177. Angus Fletcher — 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

One of the most influential physicists of our time, Stephen Hawking touched the lives of millions. Recalling his nearly two decades as Hawking’s collaborator and friend, Leonard Mlodinow brings this complex man into focus in a unique and deeply personal portrayal. We meet Hawking the genius, who employed his mind to uncover the mysteries of the universe — ultimately formulating a pathbreaking theory of black holes that reignited the discipline of cosmology and paved the way for physicists to investigate the origins of the universe in completely new ways. We meet Hawking the colleague, a man whose illness leaves him able to communicate at only six words per minute but who expends the effort to punctuate his conversations with humor. And we meet Hawking the friend, who could convey volumes with a frown, a smile, or simply a raised eyebrow. Modinow puts us in the room as Hawking indulges his passion for wine and curry; shares his feelings on love, death, and disability; and grapples with deep questions of philosophy and physics. This deeply affecting account of a friendship teaches us not just about the nature and practice of physics but also about life and the human capacity to overcome daunting obstacles. Shermer and Mlodinow discuss: what it was like working with Stephen Hawking, what Stephen Hawking was like as a person and personality, Hawking’s place in the pantheon of great physicists in the history of science, Hawking’s major contributions to physics, What is grand about the grand design of the universe? model dependent realism and the philosophy of science, Can we ever know reality? Why is there something rather than nothing? What caused the Big Bang to bang? What there was before time began? Why does the universe look fine-tuned and designed? Is the universe itself a giant black hole? Did the universe begin in a singularity? Hawking’s beliefs about God and why the concept isn’t necessary to explain the universe. Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include the best sellers The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time (coauthored with Stephen Hawking), Subliminal (winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award), and War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), as well as Elastic, Euclid’s Window, Feynman’s Rainbow, and The Upright Thinkers.

8 Sep 20201h 27min

Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless — or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extraterrestrial life. As Science Fictions makes clear, the current system of research funding and publication not only fails to safeguard us from blunders but actively encourages bad science — with sometimes deadly consequences. Yet Science Fictions is far from a counsel of despair. Rather, it’s a defense of the scientific method against the pressures and perverse incentives that lead scientists to bend the rules. By illustrating the many ways that scientists go wrong, Ritchie gives us the knowledge we need to spot dubious research and points the way to reforms that could make science trustworthy once again. Shermer and Ritchie also discuss: why we need to get science right because science deniers will pounce on such fraud, bias, negligence, and hype in science, Daryl Bem’s ESP research and what was wrong with it, “psychological priming” and the problem of replication, sleep research and the problems in Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep, Amy Cuddy and the problem with “Power Posture” research, Andrew Wakefield and the biggest fraud in the history of science linking vaccines & autism, diet and nutrition research and the complication of linking saturated fats, unsaturated fats, cholesterol, and heart disease, Phil Zimbardo‘s Stanford Prison Experiment, Samuel Morton’s skulls showing racial differences in head size, Steve Gould’s critique, the critique of Gould, and the critique of the critics of Gould, self-plagiarism, p values / p hacking the Schizophrenia/amaloid cascade hypothesis and why it has been hard to prove, the file-drawer problem, how to detect fraud, and Terror Management Theory and why it is almost certainly wrong. Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. His main research focus is human intelligence: how it relates to the brain, how much it’s affected by genetics, and how much it can be improved by factors such as education. He is a noted supporter of the Open Science movement, and has worked on tools to reform scientific practice and help scientists become more transparent when reporting their results.

1 Sep 20201h 40min

Is our gender something we’re born with, or are we conditioned by society? In The End of Gender, neuroscientist and sexologist Dr. Debra Soh uses a research-based approach to address this hot-button topic, unmasking popular misconceptions about the nature vs. nurture debate and exploring what it means to be a woman or a man in today’s society. Shermer and Soh discuss: If you are transitioning to a different gender, but the word “gender” is largely meaningless biologically, then what are you transitioning to and what is the point of hormone therapy and surgery? the 1990s push to find biological basis of homosexuality so it’s not a “lifestyle choice” and how this trend has been recently reversed, the problem of putting ideology before science, cognitive creationism on the left (evolution from the neck down), why biology is not destiny, cancel culture, sex and gender, percentages of the population of LGBTQ, what you identify as vs. who you’re attracted to, individual behavior vs. collective labels, sexual orientation and gender identity, gender neutral parenting, gender dysphoria, men and women dating, trans bathrooms, prisons, and sports. Dr. Debra Soh is a neuroscientist who specializes in gender, sex, and sexual orientation. She received her doctorate from York University in Toronto and worked as an academic researcher for eleven years. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Harper’s Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, Playboy, Quillette, and many other publications. Her research has been published in academic journals including the Archives of Sexual Behavior and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. As a journalist, Soh writes about the science and politics of human sexuality and gender, free speech, and censorship in academia. She lives in Toronto and divides her time between New York and Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter at @DrDebraSoh and visit her website at DrDebraSoh.com.

