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PODCAST

MULTIVERSES

Coffee table conversations with people thinking about foundational issues. Multiverses explores the limits of knowledge and technology. Does quantum mechanics tell us that our world is one of many? Will AI make us intellectually lazy, or expand our cognitive range? Is time a thing in itself or a measure of change? Join James Robinson as he tries to find out.

science physics

All Episodes

54:01

19| The Meaning of Net Zero — Myles Allen

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/11/16

To stop global warming it is not enough to stop atmospheric CO2 rising. That is not the meaning of net zero.Despite net zero being a core concept in the Paris Agreement, it appears to be much misunderstood. The idea of net zero can be traced back to the work of Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at Oxford and a veteran of several IPCC assessments.Myles explains the original intent of net zero and what we really need to aim for: zero transfer of carbon between the geosphere (Earth's crust)

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108:32

18| Feeling Right: Emotions & Ethics — James Hutton

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/11/02

Can we trust our emotions as a guide to right and wrong?This week's guest James Hutton is a philosopher at the University of Delft who argues that emotions provide a way of testing our moral beliefs — similar to the way observations are used in natural sciences as evidence for or against theories.This is not to say that emotions are infallible, nor that they are not themselves influenced by our moral beliefs, but that they do have a place in our moral inventory. In particular, the destabilizing

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93:49

17| Santiago Bilinkis — Artificial Intelligence:...

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/10/19

Could AI's ability to make us fall in love with be our downfall? Will AI be like cars, machines that encourage us to be sedentary, or will we use it like a cognitive bicycle — extending our intellectual range while still exercising our minds?These are some of the questions raised by this week's guest Santiago Bilinkis. Santiago is a serial entrepreneur who's written several books about the interaction between humanity and technology. Artificial, his latest book, has just been released in

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85:27

16| Gábor Domokos — The Gömböc, a shape at the limit...

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/10/05

The Gomboc is a curious shape. So curious many mathematicians thought it could not exist. And even to the untrained eye, it looks alien: neither the product of human or natural processes.This week Gábor Domokos relates his decade-long quest to prove the existence of a (convex, homogenous) shape with only two balance points.The Gömböc is not just a mathematical curio, its discovery led to a theory of how "things fall apart", of the processes of abrasion that — whether on Earth, mars, or deep space —

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89:50

15 | Simon Critchley — Philosophical itches & how to...

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/09/21

From what human need does philosophy emerge? And where can it lead us?Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York, and a scholar of Heidegger, Pessoa, Football (Liverpool FC), and humour — among other things. He crosses over between analytic and continental traditions and freely draws on quotes from Hume, poetry and British pop bands.Simon argues that philosophy begins in disappointment, not wonder. But its goals can be wisdom, knowledge, enlightenment, and

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97:45

14| ChatGPT as a Glider — James Intriligator

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/09/07

Large language models, such as ChatGPT are poised to change the way we develop, research, and perhaps even think. But how do we best understand LLMs to get the most from our prompting?Thinking of LLMs as deep neural networks, while correct, is not very useful in practical terms. It doesn't help us interact with them, rather as thinking of human behavior as nothing more than the result of neurons firing won't make you many friends. However, thinking of LLMs as search engines is also faulty — they are

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68:59

13| Phylogeny & The Canterbury Tales — Peter Robinson

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/08/24

The physical solidity of books encourages notions of "the text" or "the canonical edition". The challenges to this view from post-modernist thought are well known. But there are other ways in which this model of a static text may fail.Our guest this week is Peter Robinson (my dad!) who takes us through his work on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This is a paradigmatic case of a work of literature that defies understanding as fixed text. Originally it would have been read, or performed. What exists now

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87:31

12 | The Long Now — Peter Schwartz

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/08/10

For hundreds of years, things changed slowly. Innovations were infrequent and spread inchmeal. Population, culture, and the atmosphere, all were static decade-to-decade. We now see rapid change.It's hard to contemplate what now? let alone what next?Peter Schwartz is a futurist, SVP for Scenario Planning at Salesforce, author of The Art of Long View, and a founder of the Long Now Foundation. He thinks about the future, both envisioning its many possibilities and harnessing these scenarios to answer

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100:12

11| AI, Risk, Fairness & Responsibility — John Zerilli

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/07/20

AI is already changing the world. It's tempting to assume that AI will be so transformative that we'll inevitably fail to harness it correctly, succumbing to its Promethean flames.While caution is due, it's instructive to note that in many respects AI does not create entirely new challenges but rather exacerbates or uncovers existing ones. This is one of the key themes that emerge in this discussion with John Zerilli. John is a philosopher specializing in AI, Data, and the Rule of Law at the

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82:26

10| Plants, Roots, Spirals and Palaeobotany — Sandy...

