In this episode of the Origins Podcast, Stephen Wolfram joins Lawrence Krauss for a fascinating conversation around Stephen's upbringing, his education path, Mathematica, and what he's working on now. They also cover various concepts around symbolic manipulation and the importance of knowing how to type. Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of more than four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking—and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business. 

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Stephen Wolfram on Math, Philosophy, & More

The Origins Podcast features in-depth conversations with some of the most interesting people in the world about the issues that impact all of us in the 21st century. Host, theoretical physicist, lecturer, and author, Lawrence M. Krauss, will be joined by guests from a wide range of fields, including science, the arts, and journalism. The topics discussed on The Origins Podcast reflect the full range of the human experience - exploring science and culture in a way that seeks to entertain, educate, and inspire. lawrencekrauss.substack.com 

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Natural Sciences

Science & Medicine

Science

Physics

 I have had the privilege of working closely with Frank Wilczek for over 40 years, on and off, and we have written perhaps a dozen scientific papers together over that time.  Our collaborations together were always a source of joy, and often of wonder, and I am pleased to say that a number of them had significant impact on our fields of study.    While I have had the privilege of working with many talented scientists during my career, Frank is unique.  He is one of the most broadly read, deep, and creative scientists I have known.   To first approximation, he has read everything in science, and one of the characteristics of our own collaborations that has been so much fun is entering an entirely new field of study and learning how much is known about it, and how that knowledge might be used in new contexts.   Frank is likely the most significant theoretical physicist of my generation, and along with Ed Witten, perhaps the intellectually most gifted.  That he won the Nobel Prize for work performed as a graduate student with David Gross to develop the theory of one of the four known forces in nature is notable, but it just scratches the surface of his interests and accomplishments.  While Frank and I have appeared onstage together on numerous occasions, I was waiting for the opportunity to sit down with him for an extended period to discuss his life in science, and the areas of study that reflect the most significant developments of recent times, and the outstanding challenges in our field.  It was a pleasure to be able to do so for this podcast.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and that it inspires your interest in the world around us.  As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. 

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From Quarks to Galaxies: A tour through the forefront of modern physics with Frank Wilczek

I first stumbled upon the journalist Katherine Brodsky, who has been a commentator and writer for various media outlets, when I heard about her new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage. The title intrigued me but I admit I was a bit skeptical.  Having written and spoken about co-called cancel culture in the academic world, I expected I might find nothing new in her book, but I was wrong.   Katherine was motivated to write her book after her own experience of being mobbed online after having defended a colleague in an online media group she helped moderate, for the crime of having posted a job opportunity at Fox News.   While she had become aware of the growing social intolerance she was witnessing around her, it was her own experience that caused to make a crucial decision.  These kind of experiences can be debilitating, as she had discovered, and she decided to explore the experiences of others, to see how they had recovered their voices, fought back against the mob, or otherwise moved on.   The stories in No Apologies are poignant, and fascinating.  Katherine is a clear and compelling writer, and an eloquent expositor, as I discovered during our discussion.  We explored her own experience, her interests in journalism, and her own takeaways from the stories she explored as a journalist, which form the basis of the book.  It was a fascinating and provocative discussion, and in many ways uplifting rather than depressing.   I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and that it helps others to deal with the a society that seems to be becoming increasing intolerant to free and open discussion about important issues. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. 

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(Audio) Katherine Brodsky: Speaking Out in an Age of Outrage

 Irwin Shapiro is a remarkable human being by almost any standard. Following his education in physics at Cornell and Harvard, he had a job at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory working on various problems in planetary dynamics, and radar ranging, when he went to a lecture and realized that a completely new phenomenon could occur in General Relativity that no one had proposed in the half-century since Einstein first proposed it.   For objects traveling near a massive object like the Sun, the travel time to go from one point to another would be slightly longer than it would be if one simply divided the distance traveled by the speed of light. One might think this is simply due to the fact that light takes a curved trajectory near a massive object, rather than traveling in a straight line.  But as Shapiro showed, there is an additional time delay, due to the fact that clocks tick somewhat slower in a gravitational field than they would otherwise.   This effect, now known as the Shapiro Effect has become known as the 4th test of General Relativity, a test the theory passed when Shapiro and collaborators used the Haystack Observatory to carefully measure reception times for radar signal that passed near the sun.  Irwin went from that triumph to Chair the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, and from there to Harvard to lead the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory.  He remains at Harvard, where at 94 years old, as Timkin University Professor, he still teachers classes, is doing research in biology, and plays tennis several times a week! Besides all of this, Irwin is one of the most lovely and gentle scientists I have known in my career, which continued after my stint at Harvard largely because of encouragement he gave to me at a very difficult time for me.  As a result, it was a pure delight to reconnect with him after many years, and have a conversation about his long career, the evolution of science in the 60 odd years that he has been doing it, and about life in general.   I hope you enjoy it, and find it as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as I did.  As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.  

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A Conversation with Irwin Shapiro: Scientist Extraordinaire from the Earth to the Stars, and at 94, still going strong.

 I first became aware of Jonathan Kay through his writing for the online magazine, Quillette.  And for full disclosure, I got to know him better because he is one of their editors, and he has edited several of my own pieces for that magazine.  Before that, however, I had been a fan of his writing, and was happy to be able to have an extended conversation with him about writing, journalism, false news, and politics, to name a few of the topics we discussed.  Our dialogue occurred shortly after the appearance of a comprehensive 15,000 word piece of investigative journalism piece by Kay about a supposed organized sex-ring in the Psychology Department at McMaster University in Canada.  Outrageous claims had surfaced, which ignited the university, and the local media, destroying the careers of various faculty and others, all of which eventually turned out to be false.  Kay carefully explored how the original story developed, what factors prompted the University to act, and how local media played up the salacious claims without much investigation.  It was a typical example of how false news can propagate, and also an indictment of the way Universities handle such claims, and local media may promote them.  The appearance of this story gave us the opportunity to talk about the state of journalism in general.  Jonathan has had a unique career and background, which made him a particularly interesting dialogue partner about this issue.  He actually was educated as a metallurgical engineer, and following that he pursued a law degree at Yale University, and was a tax lawyer before eventually becoming disenchanted and deciding to pursue a career in writing and journalism.  He also defies easy labelling.  While he was a founding editor of the conservative Canadian newspaper The National Post, he also helped Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau write his memoirs.  It is Jonathan’s non-ideological bent, perhaps due to his early training as a scientist and engineer that makes his perspective on today’s news so refreshing.  We discussed his own background, what got him into writing, his experiences, and stories including the recent claimed Indigenous Residential School scandal in Canada, and the controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope in the U.S.  When I contacted Jon this week to let him know the podcast is coming out, I learned that he had just completed a lengthy investigative piece about University of New Hampshire astrophysicist/gender studies social justice warrior Chanda Prescod Weinstein who, in the process of claiming victimization for herself and others, has apparently been bullying, harassing, and intimidating a host of others online, leading to complaints recently being filed at her institution.  It coincidentally just came out yesterday, so this podcast is particularly timely.  I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I enjoyed talking to this fascinating man.  As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.  

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A Dialogue with Label-Defying Journalist Jonathan Kay

 In mid October the Origins Project Foundation ran two public events in California.  The second event was held at the Air and Space Museum in San Diego.  I had asked my colleague Brian Keating, who teaches at UCSD and is a Trustee of that museum, whether he might be interested in doing a public dialogue together that we could later both broadcast on our respective podcasts.  He and I have each appeared before on each other’s podcasts, and I knew that we could have the kind of comfortable, informative, and fun conversation that might appeal to a live audience, which would make for a different kind of podcast.    I am happy to present here the video record of that live-audience podcast, and the Q&A; with the audience that was recorded right after it.  Brian and I discussed many things, from forefront cosmology, to the nature of teaching and doing research, as viewed by an experimentalist and a theorist respectively, as well as broader questions associated with science in society today.  The questions afterwards were equally interesting.  I hope you enjoy both as you listen to or watch the podcast.  As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.  

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Stephen Wolfram on Math, Philosophy, & More

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