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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(part 2): Max Tegmark & Eric Weinstein in Conversation (#106)
01/01/2021 Duration: 01h13minMax Tegmark and Eric Weinstein chat on the last day of 2020! Let’s say ‘good riddance’ with good friends and great conversation! We’ll talk a bit about Artificial Intelligence, Theories of Everything & the seemingly impossible challenge of building a positive future for humanity. Max thinks that, by improving the news we receive with the aid of machine learning, we can achieve a brighter future. Check out his new center at MIT: https://iaifi.org Find him on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/mtegmark Watch Max’s appearance on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast in 2020 discussing Theories of Everything: https://youtu.be/3MX8EpvLwao Eric Weinstein, host of the Portal will share insights from Geometric Unity and thoughts on the meaning of it all! Find Eric at https://www.youtube.com/c/EricWeinsteinPhD/ Watch Eric’s previous debate with Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/OI0AZ4Y4Ip4 Watch my most popular videos: Sheldon Glashow Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek Jill Tarter Eric Weinstein
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(part 1): Max Tegmark & Eric Weinstein in Conversation (#106)
01/01/2021 Duration: 01h19minMax Tegmark and Eric Weinstein chat on the last day of 2020! Let’s say ‘good riddance’ with good friends and great conversation! We’ll talk a bit about Artificial Intelligence, Theories of Everything & the seemingly impossible challenge of building a positive future for humanity. Max thinks that, by improving the news we receive with the aid of machine learning, we can achieve a brighter future. Check out his new center at MIT: https://iaifi.org Find him on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/mtegmark Watch Max’s appearance on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast in 2020 discussing Theories of Everything: https://youtu.be/3MX8EpvLwao Eric Weinstein, host of the Portal will share insights from Geometric Unity and thoughts on the meaning of it all! Find Eric at https://www.youtube.com/c/EricWeinsteinPhD/ Watch Eric’s previous debate with Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/OI0AZ4Y4Ip4 Watch my most popular videos: Sheldon Glashow Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek Jill Tarter Eric Weinstein
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Nobel Prize Winner Rainer Weiss: Feeling Spacetime Shudder: Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and Nobel Prizes! (#105)
29/12/2020 Duration: 01h54minMIT Physics Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss won a 1/2 share of The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 For his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. He was born in Berlin, where his father was a doctor and psychoanalyst and his mother an actress. His father was of Jewish descent, and the family fled Nazism to the United States. After schooling in New York, Weiss studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctor’s degree in 1962. After a couple of years at Tufts University and Princeton University, he returned to MIT, which he has been associated with ever since. Rainer Weiss is married and has a daughter and a son. Professor Weiss’ Nobel winning work come out of one consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the existence of gravitational waves. These are like ripples in a four-dimensional spacetime that occur when objects with mass accelerate. The effects are very small. Beginning in the 1970s the LIGO detector was develope
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Cumrun Vafa: Puzzles to Unlock The Universe! (#104)
25/12/2020 Duration: 01h13minJoin me in welcoming Prof. Cumrun Vafa (Harvard) in his first major podcast interview! We discussed a wide range of topics including what message he’d put into a billion-year time capsule. Plus, we discuss his delightful new book. Beneath all of the complex and formidable mathematical structures that formulate physical laws rest simple but deep nuggets of truth. It is these simple truths, and not the complicated technical details, that scientists strive for when uncovering the laws of nature. Fortunately, these core ideas can often be illustrated with simple mathematical puzzles. These puzzles are so simplified that one can tackle them and appreciate their meaning without using any complicated math. His book, Puzzles To Unravel The Universe, includes over a hundred puzzles and their solutions, along with a discussion about how they relate to deep ideas in physics and math. Examples are drawn from classical physics, such as Newton’s laws and Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as from modern physics, incl
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Jill Tarter – Proxima Centauri, the Drake Equation, and SETI in 2021! (#103)
