There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, yet have traditionally been assumed to be impossible to incorporate into fundamental scientific explanations. They are facts not a ... Show More
Apr 28
Raffaele Danna, "The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600" (Harvard UP, 2026)
In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been known that this transition stemmed from Europe’s increasing exchanges with India, Pe ... Show More
1h 4m
Apr 22
Masud Husain, "Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain" (Canongate, 2025)
What makes us who we are?Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create, change and can even restore our identity. Husain introduces us to a man who ran out of words, a woman who lost all inhibitio ... Show More
58m 40s
Apr 21
David Blumenthal and James A. Morone, "Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science" (Yale UP, 2026)
For nearly a century, every Democratic president—and many Republicans—entered office promising to restructure America’s health care system. Barack Obama finally broke through but, in the process, opened a tumultuous decade in which battles over health care dominated American poli ... Show More
1h 7m
Oct 2021
167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility
Traditional physics works within the "Laplacian paradigm": you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system through time. Constructor theory proposes an alternative paradigm: to think of physi ... Show More
1h 35m
Jul 2021
Alyssa Ney, "The World in the Wave Function: A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings – for example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated, and that a system may be in two different possible states at the same time. Entanglement and superposition, among other phenomena, have prompted debate since ... Show More
1h 11m
Oct 2021
Roger Penrose, “The Cyclic Universe” (Open Agenda, 2021)
In the last twenty years, cosmology has unexpectedly emerged as one of the most exciting and dynamic fields of modern science. From astoundingly precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background to the ongoing mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, modern cosmology is un ... Show More
2h 31m
Feb 2021
#238 — How to Build a Universe
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Harris speaks with Frank Wilczek about the fundamental nature of reality. They discuss the difference between science and non-science, the role of intuition in science, the nature of time, the prospect that possibility is an illusion, the cu ... Show More
59m 13s
Apr 2019
Will we ever know what the universe is made of?
We are all made of particles – but what are particles made of? It’s a question that’s been perplexing scientists for centuries - for so long, in fact, that listener Doug in Canada wants to know if there’s a limit to how much they can ever discover. CrowdScience heads out to CERN, ... Show More
35m 25s