167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, ...

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347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You

In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single prison guard. Although his original idea was never built, the word has come to indicate any system of social control through ...  Show more

346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play

Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what numbers actually mean. One window on the ways that species differ is how they play amo ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Chiara Marletto, "The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals" (Viking, 2021)
New Books in Science

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 impossib ...  Show more

Ep 62: "The Science of Can and Can't" episode 1.
ToKCast

This is the first episode in a new series devoted to an entirely new book: “The Science of Can and Can’t” by Chiara Marletto. Get the book anywhere ebooks are available (as of May, 2021) and learn more about Chiara and her work here: https://www.chiaramarletto.com​ This book is a ...  Show more

#238 — How to Build a Universe
The Best of Making Sense with Sam Harris

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 current limits of quantum mechanics, ...  Show more

Ep 119: Work and Heat: An introduction to thermodynamics (a prelude to Ch 6 of ”The Science of Can & Can’t).
ToKCast

This is part of my series on Chiara Marletto's groundbreaking book on Constructor Theory "The Science of Can and Can't". In this episode, I do not read from the book but set the scene for newcomers who may not have a physics/engineering/chemistry or perhaps the scientific backgro ...  Show more