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/07/13

Plants have transformed the surface of the earth and the contents of our atmosphere. To do this they've developed elaborate systems of roots and branches which (sometimes) follow uncanny mathematical patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence.Our guest this week, Sandy Hetherington, leads Edinburgh's Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group. They take a no-holds-barred approach to understanding plant development by combining genomics, fossil records, herbaria, and 3D modeling. Dig in! Show notes:

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112:50

9| The Hunt for Hydrogen — Rūta Karolytė

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/07/06

Does the Earth contain enormous clean energy reserves? For many years the received logic was that hydrogen does not occur naturally in significant quantities without being bound to other atoms (such as in H20, water, or CH4, methane). To obtain the gas — whether as a fuel or for use in fertilizers — we need to strip it from those molecules, typically by electrolysis and steam reformation. But our understanding may be ripe for change.Rūta Karolytė is at the vanguard of prospectors looking for large,

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99:09

8 | Harald Wiltsche — Thought Experiments, Mach,...

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/06/29

Thought experiments have played a starring role in physics. They seem, sometimes, to pluck knowledge out of thin air. This is the starting point for my discussion this week with the philosopher Harald Wiltsche: what are thought experiments?How do they function — are they platonic laboratories with no moorings in observations or a way of supercharging our reasoning about phenomena?What do they deliver? Much emphasis has been put on the paradigm-shattering insights of Einstein where thought

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107:10

7| Anna Lewis — Genomics, polygenic risk scores,...

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/06/22

Genomics is leading a revolution in our understanding of disease. But the ways we pursue genomics research and the use we make of that knowledge demand careful thinking.Anna is a researcher at The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, she holds a PhD in Systems Biology from Oxford (where we met) and has worked in medtech startups. As someone who has looked at genomics from multiple perspectives, she’s an excellent guide to this rocky terrain.Anna emphasizes the challenges and

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111:21

6| Christian Bök — Poetry, Constraints, DNA & The...

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/06/15

Christian Bök is an award-winning poet pushing the boundaries of the medium and exploring the capabilities of language itself. Rather than focusing on self-expression, Christian uses poetry as a laboratory for understanding language — probing its plasticity and character.His notable work, the bestseller Eunoia, draws inspiration from the avant-garde rules of Oulipo and takes it a step further by restricting each chapter to only one vowel. This constraint leads to the creation of such singular

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93:25

5| QBism: The World is Unfinished — Ruediger Schack

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/06/08

Is the fate of the universe predetermined? Many physicists and philosophers argue it is, particularly those who adopt the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.Our guest this week is Ruediger Schack. With Christopher Fuchs and Carlton Caves, he is one of the originators of a new way of interpreting quantum mechanics, QBism, according to which we — as agents — are co-creators of the world. Destiny is shaped by our hands.Ruediger is a professor of mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of

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77:24

4| Science & Poetry — Sam Illingworth

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/06/01

Science and poetry are sometimes caricatured as opposing paradigms: the emotional expression of the self versus the objective representation of nature. But science can be poetic, and poetry scientific. Our guest this week, Sam Illingworth, bridges these worlds. He’s researched scientists who were also poets, and organized workshops for scientists and laypeople using the medium of poetry to create an equitable and open dialogue.In addition to being an Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier

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75:14

3| Julian Barbour — Relational Space and Time

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/05/25

Space and time appear in charts as axes oblivious to the points they demarcate. Similarly, we may feel that we, and all the objects of our worlds, are like such points — and spacetime is a container in which we sit.Julian Barbour is a physicist who has spent six decades arguing against this. He takes the relationist approach of Leibniz and Mach: there is no space without objects and no time without change. Rather space is just the geometric relationships between things.Julian has pioneered theories

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87:42

2 | David Wallace — The Emergent Multiverse

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/05/18

We live in a branching universe. If it can happen, it does happen.These are the almost incredible claims of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet today’s guest, David Wallace, makes a case that this is the most grounded way of reading our best theory of nature.While at first sight quantum mechanics seems to say that things (famously, cats!) can occupy impossible states, David argues that a careful reading shows we can take seriously “superpositions” (these apparently weird states)

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91:21

1 | Casey Handmer — Mining the Air

MULTIVERSES ·

2023/05/11

Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries (TI).TI is pioneering air-to-fuel technology to manufacture methane (natural gas) from the air. Currently, we continue to extract enormous quantities of hydrocarbons from the crust, burn them, and release carbon dioxide. Instead, TI wants to mine the air: displacing the transport of carbon from the crust to the atmosphere.Casey Handler has a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from Caltech, he’s worked at Nasa’s JPL and on Hyperloop One.His blog is at

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