23/12/2020 Duration: 01h06minLast week the Guardian and Scientific American announced that Breakthrough Listen astronomers using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia saw a weird radio signal coming from Proxima Centauri, the star system closest to Earth. The signal behaves strangely, only using a narrow 982MHz band typically not used by human-made spacecraft. It also does not correspond to known natural processes. The frequency moves around too…not what you’d expect from a planet. As soon as I heard about it, I knew I had to talk to my friend, Jill Tarter! Check out the biography of Jill (Making Contact) here: https://amzn.to/2M22Bv5 Please consider donating to the SETI Institute: https://www.seti.org Watch Jill’s TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EszGIvRdgTE Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://you
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Eric Weinstein – Ask Me Anything Live (#102)
22/12/2020 Duration: 01h21minEric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel‘s investment firm, a position he has held since 2015. Though not an academic physicist, he proposed a unified theory of physics in 2013. He and his brother Bret Weinstein coined the term Intellectual Dark Web to refer to an informal group of pundits. Weinstein received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the Mathematics Department at Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott Find Eric’s Portal Podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR85PW_B_7_Aisx5vNS7Gjw Host Brian Keating: ♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.phpJoin my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthen
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Nobel Prizewinner Frank Wilczek: Beautiful Questions, God, Nobels, Imposters & the Power of Beauty (#101)
17/12/2020 Duration: 01h39minDoes the universe embody beautiful ideas? Join me on a cosmic journey with Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. We will embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. This is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring. Wilczek is hardly alone among great scientists in charting his course using beauty as his compass. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras and the ancient belief in the music of the spheres to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentieth-century physics. Wilczek brings us right to the edge of knowledge today, where the core insights of even the craziest quantum ideas apply principles we all understand. The equations for atoms and light are almost the same o
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Barry Barish – Black Holes, Nobel Prizes & The Imposter Syndrome (#100)
15/12/2020 Duration: 01h26minBarry Barish is an emeritus professor at Caltech, where he has worked since 1963. He became director of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) project in 1997, which led to his Nobel Prize in 2017. He has many other awards and is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and American Physical Society, of which he was also president. Barry joins our Nobel Minds playlist on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rai Weiss and Kip Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.” We discuss Barry’s long and remarkable career that covers many disciplines within physics. It’s not the standard model, but he has a confidence about himself, and his contributions that make it seem perfectly natural to have been part of such varied, noteworthy projects during his career. Despite that, Barry also admits to feeling like an imposter at times, especially when singing the same Nobel register as Einstein. Wh
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Sheldon Glashow: The Power of Useless Ideas! (#099)
03/12/2020 Duration: 01h32minSheldon Glashow is a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at Harvard, where he also earned his Ph.D. He was the first to propose a grand unified theory and also worked as a visiting scientist at CERN. Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg. He is a member of the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It was an honor to have Sheldon Glashow on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast. He joins our Nobel Minds playlist, having won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, for his “contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current.” Shelly recounts a remarkable life as the son of a plumber who went to the acclaimed Bronx Science high school and then worked his way through some of the most notable laboratories in the world, meeting colleagues and forming collaborations along the way. Having won science’s top prize over 40 years ago didn’
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Bill Perkins: Winners DIE WITH ZERO! (#098)
28/11/2020 Duration: 01h06minWe all have limited time on Earth, so how should we spend it? Financial advisors urge us to be more like the ant than the grasshopper: work hard to maximize our earnings, save early and often, and, in retirement, reap the fruits of our labors and the rewards of compound interest. “What a monumental waste of human life,” says multi- millionaire Bill Perkins. If you spend a lifetime working and die with lots of money left over, you’ve squandered a huge amount of life energy, bypassing the opportunity to enjoy your money — or to give it away — during your lifetime. Our lives are only as fulfilling as the sum of our experiences, Perkins argues, so the more time and money we invest in experiences during our lifetime, the richer our lives become. “Bill Perkins’ Die With Zero opens up a completely different avenue of thinking to realize that your life can be maximized through memorable experiences. Why wait? Being present is a priority. This book provides an amazing blueprint to living your life while using your res
