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

Ep 119: Work and Heat: An introduction to the...

Up next

Ep 260: I don't believe it!

Response to a question about my discussion with @drpeterboghossian here: https://youtu.be/72vhtT0pFmA?si=hAx1kPho4DkLkBFN This is yet another way of coming at a critique around the concept of "belief" or those who profess to "believe" and so on using Deutsch's approach that knowl ...  Show more

Ep 259: Reaction to Michael Levin Part 3: Bait and Switch, Podcastistan and Surprising(?) algorithms.

In this, the third and final part of a series, I break down some work Michael Levin has done with sorting algorithms. That seems very dry until you hear his claim that these algorithms that are well known and have been studied for decades exhibit extremely unusual behaviour never ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Traditional physics works within the "Laplacian paradigm": you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system through time. Constructor theory proposes an alternative paradigm: to think of physi ...  Show more

The Second Law of Thermodynamics
In Our Time: Science

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Second Law of Thermodynamics which can be very simply stated like this: "Energy spontaneously tends to flow from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused and spread out". It was first formulated – derived from ideas first put forwar ...  Show more

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

The Universe Speaks in Numbers: Ruth Britto interviewed by Graham Farmelo
The Universe Speaks in Numbers

One of the hottest topics in modern physics is trying to understand the scattering of fundamental particles with neither shape nor size - one step up from nothingness. Amazingly, attempts to understand these simple processes theoretically require state-of-the-art mathematics. The ...  Show more