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

This episode is heavily focussed on Dawkin's "Selfish Gene" explanation of Darwin's evolution by natural selection. Obviously there are readings from the relevant part of this chapter from The Fabric of Reality but I augment that with sections from "The Selfish Gene" itself as we ...  Show more

Do not destroy the means of error correction. A deep unification of knowledge akin to unifying quantum theory with computation to create the theory of quantum computation. David Deutsch will be known for not merely forging the basis of quantum computing but also a new basis for m ...  Show more

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

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

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

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