July 06, 2021

Alan Lightman: Astronomy's Tolstoy -- Improbable Possibilities, Einstein's Dream, & More (#164)

56 minutes

Einstein's Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, and people are fated to repeat their triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.

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Probable Impossibilities is a brilliant collection of meditative essays on the possibilities - and impossibilities - of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between.

Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab?

Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.

00:00:00 Intro

00:02:03 What's the status of your movie adaptation?

00:03:15 What about planck time is so interesting to you?

00:09:28 How do you reconcile the fact that great minds often go with bad people?

00:11:46 The Role of Ego in your current book Probable Impossibilities, and the story of Andrei Linde.

00:15:11 What do you think about the proliferation of "god" in cosmology and physics literature?

00:16:24 What are you views regarding aetheism and agnosticism?

00:25:12 Does science rely too much on Carl Popper's assertions about falsifiability?

00:32:26 Do you agree with Stephen J. Gould? Are religion and science separate but equal, and the obligation of communicating science to the public.

00:33:24 Should we be encouraging young people to be science communicators?

00:36:25 How did you come to write Einstein's Dream?

00:42:56 Which scenario of time do you personally favor?

00:47:53 Final Thrilling Three.

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