Podcast appearances and mentions of murray gell mann

Pep Martorell es director del Barcelona Supercomputing Center, hogar del MareNostrum 5. Sentimos una extraña mezcla de fascinación y temor por las nuevas tecnologías. La ciencia tiene un impacto en el mundo en el que vivimos y la computación del superordenador soluciona problemas que no podemos tan siquiera concebir. Escribió Eduardo Mendoza en su precioso discurso de aceptación del Premio Cervantes que “las vocaciones tempranas son árboles con muchas hojas, poco tronco y ninguna raíz”. Pep, que divulga también en su propio Substack, entró en el campo de la física fascinado por los documentales de Cosmos. Carl Sagan contagió y sigue contagiando a muchos jóvenes en busca de una vocación. Ese hombre, con su pasión por la ciencia, despertó la curiosidad de muchos y mi esperanza es que este podcast haga lo mismo.Quiero dar las gracias a la Cambra de Comerç de Barcelona por haber hecho posible este episodio. Me permitieron grabar en su fantástico ático de Diagonal y no habría podido encontrar un emplazamiento mejor para la charla con Pep. La propuesta de la Cambra es atractiva para todo tipo de perfiles relacionados con el mundo de la empresa y te animo a que explores los eventos que allí organizan. La Cambra quiere ser un punto de encuentro empresarial en la ciudad de Barcelona, facilitando conexiones inesperadas y creando oportunidades en la serendipia que se genera en esos círculos. Siempre la opcionalidad del amigo Taleb, los accidentes positivos de los que te hablo en Kapital.Así narra Stephen Fry el regalo del fuego por parte de Prometeo, en su fantástico libro Los mitos griegos revisitados: “Cuando les mostró a los hombres aquel demonio saltarín y célebre danzarín, de primeras chillaron atemorizados y recularon ante las llamas. Pero la curiosidad pronto superó al miedo y comenzaron a solazarse con aquel nuevo juguete mágico, aquella sustancia, fenómeno..., llamadlo como queráis. Supieron por Prometeo que el fuego no era su enemigo sino un poderoso aliado que, convenientemente domesticado, tenía diez mil millares de usos. Prometeo pasó de una aldea a otra enseñándoles técnicas para fabricar herramientas y armas, cocer cacerolas de arcilla, cocinar carne y hornear masas de cereales, lo que enseguida desencadenó una avalancha de ventajas que supuso la prevalencia del hombre sobre la presa animal, que no podía reaccionar a las lanzas y flechas de punta metálica. No tardó mucho Zeus en bajar la mirada desde el Olimpo y ver puntos de titilante luz naranja salpicando el paisaje a su alrededor. Al instante supo lo que había sucedido. Tampoco hizo falta que le dijesen quién era el responsable. Su ira fue arrebatada y terrible. Jamás se había presenciado una furia tan extrema, tan tumultuosa, tan apocalíptica. Ni siquiera Urano, en su mutilada agonía, había experimentado una rabia tan vengativa. Urano fue vencido por un hijo que le resultaba indiferente, pero Zeus había sido traicionado por el amigo al que más amaba. Ninguna traición podía ser más terrible.”Índice:1:21 Temor ancestral a lo desconocido.8:52 Labatut ve al científico como un poeta.19:10 Mirar en el abismo del conocimiento.27:06 Las bellísimas lecciones de Sagan.30:51 Faltan chicas en las carreras STEM.42:56 La tradición catalana de comprar tecnología en Andorra.51:35 Conferencia en Solvay en 1927.1:03:15 Los misterios del big bang.1:06:58 Hablar de Newton es como hablar de Messi.1:16:51 Un superordenador en una capilla.1:25:58 Ich probiere.1:35:06 AlphaGo.1:41:53 Nobel de Química para el plegado de proteínas.1:45:59 Kasparov contra Deep Blue.1:48:23 Destrucción mutua asegurada.1:59:39 El bosón de Higgs.2:06:31 Misterios por resolver.Apuntes:Cosmos. Carl Sagan.Cosmos. Neil deGrasse TysonUn verdor terrible. Benjamín Labatut.MANIAC. Benjamín Labatut.BTG Talks. Benjamín Labatut.Beauty, truth and... physics? Murray Gell-Mann.La utilidad de lo inútil. Nuccio Ordine.El orden del tiempo. Carlo Rovelli.Cuántica. José Ignacio Latorre.

