Closer To Truth

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To inquire whether plants are “sentient” sounds like pseudoscience but has become real science. What does a plant know? Plants can react to their environments, but can plants sense or feel? Can they remember long-term? Can they adapt and learn? Are plants intelligent? And are they in any sense aware?

Daniel Chamovitz is an American-born plant geneticist and the 7th President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel.

How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address the perennial problems of suffering, ethics, ritual and contemplative practices? Why is suffering so important in Buddhism? Why karma in Hinduism? Why systems of nature in Chinese traditions?

Featuring interviews with Helen De Cruz Jay Garfield, Swami Sarvapriyananda, Swami Medhananda, Franklin Perkins, and Yang Xioa.

Explore all CTT videos on Eastern Traditions.

Why are we here? Why is there a world, a cosmos, something-instead of absolutely nothing at all? Of all the big questions, this is the biggest. Why? What can we learn from "nothing"?

Featuring interviews with John Leslie, Bede Rundle, Max Tegmark, Simon Blackburn, Quentin Smith, Victor Stenger, Peter van Inwagen, John Polkinghorne, Richard Swinburne, and Paul Davies.

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Professor Brian Swimme discusses cosmogenesis, our cultural evolution, human consciousness, the Noosphere, and more.

Brian Thomas Swimme is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where he teaches evolutionary cosmology to graduate students in the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program. His upcoming book, The Story of the Noosphere, will be published in October.

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Two big ideas in biology: the evolution of species via mutation, fitness and natural selection; and the embryological development of individuals, from fertilized egg to whole organisms. How do these two big ideas—“evo-devo,” as it’s called—relate? What novel ideas emerge?

Featuring interviews with Alex Rosenberg, Alan Love, Rachell Powell, and Terrence Deacon.

You can watch all episodes in Season 23 on our website.

How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions and Hinduism address the essence

Featuring interviews with Swami Sarvapriyananda, Swami Medhananda, Jay Garfield, and Franklin Perkins.

Get early access to watch Season 24 by registering for a free membership on our website.

Why is matter solid? Why is there antimatter? Where do the sizes of atoms come from? Theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll cuts to the bare mathematical essence of our most profound theories, explaining every step in his new book, Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. In this interview, Carroll uses the basics of quantum mechanics itself to explain measurement and entanglement before exploring how the world is really made of fields.

Carroll's book, Quanta and Fields, is available for purchase now.

Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is host of the Mindscape podcast, and author of several bestselling books. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the American Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of London, and many others.

What is the world fundamentally, deeply made of? What is life? We are always searching for Scientific Breakthroughs: those leaps in knowledge and jumps in understanding that change how we see the world. Now, we focus on Biology. What are Scientific Breakthroughs in Biology?

Featuring interviews with Geoffrey West, Stuart Kauffman, V.S. Ramachandran, Antonio Damasio, and Michio Kaku.

Watch all of Season 21 on the Closer To Truth website.

In honor of NASA's Black Hole Week (May 6-10, 2024), we're re-running our episode from Season 2 of Closer To Truth.

They warp space and time, squeeze matter to a vanishing point, and trap light so that it cannot escape. How can black holes perform such stupendous tricks, and what can we learn from them?

Professor Anna Abraham discusses her book, The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths, and provides a science-based understanding of the creative mind that dispels the pervasive myths we hold about the human brain—but also uncovers the truth at their cores. Drawing on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Abraham offers an examination of human creativity that reveals the true complexity underlying our conventional beliefs about the brain.

Abraham's book, The Creative Brain, is available for purchase now.

Anna Abraham is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. She is the author of "The Neuroscience of Creativity" and the editor of the multidisciplinary volume "The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination".

Watch all CTT Chats here: https://t.ly/jJI7e