25 Aug 20201h 46min

The Science of Diversity uses a multidisciplinary approach to excavate the theories, principles, and paradigms that illuminate our understanding of the issues surrounding human diversity, social equality, and justice. The book brings these to the surface holistically, examining diversity at the individual, interpersonal, and international levels. Shedding light on why diversity programs fail, the book provides tools to understand how biases develop and influence our relationships and interactions with others. Shermer and Weissmark also discuss: What is diversity and how do we understand it? How is diversity related to people’s perceptions of fairness and justice? Does respect for diversity promote peace and positive change? psychology and neuroscience of classification/stereotyping, Freudianism to behaviorism to cognitive science to post-cognitive science, the self, consciousness, ai, and free will in the context of a science of diversity, revenge and justice, Israel and Palestine, nationalism: ethnic and civic, just-world theory of inequality, intergenerational justice and reparations, BLM and reparations, and the future after 2020. Mona Sue Weissmark is an American clinical psychologist and social psychologist, researcher, and author whose work on diversity and justice has received global recognition. She is best known for her groundbreaking social experiment of bringing children of Holocaust survivors face-to-face with children of Nazis, and later, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of African American slaves with descendants of slave owners. She is also a professor of psychology and author of numerous journal articles and the books: Doing Psychotherapy Effectively (University of Chicago Press); Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II (Oxford University Press); The Science of Diversity (Oxford University Press).

18 Aug 20201h 58min

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction. His conclusion: “Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem.” Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas. Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. Shermer and Shellenberger also discuss: what’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism, the powerful financial interests in environmentalism, the desire for status and power among environmentalists, along with the all-too human propensity to moralize and tell other people what to do, Shellenberger’s hypothesis that environmentalism is a faux religion primarily followed by secular people searching for transcendence, Environmental Humanism as a replacement worldview, the problems and shortcomings of climate computer models, how much warmer it’s going to get and what the consequences of that warming will be, and what we do about it? (hint: nuclear), myths about nuclear power and why people fear it, renewables, solar, wind, geothermal, and why they are not nearly as efficient as nuclear, the Amazon: Are the Earth’s lungs burning? plastic straws, recycling, electric cars, and other things, Are we in a Sixth Extinction? How have sweatshops saved the planet? How have technology and capitalism saved the whales? meat eating, Temple Grandin, and happy farms vs. factory farms, the myth of natural: what is natural is good, non-natural is bad, why environmentalism is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in the most developed nations, with good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, and Environmentalism as Calvinism — Richard Rhodes: “In the sense that the world is an evil place and it would be better if it were destroyed and turned back over to the natural kingdom.” Michael Shellenberger is a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment”; the winner of the 2008 Green Book Award from the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Center for Science Writings; and an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has written on energy and the environment for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Nature Energy, and other publications for two decades. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California. Listen to Science Salon via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.