Simon DeDeo's inquiry takes on the most immense topics: astrophysics, history, epistemology, culture. He brings the precision of a physicist, the capability of a data scientist, and the sensibility of a philosopher to thinking about how we live our lives; and his polymathic life might be the example we need to make sense of the world we are walking into, one requiring an evolution to our way of studying and understanding.Origins Podcast WebsiteFlourishing Commons NewsletterShow Notes:David Spergel (08:40)The Santa Fe Institute (14:10)The Village Vanguard in New York City (16:30)The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem by Mark Steiner (24:30)Murray Gell-Mann (25:00)"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" by Eugene Wigner (26:00)"The civilizing process in London's Old Bailey" Klingenstein et al (27:30)Michael Tomasello (31:50)Michael Palmer "Lies of the Poem" (34:50)Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel (37:20)Gregory Bateson "Where is the mind?" (40:20)The CANDOR corpus (42:50)Judith Donath on Origins (48:10)Marshall McLuhan (49:00)Science of Science (49:10)"New and atypical combinations: An assessment of novelty and interdisciplinarity" (49:10)Helen Vendler (51:20)The Anxiety of Influenceby Harold Bloom (53:00)C Thi Nguyen on Origins (57:00)The Scientific Landscape of Human Flourishing (58:00)eudaimonia (58:30)thumos (59:00)Lightning Round (01:04:50)Book: American Pastoral by Philip Roth Passion: exerciseHeart sing: narrativeScrewed up: teaching and mentoringFind Simon online:WebsiteLogo artwork by Cristina GonzalezMusic by swelo on all streaming platforms or @swelomusic on social media

This podcast is a commentary and does not contain any copyrighted material of the reference source. We strongly recommend accessing/buying the reference source at the same time. ■Reference Source https://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_the_ancestor_of_language ■Post on this topic (You can get FREE learning materials!) https://englist.me/25-academic-words-reference-from-murray-gell-mann-the-ancestor-of-language-ted-talk/ ■Youtube Video https://youtu.be/ZCGflXJBaS0 (All Words) https://youtu.be/IYt3bxPqLUE (Advanced Words) https://youtu.be/UXCnry2qMJA (Quick Look) ■Top Page for Further Materials https://englist.me/ ■SNS (Please follow!)

This podcast is a commentary and does not contain any copyrighted material of the reference source. We strongly recommend accessing/buying the reference source at the same time. ■Reference Source https://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_beauty_truth_and_physics ■Post on this topic (You can get FREE learning materials!) https://englist.me/153-academic-words-reference-from-murray-gell-mann-beauty-truth-and-physics-ted-talk/ ■Youtube Video https://youtu.be/TNp0pvbf6_0 (All Words) https://youtu.be/rzMgRvZSLJo (Advanced Words) https://youtu.be/NIWrej9P55w (Quick Look) ■Top Page for Further Materials https://englist.me/ ■SNS (Please follow!)

Support me by becoming wiser and more knowledgeable – check out Murray Gell-Mann's collection of books for sale on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/4aiklsw If you purchase a book through this link, I will earn a 4.5% commission and be extremely delighted. But if you just want to read and aren't ready to add a new book to your collection yet, I'd recommend checking out the ⁠⁠⁠Internet Archive⁠⁠⁠, the largest free digital library in the world. If you're really feeling benevolent you can buy me a coffee or donate over at ⁠https://ko-fi.com/theunadulteratedintellect⁠⁠. I would seriously appreciate it! __________________________________________________ Murray Gell-Mann (September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons. In the 1970's he was a co-inventor of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) which explains the confinement of quarks in mesons and baryons and forms a large part of the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces. Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished fellow and one of the co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of physics at the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California. Gell-Mann spent several periods at CERN, a nuclear research facility in Switzerland, among others as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow in 1972. Audio source ⁠here⁠⁠ Full Wikipedia entry ⁠here⁠ Murray Gell-Mann's books ⁠here --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theunadulteratedintellect/support

Hello Interactors,As I was preparing for my talk at Harvard last month, I was finishing a book called The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. He explores how culture shapes values, and those values shape history. Hat tip to Kasey Klimes over at rhizome r&d for the recommendation. Lent uncovers the history and evolution of dominant Western culture through the lens of evolutionary biology and neuroscience and the role patterns play in cognitive and cultural development. He then compares it the lesser examined evolution of Eastern, mostly Chinese, culture, philosophy, and scientific history.He found discrepancies in dominant Western thought, and how it sometimes is incongruent with select examples of more recent advances in science. Especially the degree to which the world is increasingly understood as a nested array of interdependent and indeterminate complex systems. Quantum physics, complexity Science, and other various branches of the physical and social sciences, are revealing evidence of a pervasive interconnectedness that can often get lost or overlooked in some more traditional methods and beliefs of dominant Western science and culture.“Divide and conquer” is one such example of how we routinely attempt to simplify to resolve problems. And yet, it seems divisions are what may be contributing to our global problems. Lent's book made me wonder how much Western thinking and culture may be keeping us from solving our most perplexing problems. What happened to ‘united we stand, divided we fall?'As interactors, you're special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You're also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let's go…FRANKENSTEIN V.2Descartes once said, "Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it." The breaking down of problems does simplify challenges. At the same time, I wonder if divisions can also introduce challenges. Consider the division of today's global crises into economic, social, and environmental problems. It's feasible to divide these even further but is it necessary to resolve them? What if instead of resolution division and partitioning is contributing to our ruin?We're good at division. Economic inequality divides the wealthy from the poor, political polarization has unraveled civil discourse, increased hostility, and a growing distrust of democratic institutions. Climate change exposes these divisions and imbalances as those more vulnerable to its effects suffer more than those most