Caleb Scharf, director of Columbia University’s Astrobiology Center talks about his latest book, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Almost Nothing, and the OSIRIS-REx space mission. 
 

Come On and Zoom (through the Universe)

Science Talk is a podcast of longer-form audio experiments from Scientific American--from immersive sonic journeys into nature to deep dives into research with leading experts.

Science

On this show, we’ve been talking about uncertainty from a variety of different angles.
We’ve heard how uncertainty can be a spark for creativity and scientific discovery.
We’ve discussed how uncertainty can go unseen and make science really difficult.
And we’ve explored some of the research techniques and habits of mind that researchers use to deal with uncertainty.
Today we’re going to end with two final questions: If science is always uncertain, how can we ever know anything? How can we have confidence in science if there’s always underlying uncertainty?
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Episode 5: How Do We Know Anything?

Science is an iterative process. Progress comes from people coming up with ideas that are sort of right and then new evidence and ideas coming in to update them to become even more correct.
Underlying this process is a willingness by scientists to accept that they might be wrong and be open to updating their ideas.
It turns out that social scientists have a term for this mindset. To find out more, I talked with two researchers who are studying this thing they call “intellectual humility.”
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Episode 4: This Simple Strategy Might Be the Key to Advancing Science Faster

Today’s episode of Uncertain is about the ways that studies can leave us overconfident and how “just-so stories” can make us feel overly certain about results that are still a work in progress. And sometimes studies get misleading results because of random error or weird samples or study design. But sometimes science gets things wrong because it’s done by humans, and humans are fallible and imperfect.
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Episode 3: When Uncertainty Hides in the Blindspot of Overconfidence

In this episode, we’ll talk with two researchers whose work probes the uncertainty surrounding how we perceive the world around us. 
It turns out that what we see may not always be a perfect reflection of reality. 

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Episode 2: Think Seeing is Believing? Think Again

Welcome to Uncertain, a five-part podcast miniseries from Scientific American. Here we will dive head first into the possibilities of the unknowing.
Over the next five episodes, I’ll be talking with people like her: explorers who work in the realm of uncertainty. Through them, we’ll discover the ways that uncertainty can spark curiosity and scientific breakthroughs. But we’ll also find out how uncertainty can bite us in the butt and make science really hard.
We’ll see how neglecting uncertainty can lead to overconfidence and how embracing uncertainty can allow for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the world.
We’ll finish by examining how it’s possible to have confidence in scientific findings, even with their uncertainties.


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Come On and Zoom (through the Universe)

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