57 | Astra Taylor on the Promise and Challenge of Democracy
"Democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone" — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor's new book. We all know how democracy falls short, in practice, of its lofty ideals; but we can a...
29 Jul 20191h 23min
56 | Kate Adamala on Creating Synthetic Life
Scientists can't quite agree on how to define "life," but that hasn't stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to create it. Kate Adamala is one of a number of scientist...
22 Jul 20191h 12min
55 | A Conversation with Rob Reid on Quantum Mechanics and Many Worlds
As you may have heard, I have a new book coming out in September, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. To celebrate, we're going to have more than the usual number o...
15 Jul 20191h 26min
54 | Indre Viskontas on Music and the Brain
It doesn't mean much to say music affects your brain — everything that happens to you affects your brain. But music affects your brain in certain specific ways, from changing our mood to helping us le...
8 Jul 20191h 15min
53 | Solo -- On Morality and Rationality
What does it mean to be a good person? To act ethically and morally in the world? In the old days we might appeal to the instructions we get from God, but a modern naturalist has to look elsewhere. To...
1 Jul 20192h 5min
52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games
Games play an important, and arguably increasing, role in human life. We play games on our computers and our phones, watch other people compete in games, and occasionally break out the cards or the Mo...
24 Jun 20191h 4min
51 | Anthony Aguirre on Cosmology, Zen, Entropy, and Information
Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the evolution of structure, and so on. But there are a...
17 Jun 20191h 31min
50 | Patricia Churchland on Conscience, Morality, and the Brain
It's fun to spend time thinking about how other people should behave, but fortunately we also have an inner voice that keeps offering opinions about how we should behave ourselves: our conscience. Whe...
10 Jun 20191h 12min