responsible for its existence. This is all amidst an age group divide. Rising housing costs, stagnant wages, and reduced opportunities make it harder for younger people to avoid financial precarity let alone secure family wealth. The gulf between the ‘haves' and ‘have nots' is widening.Cultural polarization also divides communities along cultural and religious lines leading to a rise in hate crimes and extremist movements. Age can reveal differing attitudes towards social issues further solidifying divisions leading to more hostility and distrust. Divisions regarding the role of technology in society can also divide along age lines, but also wealth.Digital divides can exacerbate social and economic inequalities, as the pandemic quickly revealed. We also witnessed how those without access to technology disproportionately struggled to access education, healthcare, jobs, and other essential services.Fear and distrust in technology is currently directed at AI. As with seemingly every fast-approaching technological innovation in human history, many fear it while many revere it. Jeremy Lent notes that advances in artificial intelligence are particularly encouraging for futurists who see AI as furthering the quest to disembodied intelligence. Transhumanists imagine a fusing of machines with physiology – the brain supplanted by a connected web of universal artificial intelligence. In the words of a leading advocate and enthusiast, Ray Kurzweil, this transformation would upgrade “the frailties of these Version 1.0 bodies we have.” Sounds like a modern-day Frankenstein to me.Lent also reminds us that futurist visions can also look more like the science fiction classic, The Matrix. Human bodies are relegated to biological livestock consumed for energy so a global matrix of software can run a simulated existence – a virtual world, a meta-universe, or metaverse. Sound familiar? Most of today's technology CEOs from Musk to Zuck subscribe to various forms of these visions of the future and they're not alone.A crude modern-day demonstration of this separation exists with remote work. While physically present in one place, people interact virtually with 2D representations of other humans to perform collaborative cognitive operations – information work. I spent my career helping to develop software tools to enable this mode of working. Now imagine instead of looking at a computer screen people are wearing a headset or special glasses, as often envisioned by leading tech firms. These attempts, in varying degrees, separate the functions of the mind from the body. Our mind can exist in a virtual world while our body remains planted in the physical world.The idea of separating mind and body is not new. These ideas are rooted in ancient Greek philosophical notions that the mind can be separated from the body. It then permeated Christian religions which influenced Western cultures leading to yet another example of division in our present-day society. These philosophies separate the brain – a seemingly computer-like organ – from the physical reality of our biological physiology. Plato viewed the mind as divine, and the body as a polluted swamp. Purity and truth existed only in the mind. He believed the earth to be perfectly round and light rays perfectly parallel. The physical world was constructed with combinations of pure geometry. For him, this reality only exists in mathematical abstractions present in the mind. But for Plato, what is in the mind is what is true. He believed the eye, the physical senses, were not to be trusted. They deceive. He was so adamant in this geometric virtual existence that he had these words carved in stone above the entrance to his academy: “Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here.”DIVIDED WE STANDAristotle later rejected this strict dualistic separation. While he is interpreted to believe the mind indeed operates differently than most organs in the body, including processing the immaterial in the form of cognition, the mind and body are nonetheless more uniformly connected.This Aristotelian view was picked up in the middle-ages by the influential Christian theologian Thomas Aguinas. He treated intellect, and the soul, as independent but unified physical forms. While separate entities, he believed separation would starve the soul and the intellect of the necessary memories contained in the brain. The mind was for reason and free will while the physical body was but a vessel.But as the Enlightenment unfolded, it was Plato's ideas that took hold. His dualistic beliefs were prominently elevated by the mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes. His form of dualism came in the existence of two substances: mind and matter. A person only exists – they only matter – because they can think. Hence is famous phrase, “I think therefore I am.”Descartes rejected the notion that the universe is comprised of atoms. He was a mechanist, believing the body to be like a machine made of specially formulated parts predetermined and preassembled by a God. He believed the body's parts – the pumps, pullies, and gears, were controlled by processing unit in the brain – a power gifted by a Christian God – the pineal gland. We now know this part of the brain is primarily responsible for producing the sleep regulating hormone, melatonin.This idea of the brain as the ‘central processing unit' serves as the prevailing metaphor of conventional Western thought to this day. Just as Descartes' theories emerged out of Christian theology, Greek philosophy, and modern mechanistic technological advances, by extension, so too do today's intellectual and scientific influencers.Descartes' influence was surely substantiated, and perhaps – like Plato – influenced, by his contributions to mathematics. Moreover, his Cartesian coordinate system provided mathematical language and visualization that further enabled deduction, detection, and delineation. It made it easier to draw borders and boundaries; to bisect and bifurcate with the exacting detail and believability that can come with mathematics. The certitude of mathematics can sometimes delude us into conflating the certainty of a truth with the truth. Plato was right, the senses, via the brain, can deceive. But so can math.Descartes mechanistic view of the world, together with the language of mathematics, meant the universe could now be calculated and communicated with extreme precision. This gave his beliefs and philosophies an added tinge of proof – of the truth. His work helped to unite an understanding of the world by mechanistically dividing the universe “into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.”The proliferation of printing presses in the 17th century helped to spread and perpetuate his perspective. It was the Cartesian coordinates that helped project the complex three-dimensional world onto a simple two-dimensional surface accelerating the craft of cartography and European global exploration. Soon, those with the means and power to draw maps did so. European powers