a wide variety of topics including a few X-mas themes — the launch and controversy around the James Webb Space Telescope, inflation, dark matter vs. Monday and more. Eric Weinstein joined in towards the end. Follow me so you don't miss the next one
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What's Important for the 2nd Half of Your Life? James Altucher & Brian Keating Part 2 of 2 (#285)
31/12/2022 Duration: 46minToday's episode with Dr. Brian Keating - concluding our conversation from last week. Brian and James delve into the perils of fame-seeking ambition and how their world views have changed after recently cresting age 50. Brian also gives some business ideas he's been ruminating on and asks for James' feedback: • "Yellowstone" but Based Around the Biblical Patriarchy (00:11:53) • Anti-Doxing as a Service (00:21:36) • Deepfake & Chatbot Detectors (00:23:11) https://BrianKeating.com/listConnect with Professor Keating:
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Does Dark Matter Exist? Stacy McGaugh (#284)
29/12/2022 Duration: 01h10minStacy McGaugh is an American astronomer and professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His primary focus has been in physics problems related to the distribution of matter and the dynamics of galaxies. He's a proponent of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which tweaks our understanding of gravity to allow galaxies to form and move without the need of a traditional dark matter halo. The theory was originally published in 1983 by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom. MOND has been effective at predicting the behavior of some galaxies, like the Dwarf Spheroidals attached to Andromeda, however it has yet to explain some anomalies like the collision of the Bullet Cluster. In cases with high gravitational lensing and little ordinary matter the theory has been shown to break down. Stacy discusses successes of his approach to astrophysics and what can be improved on in the future. https://twitter.com/DudeDarkmatter http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/ Connect with Professor Keating:
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Laser Fusion: Is it Hype? Professor Charles Seife (#283)
27/12/2022 Duration: 55minThe U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) recently announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power. On Dec. 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This first-of-its-kind feat will provide unprecedented capability to support NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy, which would be a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy. “This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have de
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Ambition, Accolades, Life Advice, and the Paradox of Striking Graduate Students: Brian Keating and James Altucher in Conversation (#282)
24/12/2022 Duration: 01h07minAn open and revealing conversation with host Brian Keating Ph.D. and James Altucher. Imposter syndrome, winning and losing prestigious awards, and whether it's more charitable to donate anonymously or influence others to do so publicly. https://jamesaltucher.com/ https://twitter.com/jaltucher https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-james-altucher-show/id794030859 Connect with Professor Keating:
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Love & Math: Edward Frenkel (#281)
21/12/2022 Duration: 01h02minEdward Frenkel’s latest book Love and Math, a New York Times bestseller, was named one of the Best Books of the year by both Amazon and iBooks, and won the Euler Book Prize from the Mathematical Association of America. The book reveals a side of math seldom seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. Mathematics, he writes, directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, holds the reins of everything from tiny atoms to the biggest stars. Love and Math is also about accessing a new way of thinking, which empowers us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the hidden magic universe of mathematics. Edward Frenkel is Russian born and overcame a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century’s leading mathematicians. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1997 after being on the faculty at Harvard University. He is a member of the American Acad
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Replay - Who Was James Webb? An honest conversation with Hakeem Oluseyi (#280)
20/12/2022 Duration: 55minThis is a replay of the discussion with Hakeem Oluseyi on the controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope. It continues! Today the New York Time published an opinion piece entitled: How Naming the James Webb Telescope Turned Into a Fight Over Homophobia: Did the former head of NASA discriminate against gay people? One physicist tried to rebut the accusation, only to find himself the target of attacks. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/us/james-webb-telescope-gay-rights.html? The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s next great flagship observatory. It’s set to continue — and extend — the illustrious scientific tradition established by the Hubble Space Telescope, while peering deeper into the universe and observing what Hubble could not. But who was James Webb? Considering the controversy surrounding his legacy, I wanted to explore the allegations against him with my friend Hakeem Oluseyi and answer the question: Why was the James Webb Space Telescope named after him? Hakeem cl
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Follow Science, Not Scientists: Jay Bhattacharya (#279)
14/12/2022 Duration: 01h34minDr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. He has published 135 articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals. He holds an MD and PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University. He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal arguing for an alternative public health approach to dealing with COVID-19, through "focused protection" of the people most at risk. In it, Bhattacharya and the two other researchers called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and to allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable. twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya https://gbdeclar
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Jim Tour: Darwin's Deception!? (#278)
