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

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, ...

Up next

342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind

Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There is tremendous divergence of species over time, but also repeated convergence to ...  Show more

341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Anyone living in a society or involved with technology must therefore be ...  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