could now easily and abstractly divide land, in their mind, conquering invaded lands into as “many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve.” They could control how they believed people should interact with each other, economies, and their natural surroundings.These Cartesian maps, plans, and projections continue to legally manifest and define so much of how we think, live, and exist in the world. Our modern society has been shaped by various forms of rigid Platonic and Cartesian concepts steeped in a desire to separate the mind from body, pure from putrid, place from space, physical from virtual, us from them, and what we think from what we feel. And it all churns on at various scales of governments and societies with seemingly little regard for how these separations may be deceiving, limiting, or destroying us.I wonder how this way of thinking contributes to the litany of divisions around us – economic divides, political divides, digital divides, gender divides, race divides, cultural divides, urban-rural divides, transportation divides, age divides, education divides, and more. We're primed to divide, categorize, clump, group, sort, filter, slice, and dice who we are, where we live, and thus how we interact with each other and the physical world.In the sixth century, another Greek philosopher, Æsop, shared a parable on division. An old man pointed to a tied bundle of sticks and ordered his eldest son to break it in half. The boy picked up the bundle and strained to crack it but failed. His younger brothers, hoping to show him up, also tried and failed. The old man then instructed the boys to untie the bundles and each take a stick. “Now, break”, he said, and the sons triumphantly broke each stick. The moral of the story is union gives strength, or as it's commonly transposed today: united we stand, divided we fall.It's easy to imagine this as an origin of an intellectual path to Descartes' interpretation and desire to divide into “as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve.” But is the universe really a bundle of sticks tied by a string? Are our worlds constructed as machines made of discrete, discernable, and dissectible parts with a CPU as a brain? Perhaps the metaphor has led us astray. Perhaps Descartes did error.PARTLY INDETERMINENTThrough it all, I worry we underappreciate, ignore, or deny that all of it, including our minds and bodies, are connected in ways that are not so easily divisible. Descartes, and later Isaac Newton, believed all problems could be subdivided into tiny bits of matter whose behavior could be described by physics in the language of mathematics. These are all important and necessary tools to understanding the world, but as Nobel-award winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann once said, “Imagine how difficult physics would be if electrons could think.”The uncertainty of human behavior, our free will, our human interactions, are unaccounted for in Cartesian and Newtonian forms of scientific inquiry – including physics. So are issues surrounding values and beliefs. Our behavior does not neatly contain the determinism Platonic, Cartesian, and Newtonian theories require. It's this observed complex uncertain behavior of systems, compounded by interactions, that led to discoveries in quantum mechanics, relativity theory, non-linear dynamics, and other fields of complexity science.What would our world be, what could it be, should we shift our thinking to reflect a closer approximation of how the world, and our minds and bodies, may actually work? Instead of focusing on divisions, what if we investigated the connections, the interactions, the overlaps? The crises we face today tend to be framed categorically as economic, sociological, and environmental problems. In a fit of Cartesian inquiry, we tend to “divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary”.Of course, subdivision can be useful, as can the Cartesian mathematics to describe it. Simple components, the results of subdivisions, exist – and are most informative – not in isolation but as part of systems of systems. An ant is most interesting, not just an ant but as an ant in a colony. Humans are best understood not alone but as members of a family, a city, or a society.Mainstream science continues to struggle with how best to account for the interaction of these components and their complex, nonlinear, and unpredictable nature. Individual components are still largely studied in isolation, divided from their reliant systems. And yet, the actions and interactions of component parts are greater, different, and potentially more impactful than their cumulative sum.It's hard to predict, let alone control, the outcomes of these complex systems. After all, these components, including humans, are not centrally controlled. Our limbs are not controlled by the puppeteering pineal gland nor by a distinct ‘central processing unit' encased in a Body v.1. There is no central control of our bodies, brains, cities, or societies. Even our free will is not to be trusted.What if we better scrutinized the emergent behaviors resulting from the countless interconnected outcomes of our world that can't be understood by looking at individual clusters, components, or categories alone? Making better sense of this remains the ongoing work of complexity science.This fundamental shift in thinking, and in science, remains contentious. Even Descartes had his detractors. I often wonder what course humanity may have taken had Enlightenment philosophers, theologians, scientists, and mathematicians more interested in connections than divisions had won favor.Such is the case in ancient Chinese philosophy and science. Those of us most influenced by Western thought may want to better understand the prominent thinkers that came long before the Enlightened Europeans. For example, it was the nineth-twelfth century Song dynasty polymaths and philosophers, like Shen Kuo, who invented the first compass, mapped the seas and stars, and helped to unleash geologic, geographic, chemical, meteorological, and astronomical discoveries. All while the Europeans were just coming out of Medieval times. One unsourced Wikipedia entry even claims Kuo was the first to hypothesize about gradual climate change.We in the West can sometimes be accused of being over-confident and reluctant to admit when we may have been deceived. We shouldn't be surprised when AI systems like ChatGPT echo back the same over-confident and sometime deceptive words we've fed it. It's a bi-product of attitudes and beliefs that just may be contributing to our many differences and divisions. But I'll give Descartes the last word. It was he who said, “It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.” And, “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”I doubt it's possible to divide our way out of the problems we face. My bet in on understanding the dynamics of the component parts. Let's better understand, communicate, and represent what it is that emerges from the interactions of the divided parts. And we'll need AI, and Cartesian and Newtonian computations, to help us know what it is we're seeing and where it is we might be going. After all, we're all nothing more than collections of systems bound by natural laws determined to adapt, change, and evolve into something beyond our knowing.    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Entrevista a Marcelo Loewe, actualmente académico de la Universidad San Sebastián y anteriormente  de la Universidad Católica de Chile. Revisamos el premio Nobel otorgado a Murray Gell-Mann por sus contribuciones a la teoría de quarks en física de partículas.

