FQxI Podcast

2014 in review: Ian Durham picks his top 5 physics stories of the year; & we congratulate the winners of the first FQXi video contest.

How parallel worlds interact with ours; redefining "life" in terms of predicting the future; questioning the founding assumptions of quantum theory; & the Philae lander sends back songs from a comet.

Primordial gravitational waves turn to dust and why this is good news for inflation theory; Julian Barbour's model in which the big bang created twin mirror universes, solves the arrow of time problem; & Paul Davies on his physics-based evolutionary-model of cancer, which recommends oxygen treatment and immunotherapy.

Watching Schrodinger's cat die; black holes bounce into white holes; sharpening Occam's razor; catching quantum pigeons; & generating quantum Cheshire cats.

Time travel is simulated in the lab; Alan Guth on the doubts clouding the BICEP2 result; how the Higgs should have destroyed the universe already; & could entropy explain why nature obeys quantum rules?

Andrei Linde and Joao Magueijo on the BICEP2 discovery of primordial gravitational waves; using thermodynamics to explain the origin of gravity; & is quantum entanglement the fundamental glue that binds reality together?

Max Tegmark proposes that consciousness may be another state of matter in his talk at the 4th FQXi International Conference.

Sean Carroll questions conventional wisdom on quantum fluctuations, whether we might be disembodied "Boltzmann Brains" floating through space & eternal inflation leading to a multiverse, in his talk at the 4th FQXi conference.

"What is quantum information *really* good for?" Physicists William Wootters, Caslav Brukner, Andrew Briggs, Raymond Laflamme, Sorin Paraoanu & Gerardo Adesso discuss this question at FQXi's 4th International Conference in Vieques.

The final part of our Year in Physics review, with Ian Durham; & could ancient aliens have thrived in the universe 15 million years after the big bang?