Dec 24, 2018
There won't be any regular episodes of
Mindscape this week or next, as we take a holiday break. Regular
service will resume on Monday January 7, 2019. In the meantime,
here is a special Holiday Message. Most likely it will be of
interest to very few people -- there's no real substantive content,
just me talking about...
Dec 17, 2018
It's a big universe out there, full of an astonishing variety of questions and puzzles. Today's guest, Janna Levin, is a physicist who has delved into some of the trippiest aspects of cosmology and gravitation: the topology of the universe, extra dimensions of space, and the appearance of chaos in orbits around black...
Dec 10, 2018
Everywhere around us are things
that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in
cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come
in particular forms, which may be emotionally or aesthetically
pleasing as well as functional. The study of how form and function
come together in things is...
Dec 3, 2018
The "Easy Problems" of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it into action. The "Hard Problem," on the other hand, is the task of explaining our individual, subjective, first-person experiences of the world. What is it like to be me, rather than someone else?...
Nov 26, 2018
I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just started taking data. Comparing where they were to where they needed to get to in terms of sensitivity, the mumblings in the audience after the talk were clear:...