11 Aug 20201h 32min

From authors William J. Perry, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration, and Tom Z. Collina, the Director of Policy at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation in Washington, DC, The Buttonrecounts the terrifying history of nuclear launch authority, from the faulty 46-cent microchip that nearly caused World War III to President Trump’s tweet about his “much bigger & more powerful” button. Perry and Collina share their firsthand experience on the front lines of the nation’s nuclear history and provide illuminating interviews with former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Congressman Adam Smith, Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, senior Obama administration officials, and many others. Shermer, Perry and Collina also discuss: even if Trump loses the 2020 election and we have President Biden, real risks of nuclear catastrophe exist because of the system, not the person, why the Iran deal was a good one to keep that country from developing nukes, how to deal with North Korea and Perry’s experience with the Kim dynasty, why the Russians are rational actors who do not want nuclear war, terrorists and the possibility of them getting a nuke, why we must eliminate Launch on Warning and First Strikepolicies, what is in “the football” seen held by men constantly trailing the President? Stanislav Petrov: the man who saved the world, and what this story tells us about the precariousness of our current system, game theory, the logic of deterrence, and how to get around it, why nuclear weapons were not inevitable, and changing the taboo from not using nuclear weapons to not owning them. William J. Perry served as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration, and then as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, and has advised presidents all through the Obama administration. He oversaw the development of major nuclear weapons systems, such as the MX missile, the Trident submarine and the Stealth Bomber. His new “offset strategy” ushered in the age of stealth, smart weapons, GPS, and technologies that changed the face of modern warfare. His vision now, as founder of the William J. Perry Project, is a world free from nuclear weapons. Tom Z. Collina is the Director of Policy at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation in Washington, DC. He has 30 years of nuclear weapons policy experience and has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was closely involved with successful efforts to end U.S. nuclear testing in 1992, extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995, ratify the New START Treaty in 2010, and enact the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Collina has published hundreds of articles, op-eds, and reports and appears frequently in major media. Listen to Science Salon via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.

4 Aug 202051min

More than half a century since Roswell, UFOs have been making headlines once again. On December 17, 2017, the New York Times ran a front-page story about an approximately five-year Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The article hinted, and its sources clearly said in subsequent television interviews, that some of the ships in question couldn’t be linked to any country. The implication, of course, was that they might be linked to other solar systems. The UFO community—those who had been thinking about, seeing, and analyzing supposed flying saucers (or triangles or chevrons) for years—was surprisingly skeptical of the revelation. Their incredulity and doubt rippled across the internet. Many of the people most invested in UFO reality weren’t really buying it. And as Scoles did her own digging, she ventured to dark, conspiracy-filled corners of the internet, to a former paranormal research center in Utah, and to the hallways of the Pentagon. In They Are Already Here we meet the bigwigs, the scrappy upstarts, the field investigators, the rational people, and the unhinged kooks of this sprawling community. How do they interact with each other? How do they interact with “anomalous phenomena”? And how do they (as any group must) reflect the politics and culture of the larger world around them? Funny and colorful, and told in a way that doesn’t require one to believe, Scoles brings humanity to an often derided and misunderstood community. Scoles and Shermer discuss: who the “they” are in her title, comparing the UFO community to that of SETI scientists, whom she wrote about in her previous book, Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence? what it was like engaging UFOlogists at conferences, her answer to the Fermi paradox: where is everyone? what it means to “believe” in UFOs vs. ETIs, Project Saucer, Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Bluebook, Robert Bigelow, Tom DeLonge, and the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, the most probable explanation for the USS Nimitz UFO videos, Kenneth Arnold, Roswell, Area 51, and modern myth making, Scoles’ Mormon background and how she lost her religion, and what we will replace religion with in the future. Sarah Scoles is a science writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover, New Scientist, Aeon, and Wired. A former editor at Astronomy magazine, Scoles worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the location of the first-ever SETI project. She lives in Denver, Colorado. Listen to Science Salon via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.

28 Juli 20201h 26min

Hurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world. Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it’s not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is. Projections of Earth’s imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education. False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong — and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all. In this wide-ranging conversation Shermer and Lomborg discuss: Is the planet warming? What is the cause of the warming? How much warmer is it going to get? What will the consequences of the warming be? What should we do about it? How the public discussion/debate over climate has changed in the past 20 years since Lomborg wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World Precautionary Principle: should we do something “just in case”? What about other existential threats: AI apocalypse, nuclear weapons, pandemics? and Why climate is such a hard problem. The claims: timeline: we have a decade to solve the problem … or else droughts, floods, hurricanes, and extreme weather deforestation/reforestation polar bears/the 6th Extinction, and AOC/Greta Thunberg/Al Gore. Non-Solutions: individual action, why the Green Revolution isn’t here yet, why the Paris Agreement is failing, how climate policy hurts the poor, and reducing greenhouse gases. Rational Solutions: carbon tax: a market-based solution, innovation, adaptation, geoengineering, and prosperity. Bjorn Lomborg is the best-selling author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. He is a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His work appears regularly in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Atlantic, and Forbes. His monthly column appears in around 40 papers in 19 languages, with more than 30 million readers. In 2011 and 2012, Lomborg was named Top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy. In 2008 he was named “one of the 50 people who could save the planet” by the Guardian. He lives in Prague. Listen to Science Salon via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.

21 Juli 20201h 22min