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Eric Weinstein: Imposter Syndrome, Donald Trump, & the Future of Theoretical Physics (#097)
28/11/2020 Duration: 01h40minEric Weinstein joins me live to take your questions about the past, present and future of physics. We’ll discuss my recent chats with Lenny Susskind, Shelly Glashow, and Barry Barish and Eric’s recent podcasts with Lex Fridman too. Eric and Stephen Wolfram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Join us in the chat room to ask questions! Previously featured: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Podcast mentioned: The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJUskAl8mzw?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe for new interviews with Sheldon Glashow, Barry Barish, Cumran Vafa and more! Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine
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Paul Sutter – How To Die In Space (#096)
20/11/2020 Duration: 49minPaul M. Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul earned his PhD in physics in 2011 as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow at the University of Illinois. He then spent three years at the Paris Institute for Astrophysics followed by two years as a research fellow at the Trieste Observatory in Italy. Prior to his current appointment, he served as the chief scientist at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio while maintaining a cosmological researcher position at the Ohio State University. Paul’s areas of research include studying the largest empty regions in the universe, mapping the leftover light from the big bang, and developing new techniques for finding the first stars to appear in the cosmos. He has authored over 60 academic papers and given over 100 seminars, colloquia, and conference talks at institutions around
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Evan Carmichael: What Is Your One Word? (#095)
20/11/2020 Duration: 30minEvan Carmichael believes in entrepreneurs. At 19, he built then sold a biotech software company. At 22, he was a venture capitalist helping to raise $500,000 to $15 million. He now runs EvanCarmichael.com, a popular website for entrepreneurs. He breathes and bleeds entrepreneurship. He’s obsessed, aiming to help one billion entrepreneurs and change the world. He has set two world records, uses a stand-up desk, rides a Vespa, raises funds for Kiva, wears five-toe shoes and created Entrepreneur trading cards. He speaks globally, but Toronto (#EntCity) is home. He loves being married, his son, salsa dancing, DJing, League of Legends and the Toronto Blue Jays. Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Steph
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Lenny Susskind: Black Hole War My BATTLE w Stephen Hawking Made the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (#094)
19/11/2020 Duration: 01h27minThe Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics is a 2008 popular science book by American theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind. The book covers the black hole information paradox, and the related scientific dispute between Stephen Hawking and Susskind. Susskind is known for his work on string theory and wrote a previous popular science book, The Cosmic Landscape, in 2005. 00:00 Introduction 05:00 What has been lost due to COVID: congeniality and v 07:00 Imposter syndrome 10:00 HOW DID IT FEEL TO DISCOVER STRING THEORY? 15:00 SUSPICIOUS OF BIG BANG SINGULARITY 20:00 LENNY ON GOD! 25:00 Can you test Bell Inequalities near a Black Hole’s stretched horizon? 30:00 ENTROPY 2ND LAW…why it’s sacred to Lenny 35:00 What would be his advice to young Lenny? 40:00 What does he think about all the competing TOEs? 45:00 Three things would push him to believe the Multiverse 50:00 Does the String Landscape of vacua imply different physical laws in each ‘pocket univ
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Janna Levin: How to Survive A Black Hole Encounter! (#093)
14/11/2020 Duration: 59minJanna is back to discuss her wonderful new book, BLACK HOLE SURVIVAL GUIDE https://amzn.to/2IlbpKS Keep your distance and enjoy the ride! Please subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 & watch my previous conversation with Janna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEtGYQ7A0B4?sub_confirmation=1 Leave a comment in the comment section or join the livechat…we all want to engage with Janna! Several Topics are on the menu on our voyage, including: 1. Black Hole basics 2. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose 3. Are singularities real? 4. What is your favorite BH? 5. Black Hole Batteries! Janna Levin is the Claire Tow Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Barnard College. She earned a PhD in theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993, and a Bachelor of Science in astronomy and physics with a concentration in philosophy at Barnard College in 1988, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Much of her work deals with looking for evidence to support the proposal that our univ
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Clifford Will and Nicolas Yunes: Is Einstein Still Right? (#092)
13/11/2020 Duration: 01h01minAlbert Einstein is often viewed as the icon of #genius, and his theories are admired for their beauty and correctness. Yet the final judge of any theory is the rigorous test of experiment, not the fame of its inventor or the allure of its mathematics. For decades, general relativity has passed test after test with flying colors, including some remarkable new tests using the recently detected gravitational waves. Still, there are reasons for doubt. Einstein’s theory of gravity, as beautiful as it is, seems to be in direct contradiction with another theory he helped create: quantum mechanics. Until recently, this was considered to be a purely academic affair. But as more and more data pour in from the most distant corners of the universe, hinting at bizarre stuff called “dark energy” and “dark matter,” some scientists have begun to explore the possibility that Einstein’s theory may not provide a complete picture of the cosmos. This book chronicles the latest adventures of scientists as they put Einstein’s theor
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Astronomy’s Great Debate – The Nature of the Universe and the Future of Astronomy! (#091)
13/11/2020 Duration: 01h41minHost of Into The Impossible Professor Brian Keating, David Spergel, Janna Levin, Sara Seager, Wendy Freedman, & Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess debate the hottest topics in modern astronomy while celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30th birthday! An all-star (get it??) party featuring observations of Hubble’s ‘greatest hits’, courtesy of Wyoming Stargazing Association! Plus we debated the greatest mysteries in the Universe including: What is the nature of Dark Matter? How did the Universe begin? How will it end? Is there life beyond earth? What is the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy? What is causing the Hubble Tension and how will it be resolved? Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw
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Sir Roger Penrose: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Black Holes Nobel Prize w/ Eric Weinstein Janna Levin (#090)
09/11/2020 Duration: 02h22minJoin me for a very special discussion with Sir Roger Penrose, co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. We will discuss Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Black Holes, and of course, Nobel Prizes! GET OUR SLIDES: https://kingsumo.com/g/vn03wc/sir-roger-penrose-on-the-into-the-impossible-podcast-slides Sir Roger Penrose is co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. We discuss Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Black Holes, and of course, Nobel Prizes! Roger is a mensch. He always makes time for me and provided one of the first and most enthusiastic “blurbs” for my book, Losing the Nobel Prize. He has always been so generous with his time, even after winning the Nobel Prize when demands for his attention are relentless. You may also enjoy this video recorded at UC San Diego in late- 2018 “Hawking Points in the CMB Sky“, based loosely on his precursor book, “Cycles of Time: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Hawking Points in the CMB Sky“. Get Cycles of Time: https://amzn.to/2JCdKl7 Sir Roger Penrose and I will discuss his l
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Marwa El-Diwiny: Using Soft Robotics to Solve Hard Problems (#089)
08/11/2020 Duration: 59minMarwa A.ElDiwiny, an early stage researcher PhD, working on modelling and simulating self-healing soft materials for industrail applications at VUB. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Seth Godin: How Creatives use The Practice to make great art, overcome fear & thrive on constraints! (#088)
06/11/2020 Duration: 36minSeth Godin is a prolific writer, thinker, and self-declared “non-guru” guru to millions around the world. He invented email marketing. He started the AltMBA program. He has written 20 books, including the Practice. He thinks deeply about the way ideas spread whether these be née notions in quantum physics, science fiction, entrepreneurship, leadership, and–most of all- marketing. He’s worked with Nobel Prize winners, industry titans and even Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Seth’s past books include Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, Purple Cow, and What to do When it’s Your Turn (And it’s Always Your Turn). Buy The Practice: Shipping Creative Work: https://amzn.to/3k2BNpY Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog is one of the most popular in the world. In 2013, Godin was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. He is the host of AKIMBO podcast: https://www.akimbo.link and has his world famous blog at https://seths.blog Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: htt