ICE@Dartmouth Podcast

For his most recent book, Notes from an Apocalypse, Mark O’Connell traveled around the world, visiting people and visiting places. He documents an attempt to come to grips with how a fear about the end of the world has affected the lives of different people and shaped different landscapes. It is a surprisingly complex topic that touches on not only the environment, but also race, gender, class, wealth, and modern society. For this episode, we’re going to talk about this expansive project and about how he has welded a variety of notes into a single book about our 21stcenturies fears for the future.

Theoretical physics and religion are not obviously related in any precise or close way. And yet they have fed one another fruitfully in different ways and at various times throughout history. Today I’m going to get a glimpse of that productive exchange by talking to Dr Emanuele Ciancio about two concepts of time in the New Testament and in theoretical physics.

Earth's climate and atmosphere are incredible: they allow us to live and breath in a relatively stable and comfortable environment. Even though they are less hospitable, other objects in our solar system also have atmospheres and climates and we can learn a lot about our own planet and how it is changing by studying these alien systems. Dr David Grinspoon is an expert comparative planetologist, as well an author and public speaker. We're going to talk about the study of alien planets, climate change, and how to be a responsible scientist in the age of climate change and science skepticism. 

Information Theory is a fundamental part of modern computing and communication that helps us better send, receive, and interpret signals. It's been with us in some form since the early 20th century and without it, modern conveniences like talking on the phone, listening to the radio, or placing an online order may look very different or not even be possible. But Information Theory can offer us much more than a few modern conveniences. It may also help us better understand how to think, learn, and do science.  

In this episode, I'm going to talk with Dr Damian Sowinski first about what this theory is, and then what it might be able to tell us about how we can both study and better understand the world around us. 

Most of us probably associate the divine with the Christian God, or at least with a monotheistic, anthropomorphized God, but of course this is not the only way to think of divinity and one fascinating and controversial alternative is pantheism, the view that the material world, universe, or nature is what is divine. Thinking of divinity in this way has enormous implications for all sorts of aspects of human life and I'm going to speak with Dr Mary-Jane Rubenstein about how to make sense of pantheism in the world today and what some of its implications are. 

How do you talk to people about science? This should be easy, after all science seems to be about facts, evidence, and uncovering truths about the natural world. But of course it is not easy and we can find ourselves in the midst of controversies, especially when scientific findings suggest we should modify our behavior or adjust our habits. Partly we face this difficulty because science can be very difficult to understand and describing how science works (not just what scientists say we should do) is hard to do concisely. 

Few forms of expression are as well equipped for handling complex topics as literature. If there is a sure way to talk about science effectively, it must certainly involve storytelling. For this episode, I'll be talking with Dr Tasneem Zehra Husain about her work as a writer and as a scientist and about how fiction can transform science into something we can apprehend . 

We use and talk about money all the time and mostly we have no need to actually have a theory of money. After all, as long as I can use it to pay for goods and as long as I get paid, does it really matter? It does. There are actually a number of controversies surrounding money that might be better understood if we could first say precisely what money is. For instance, what role should the government play in regulating money? Is money just another commodity like bread or oil? Is money best regulated by the market? For this episode, I'll speak with the philosopher Dr Graham Hubbs about what money is and why it is so important for us to know. 

Different people across the globe have a variety of perceptions of science that range from trust and admiration, to suspicion, ignorance, and indifference. Understanding these perceptions and why people have them is a fascinating and increasingly important subject of study, particularly if we want to make scientifically informed decisions about difficult and complex problems. In this episode, I'll talk with Dr Salman Hameed about his work studying the perception of science and its relation to religion, especially in different Muslim communities around the world. 

Astronomers typically study distant stars and planets. This in fact seems something like the definition of what an astronomer is. However, studying other parts of the universe might also give us insight into the nature of planet Earth and our time on it, brief though it is compared with the history of our small galaxy. These are some of topics I'll chat with Dr Adam Frank about, who is an astronomer doing some very interesting work on distant stars, but who also has keen interests in life on Earth. 

Providing a theory of the mind that tells us what it is, how it works, and how it relates to the brain or body is an intensely difficult project. Thinkers have been struggling with it for thousands of years. It is no less difficult a project today, but recent work that brings insights from different disciplines, cultures, and schools of thought is offering us the chance to think about the mind in novel and fruitful ways. This is exactly what Dr Evan Thompson is doing and we are going to talk about how he is doing it in this week's episode.