90 | David Kaiser on Science, Money, and Power

90 | David Kaiser on Science, Money, and Power

Science costs money. And for a brief, glorious period between the start of the Manhattan Project in 1939 and the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, physics was awash in it, largely sustained by the Cold War. Things are now different, as physics — and science more broadly — has entered a funding crunch. David Kaiser, who is both a working physicist and an historian of science, talks with me about the fraught relationship between scientists and their funding sources throughout history, from Galileo and his patrons to the current rise of private foundations. It's an interesting listen for anyone who wonders about the messy reality of how science gets done.

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David Kaiser received a Ph.D. in physics, and a separate Ph.D. in history of science, from Harvard University. He is currently Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Professor of Physics in MIT's Department of Physics, and also Associate Dean for Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) in MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing. He has been awarded the Davis Prize and Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society, was named a Mac Vicar Faculty Fellow for undergraduate teaching at MIT, and received the Perkins Award for excellence in mentoring graduate students. His book Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World is available April 3.


Avsnitt(418)

AMA | March 2022

AMA | March 2022

Welcome to the March 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of quest...

17 Mars 20223h 18min

188 | Arik Kershenbaum on What Aliens Will Be Like

188 | Arik Kershenbaum on What Aliens Will Be Like

If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have trained us to think that they won't be that different at...

14 Mars 20221h 21min

187 | Andrew Leigh on the Politics of Looming Disasters

187 | Andrew Leigh on the Politics of Looming Disasters

We're pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren't naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet suc...

7 Mars 20221h 20min

186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity

186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity

Advances in technology have gradually been extending the human self beyond its biological extent, as we augment who we are with a variety of interconnected devices. There are obvious benefits to this ...

28 Feb 20221h 11min

185 | Arvid Ågren on the Gene's-Eye View of Evolution

185 | Arvid Ågren on the Gene's-Eye View of Evolution

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin's theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently "purposeful" or "designed" aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolut...

21 Feb 20221h 25min

184 | Gary Marcus on Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense

184 | Gary Marcus on Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense

Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Deep-learning algorithms are used to classify images, suggest songs to us, and even to drive cars. But the quest to build truly "human" artificial inte...

14 Feb 20221h 24min

AMA | February 2022

AMA | February 2022

Welcome to the February 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of qu...

10 Feb 20224h 15min

183 | Michael Dine on Supersymmetry, Anthropics, and the Future of Particle Physics

183 | Michael Dine on Supersymmetry, Anthropics, and the Future of Particle Physics

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it's hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet...

7 Feb 20221h 39min

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