11/12/2022 Duration: 45minJames (Jim) Tour is a renowned chemist and nanotechnologist and is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Comp. Sci., Materials Science & NanoEngineering, at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He conducts research at the Smalley-Curl Institute & NanoCarbon Center. Dr. Tour has been the source of many well-publicized debates on and offline, including with Prof. Lee Cronin: Are we close to discovering the Origin Of Life? James Tour vs Lee Cronin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DHvN... Tour's research has been the subject of a video by Dave Farina, a YouTuber, arguing that Tour is wrong and that origin-of-life researchers are well on their way to solving the mystery of life’s origin: Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour: A Defense of Abiogenesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SixyZ... Tour responded to @professordaveexplains) in his own 13 episode YouTube video series: A Course on Abiogenesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71dqA... www.jmtour.com http://www.drjamestour.com/ www.youtube.com/drjamest
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Balaji Srinivasan: The Network State Is Eternal (#277)
04/12/2022 Duration: 01h43minBalaji S. Srinivasan is an American entrepreneur and investor. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford university and sports several high scale financial successes; he was the co-founder of Counsyl, the former Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase, and former general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. twitter.com/balajis www.amazon.com/Network-State-How-Start-Country-ebook/dp/B09VPKZR3G Connect with me:
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Francis Halzen: Catching Neutrinos at the South Pole (#276)
30/11/2022 Duration: 01h30minFrancis Halzen is the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world's largest neutrino detector, he is the Director of the Institute for Elementary Particle Physics, and the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A theoretician studying problems at the interface of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, Halzen has been working since 1987 on the AMANDA experiment, a first-generation neutrino telescope at the South Pole. AMANDA observations represent a proof of concept for IceCube. After six years of construction, IceCube became operational in 2010. IceCube searches for neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources: events like exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars. The IceCube telescope is a powerful tool to search for dark matter, and could reveal the new
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The SCIENCE of ALIENS: Garry Nolan & Avi Loeb (#275)
25/11/2022 Duration: 02h13minGarry Nolan is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research is in microbiology, immunology, bio-computation, and analysis of UFO artifacts, materials, and he is actively investigating reports of UFO encounters. Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist at Harvard, the director of the Galileo Project, and the author of Extraterrestrial. In 1993 he moved to Harvard University where he was tenured three years later. He is now the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science and former chair of the department. EPISODE LINKS: WOW DNA SIGNAL http://bit.ly/3EBASJr Avi's Website: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/ Latest essays: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Opinion.html Garry's Twitter: https://twitter.com/GarryPNolan Nolan Lab's Website: https://web.stanford.edu/group/nolan/ Connect with me:
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Cosmic Insignificance Therapy (#274)
24/11/2022 Duration: 14minJust a few thoughts on 'cosmic insignificance therapy', popularized in the book "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" Oliver Burkeman, brought to my attention in this blog post by Tim Ferriss https://tim.blog/2021/12/15/the-liberation-of-cosmic-insignificance-therapy/, with some additional thoughts on the philosophy of Sam Harris and Scott Galloway as well. I hope you enjoy and I thank you for being along on this cosmic adventure with me! Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel, just click here
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Niall Ferguson: DOOM! (#273)
20/11/2022 Duration: 01h19minNiall Ferguson’s most recent book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. In this book he posits that disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, and financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Niall F
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Bernardo Kastrup: Consciousness & Superdeterminism Doubts (#272)
13/11/2022 Duration: 01h23minBernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on Scientific American, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. Bernardo’s most recent book is The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com. Connect with me:
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Can Science Save Us? Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees (#271)
08/11/2022 Duration: 01h49minIn his most recent book If Science is to Save Us, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees argues that, in his expert and personal analysis of the scientific endeavor on which we all depend, that we need to think globally, we need to think rationally and we need to think long-term, empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone cannot provide. In this timely work, Lord Rees details how there has never been a time when ‘following the science’ has been more important for humanity. He warns that our world is so interconnected that a collapse - societal or ecological - would be a truly global catastrophe. So it’s ever more crucial to ensure that science is deployed optimally, and that brakes are applied to applications that are dangerous or unethical. At no other point in history have we had such advanced knowledge and technology at our fingertips, nor had such astonishing capacity to determine the future of our planet. Therefore, decisions we must make on how science is applied belong o
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Mat Kaplan of Planetary Radio introduces a New Host and Interviews Brian Keating for an Update on The Simons Observatory (#270)
02/11/2022 Duration: 21minJoin host Mat Kaplan as he proudly introduces the person who will take on the show he created 20 years ago. Then we’ll join astrophysicist Brian Keating at a joyful gathering of cosmologists who hope to reveal secrets of the Universe through the new Simons Observatory. You might win Brian’s new book about thinking like a Nobel Prize winner in the What’s Up space trivia contest. There’s more to discover at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-introducing-new-host Youtube video of the Simons Observatory event panel: We Are Cosmologists, Ask Me Anything: https://youtu.be/c4L782wUStw Watch the video with slides here: https://youtu.be/q1cPyE9rAD4 Connect with me: