Anastasia has been reading Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization, so we decided to sit down for a meta conversation about petroleum, prime movers, and geopolitics. This solo chat ties together a bunch of the conversations we've had on the show in the last year about climate, technology and the energy transition. Historically, we've been pretty skeptical when people start banging on about the need to transition to a completely electric grid, but Smil makes a really compelling point - all human endeavors depend on motive power. We go further to consider the downstream consequences of the prime movers we rely on, the risk of this being the last civilization for the next 20 million years, and the strange software called "progress" that was installed in humans when we departed from our primate roots.

Dr. C.S. Unnikrishnan is a professor at the School of Quantum Technology at the Defense Institute of Advanced Technology. Unnikrishnan is also a key member of the LIGO-India project and a member of the global LIGO Scientific Collaboration. His work has led him to some revolutionary conclusions about the nature of gravity, light, and the missing medium for these invisible actions. Our conversation gets into the details of his Machian approach to understanding the cosmos, which his calls "cosmic gravity." We discuss Henri Bergson's criticism of relativity, Einstein's transformation into quantum mascot, and issues with simultaneity in cosmic physics. Tell us your thoughts in the comments!

This is Dr. Hughes second appearance on the podcast. His background is in biochemistry and biophysics of protein folding, and water hydration structures. But today we're digging under the floorboards of science itself. Is it possible to have a science that isn't built on some set of assumed values? To tackle this issue, we dig into esoteric mysticism - particularly the work of Rudolph Steiner, who prophesized many of the features of the world we see today back in the late 19th century. This leads us to a path where we explore the modern scientific approach to understanding nature, grounded in materialism in all its splendor and shortcomings, asking where do we go from here? What does a healthy science of the future actually look like? Tell us your thoughts in the comments!

Kate Raworth is an Economist best known for “donut economics,” a model that attempts to map the balance between essential human needs and planetary boundaries. She proposes that the last few hundred years of economic theories were created with a monomaniacal focus on growth that was only possible on a planet with relatively untapped natural resources. After more than two hundred years of industrial development, older economic theories cannot be applied to the necessities of today. Namely, a sustainable material economy for the generations yet to come. We talk about what an economic system that provides for everyone’s basic humans needs can look like, places that have started putting donut economics to use, and how to balance personal responsibility with survival in an unjust system. Check out more of Kate Raworth's work at the Donut Economics Action Lab: https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics

Warren Mosler is an economist, hedge fund manager, and proponent of modern monetary theory, an economic model that posits fiscal crises are caused by governments not spending enough money. From Mosler’s perspective, the reversal of any recession starts with getting very comfortable with deficit spending. Opponents argue that unchecked spending eventually leads to inflation of the currency and economic collapse, which Mosler argues is impossible as long as you know how money actually works. We dive deep into chartalism, the theory about the creation of money that sits at the heart of MMT, lay out why deficit spending doesn’t have to lead to inflation, and why the Federal Government’s checks will never bounce. To read more about Modern Monetary Theory and Mosler’s take on it, check out https://moslereconomics.com/

Scott Zimmerman is a mechanical engineer whose life took a sharp turn when he started to think about the relationship indoor lighting, biology, and solar radiation. He believes that near-infrared light, an invisible component of sunlight from ~800 to 3,000 micrometer wavelengths, is vital for human health. Unfortunately, these are the exact frequencies that our indoor lights and digital devices are incapable of producing. Zimmerman believes that the shift away from incandescent lighting inside of homes has contributes massively to wide-spread hormonal issues in modern population. His mechanism is that our skin, the largest endocrine gland in the universe, is actually a light harvesting organ that uses all the components of light to produce everything from sex hormones to vitamin D. We talk to him about the effect of sunlight on the human body, how he transitioned from mechanical engineering to making lightbulbs, the active harm of blue light, and much more.Tell us your thoughts in the comments!!!

Dr. Rajendra Gupta is a physics professor at the University of Ottawa who was in the headlines a few months ago for his assertion that the universe might be at least twice as old as we realize. He’s back at the radical reshaping of physics with his latest paper, which proposes that we can do away with dark matter and dark energy. Currently, these invisible substances are thought to make up something like 70-90% of our universe, depending on who you ask. But they’re invisible, undetectable, placeholders for some force or particle that can make the math work out. As an alternative, Gupta proposes modeling the universe with two ideas in mind. One, that the constants of nature are not, in fact, constant and two, that the red light shift seen in the cosmos that is considered to be a signature of expansion is actually the fingerprint of “tired light.” Together, these concepts allow him to recalculate the mechanics of the universe without relying on dark matter and dark energy, which is pretty cool. We talk about the impetus for this work, the meaning of tired light, why expansion isn’t going away any time soon, and the future of physics.

Another talk from our recent April conference in Austin, TX, with Thad Roberts from The Physics Monastery. Thad speaks about his institute's recent progress in an ongoing struggle to comprehend the secrets of the constants of nature. These are the steady quantities that scale all the behaviors of the natural world, from electricity and magnetism, to gravity, or even elasticity. It seems strange that there are these fixed numbers inside of all our scientific formulas, but the physical significance is often forsaken. Even worse, we often have no idea why the constant is fixed as it is. Why is the speed of light limited? Why does the electron orbit at that speed? Why are they related just so? These questions and more get aired out in depth.

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Visualizing the atom

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Learning to see in the dark

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Grandfather of science

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Tools & science

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Empires of the mind

(00:18:52)

Flatland

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Perspective and relativism

(00:32:23)

Newtonian revelations

(00:40:50)

Einsteinian revelations

(00:54:33)

Gravity as density field

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Remember the atom, Feynmann

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NIST & constants of nature

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Fine structure constant

(01:38:12)

Q&A

Humans have long encountered experiences that challenge their rational ideas about the world. Encounters with angels, demons, fairies, gnomes, or other spirits have been the standards of folklore since time immemorial. We agree with Jung that these revelations are scientifically valuable, though best explored though any lens but materialism; i.e. physics. When we learn about common bizarre experiences, we learn about ourselves. Author Ogi Ogas joins us again, alongside Qualia Research Institute's Andrés Gómez Emilsson, to discuss close encounters with the modern version of those elusive, yet timeless, entities. We begin with the phenomenological approaches to studying consciousness. We then compare both guest's experience with non-human minds.

Today we are sitting down with Dr. Stephanie Seneff, an MIT researcher, who has spent more than a decade obsessively investigating the role that industrial herbicides play in the modern health-scape. This is our second conversation with Dr. Seneff, following up on our detailed discussion of the myriad ways that the herbicide, glyphosate, interferes with cellular processes throughout the body. This time we are digging a bit deeper into how herbicides affect the balance of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, in the body, and how this dysregulation might promote various disease states. We also go much further into the solution sets facing humanity as these startling realizations become more and more difficult to ignore.