Entrevista a Marcelo Loewe, actualmente académico de la Universidad San Sebastián y anteriormente  de la Universidad Católica de Chile. Revisamos el premio Nobel otorgado a Murray Gell-Mann por sus contribuciones a la teoría de quarks en física de partículas.

Cormac McCarthy is a literary icon. Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel All the Pretty Horses, and the Pulitzer Prize for his apocalyptic novel The Road, Norma's earlier novel, Blood Meridian has been labelled The Great American Novel. Many people did not know that this cultural giant is also fascinated by, and amazingly knowledgeable about science. Reading his newest books, The Passenger and Stella Maris (released this week!), however, and that becomes obvious. The protagonists are mathematical and physics prodigies, and just as one may requires a dictionary to keep up with the the remarkably diverse prose in Cormac's writing, some people may need to consult some popular books on science to fully appreciate the scientific asides sprinkled throughout both volumes. I first met Cormac at the Santa Fe Institute back when I was considering a possible position there as its Director, some years ago. I was shocked to walk into the kitchenette there and discover him, as I had no idea that is where he spent his time. But, as we discuss in our dialogue, he moved to Santa Fe at the invitation of Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell Mann to join the new Institute. Cormac and I became fast friends then, and have remained friends ever since. The best hour of radio I ever did was with Cormac and Werner Herzog, on the occasion of Herzog's film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, where both Cormac and Werner talked with amazing authority about the evolution paleontology of early modern humans. Then later, he honored me by asking if he could copyedit the paperback version of my book Quantum Man, a scientific biography of Richard Feynman. He said he wanted to make the paperback version ‘perfect', in part by removing all exclamation marks and semicolons.. Of course I said yes, and we added his name as copyeditor on the front page! I have known that Cormac is extremely reluctant to appear in public or do interviews. He agreed to appear in our film The Unbelievers, which was a great gift, but has often demurred when I have asked him to appear in other public panels on subjects we love to talk about in private. So, when I asked him if, on the occasion of the publication of his new books, the first books in 16 years, if we could sit down and record a conversation about science for The Origins Podcast, I was shocked and thrilled when he agreed. He is 89 years old now, and I was so pleased to have the chance to record some of his thoughts on science for posterity.He invited us into his home for an afternoon conversation after a long lunch, and the conversation that ensued was much like the conversations we have had over the years. Cormac loves to discuss science, but prefers to listen to physicists talk about their work rather than initiate conversations. He is, after all, notoriously laconic. But when he does speak about science, his insights are fascinating. Using some of the ideas discussed in his new books a launching points, our discussion ranged over quantum mechanics, the role of mathematics in science, and whether there will ever be a theory of everything. There were a variety of challenges that day, including the difficulty of filming something in a sunlight room without window shades, but the end result was unique and memorable. I hope you agree. 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. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. We discuss:why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make more technological progresswhy he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermismwhy there aren't any successful slave revoltshow geoengineering can help us solve climate changewhy Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Tradeand much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Some really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy my interviews of Will MacAskill (about longtermism), Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection), and David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America's constitution).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.Timestamps(0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities(0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires(0:03:28) -Slave Revolts(0:08:43) -Slavery Ban(0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids(0:18:13) - Teotihuacan(0:20:02) - New Book Thesis(0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley(0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World(0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization(0:44:00) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories(0:49:05) - Virginia Company + Hubris(0:53:30) - China's Silver Trade(1:03:03) - Wizards vs. Prophets(1:07:55) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays(0:12:26) -Geoengineering(0:16:51) -Finding New Wizards(0:18:46) -Agroforestry is Underrated(1:18:46) -Longtermism & Free MarketsTranscriptDwarkesh Patel   Okay! Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be here.Epidemically Alternate RealitiesDwarkesh Patel   My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here?Charles C. Mann   Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases. But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would've happened and that the diseases would've happened, but it didn't have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It's also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency,Weak Points in EmpiresDwarkesh Patel   When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?Charles C. Mann   Well, typically, empires are much more jumbly and fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Hernán Cortés was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs––who are better called The Triple Alliance (the term “Aztec” is an invention from the 19th century). The Triple Alliance was comprised of three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. The other two guys really resented them and so what Cortes was able to do was foment a civil war within the Aztec empire: taking some enemies of the Aztec, some members of the Aztec empire, and creating an entirely new order. There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really emerged into the popular consciousness. I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there's a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. However, the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. I talk a bit about this in 1493 but what happens is Cortes moves in and he marries his lieutenants to these indigenous people, creating this hybrid nobility that then extended on to the Incas. The Incas were a very powerful but unstable empire and Pizarro had the luck to walk in right after a civil war. When he did that right after a civil war and massive epidemic, he got them at a very vulnerable point. Without that, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allied with the losing side (or the apparently losing side in this in the Civil War), and was able to create a new rallying point and then attack the winning side. So yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.Dwarkesh Patel   It does also remind me of the East India Trading Company.Charles C. Mann   And the Mughal empire, yeah. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his people in. In fact, I was struck by this. I had just been reading this book, maybe you've heard of it: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.Dwarkesh Patel   I've started reading it, yeah but I haven't made much progress.Charles C. Mann   It's an amazing book! It's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal empire, and one side thought, “Oh, we'll get these foreigners to come in, and we'll use them.” That turned out to be a big mistake.Dwarkesh Patel   Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was about 1: 3,000,000 at the peak of the ratio. Which obviously is only possible if you have the cooperation of at least the elites, right? So it sounds similar to what you were saying about Cortes marrying his underlings to the nobility. Charles C. Mann   Something that isn't stressed enough in history is how often the elites recognize each other. They join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. It's exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there was this amazing efficiency, but rather, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for Xcalack, which is now a Mexican state. It had its rights, and the people kept their integrity, but they weren't really a part of the Spanish Empire. They also weren't really wasn't part of Mexico until around 1857. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis, especially the elites who made out like bandits from the British Empire.Slave Revolts Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super interesting. Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the new world in Haiti? In many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners are just huge. So why weren't more of them successful?Charles C. Mann   Well, you would first have to define ‘successful'. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant ‘creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.' Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape. Whereas in the case of Paul Maurice, you had people who were self-governing for more than 100 years.. Eventually, they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. There's a great Brazilian classic that's equivalent to what Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to us called Os Sertões by a guy named Cunha. And it's good! It's been translated into this amazing translation in English called ​​Rebellion in the Backlands. It's set in the 1880s, and it's about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally, from the time of colonialism. Now the new Brazilian state is trying to take control, and they fight them to the last person. So you have these effectively independent areas in de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the US, too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those marooned communities in North Carolina, in Mexico, where everybody just agreed “these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.”  If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, but it seems like these are temporary successes..Charles C. Mann   I mean, how long did nations last? Like Genghis Khan! How long did the Khan age last? But basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There's an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. Similar to the reasons that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality–– these were seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.Dwarkesh Patel   Right. It reminds me of James Scott's Against the Grain. He pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there're many examples where people choose to run away as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.Charles C. Mann   Right. And so this is exactly part of that dynamic. I mean, who wants to be a slave, right? So as many people as possible ended up leaving. It's easier in some places than others.. it's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They're still Brazilians and so forth, but, you know, they ended up not being slaves.Slavery BanDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super fascinating. What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present to ending at a particular time when it was at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? What's the explanation for why, when Britain banned the slave trade, within 100 or 200 years, there ended up being basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world?Charles C. Mann   This is a really good question and the real answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but you know, for decades, and there's a bunch of different explanations. I think the reason it's so hard to pin down is… kind of amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries in which slavery was illegal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It's the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi is still the oldest complete legal code that we have, and about a third of it is about rules for when you can buy slaves, when you can sell slaves, how you can mistreat them, and how you can't–– all that stuff. About a third of it is about buying, selling, and working other human beings. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes. So there's some explanation, and it's that machinery gets better. But the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers, who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and when they're caught, you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery, or to create a wage where you can run wage people, pay wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, then maybe that's a better deal for you. Another one is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with the agricultural laborer. So as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery become less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning of the collapse of the colonial order. Part of it has to do with.. (at least in the West, I don't know enough about the East) the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various Darwins and so forth. And they're incredibly influential, so to some extent, I think people started saying, “Wow, this is really bad.”  I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment, but I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement in which we're all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, the social aspect of it is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation, industrialization, and ending slavery… Obviously, with time, that might have actually been why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain happened before the Industrial Revolution took off. So that was purely them just taking a huge loss because this movement took hold. Charles C. Mann   And the same thing is true for Bartolome de Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s just comes out of nowhere and starts saying, “Hey! This is bad.” He is the predecessor of the modern human rights movement. He's an absolutely extraordinary figure, and he has huge amounts of influence. He causes Spain's king in the 1540s to pass what they call The New Laws which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow enacted to the colonial economy in Spain because they depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire. It was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it. Now, you can say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned. But it's still… this actually happened in the 1540s. Largely because people like Las Casas said, “This is bad! you're going to hell doing this.”Contingency & The Pyramids Dwarkesh Patel   Right. I'm super interested in getting into The Wizard and the Prophet section with you. Discussing how movements like environmentalism, for example, have been hugely effective. Again, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. So I'm very interested in discussing that point about why these movements have been so influential!But let me continue asking you about globalization in the world. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving and separated for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent? What I find really interesting from the book was how both of them developed pyramids––  who would have thought that structure would be within our extended phenotype or something?Charles C. Mann    It's also geometry! I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are also easier to build: if you get a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it and it gets harder and harder.With pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one, on and on, and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now the material you make them up of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and if you want them to stay on for a long time, there's going to be certain things you have to do for the structure which people figured out. For some pyramids, you had all this marble around them so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems, from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universal like that, along with the apparently universal, or near-universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated. Dwarkesh Patel   Yes, I visited Mexico City recently.Charles C. Mann Beautiful city!TeotihuacanDwarkesh Patel Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book. What struck me was that if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have domesticated animals. So if you really think about it, that's a really huge amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. It's like a huge negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.Charles C. Mann   Sure, but there are lots of really interesting things about Teotihuacan. This is just one of those things where you can only say so much in one book. If I was writing the two-thousand-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tehuácan pretty much starts out as a standard Imperial project, and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience (like building the pyramids), but then something happened to Teotihuacan that we don't understand. All these new buildings started springing up during the next couple of 100 years, and they're all very very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is because that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status. So based on the way it looks, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? Where they created something much more egalitarian, probably with a bunch of good guy kings who weren't interested in elevating themselves so much? There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, in my view, they go a little overboard–– it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way can start looking very differently quite quickly. You see this lots of times in the Americas in the Southwest–– I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, but you should absolutely go! Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible but overall, it's totally worth it. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible, it's just really a fantastic thing to see. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon, that we would call castles if they were anywhere else because they're huge. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or some insane number like that. And it's clearly an imperial venture, we know that because it's in this canyon and one side is getting all the good light and good sun–– a whole line of these huge castles. And then on the other side is where the peons lived. We also know that starting around 1100, everybody just left! And then their descendants start the Puebla, who are these sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing (in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner but also seriously) that this is the first American Revolution! They got rid of these “kings” and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice about what went on.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we're just looking at the buildings that survived. Maybe the buildings that survived were better constructed because they were for the elites? The way everybody else lived might have just washed away over the years.Charles C. Mann   So what's happened in the last 20 years is basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only people with things that survived while the ordinary people didn't? You can never be absolutely sure, but what they did is they had these ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. So it's possible that there are more really, really poor people. But at least you'd see an aggressively large “middle class” getting there, which is very, very different from the picture you have of the ancient world where there's the sun priest and then all the peasants around them.New Book ThesisDwarkesh Patel   Yeah. By the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? It's okay if you're not––Charles C. Mann   Sure sure, it's okay! This is a sort of weird thing, it's like a sequel or offshoot of 1491. That book, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter. The chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up, and I'm very fond of it. And apparently, I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter; the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. So I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. So I just cut it. If you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. At the end, the author sort of goes, “Hey! I'm ending, look at how great this is!” So this has been bothering me for 15 years. During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home like so many other people, I held out what I had since I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder, and I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna write this out more seriously now.” 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long so I thought “Maybe this could be an e-book.” then I showed it to my editor. And he said, “That is not an e-book. That's an actual book.” So I take a chapter and hope I haven't just padded it, and it's about the North American West. My kids like the West, and at various times, they've questioned what it would be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts, where they grew up. So I started thinking “What is the West going to be like, tomorrow? When I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now?”It seems to be that you won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there are some things we can know. It'd be hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past, like that wouldn't really be a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent–– from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast, so it's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be an epicenter of energy, sort of no matter what happens. Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.And the last thing is (and this is the iffiest of the whole thing), but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. That's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So then you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties. Nature is also going to really be in kind of a terminal. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s! And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth. There's this breakpoint in history when people who looked like me came in and sort of rolled in from the East and kind of took over everything. And the West disappears! That separate entity, the native people disappear, and nature is tamed. That's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? Dwarkesh Patel  No.Charles C. Mann So he's like one of these guys where nobody knows who he is. But he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893, called The Significance of the Frontier. It was what established this idea that there's this frontier moving from East to West and on this side was savagery and barbarism, and on this other side of civilization was team nature and wilderness and all that. Then it goes to the Pacific, and that's the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks but in a different form: we don't call native people “lurking savages” as he did. But it's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbook because it's such a bedrock. What I'm saying is that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. A wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, says, “To know the past, you first have to understand the future.”It's funny, right? But what he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is about asking, “How did we get here? How do we get there?” To get that, you have to have an idea of what the “there” is. So I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West that I talked about in mind. Which gives you a very different picture: a lot more about indigenous fire management, the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley Dwarkesh Patel   I love that quote hahaha. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I remember that in a chapter of 1493, you talk about these rowdy adventurer men who outnumber the women in the silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio and you have the same kind of frontier spirit? Maybe not the same physical violence––– more sociologically. Is there any similarity there?Charles C. Mann   I think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this off the top of my head. I like the idea that at the end of it, I can say, “wait, wait, that's ridiculous.“ Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose, or were oblivious about what they had to lose, and had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing, the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things! They just get up and keep‌ trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. It's pretty clear they are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least a sort of shallow comparison, there are some certain similarities. I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It's absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia, and in northern‌ Mexico, created to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these cesspools of violence and exploitation that had consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products *chuckles* I use them every day, and I curse them every day.Dwarkesh Patel   Right.Charles C. Mann   I want to give you an example. The internet has made it possible for me to do something like write a Twitter thread, get millions of people to read it, and have a discussion that's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, The Washington Post has an article about how every book in Texas (it's one of the states) a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. They can see and look for patterns of people taking out “bad books” and this sort of stuff. And I think “whoa, that's really bad! That's not so good.” It's really the same technology that brings this dissemination and collection of vast amounts of information with relative ease. So with all these things, you take the bitter with the sweet. Technological Stupidity in the New WorldDwarkesh Patel   I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think you talked about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, with gold and copper, but then they didn't do iron or steel. You would think that given their “warring nature”, iron would be such a huge help. There's a clear incentive to build it. Millions of people living there could have built or developed this technology. Same with the steel, same with the wheel. What's the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with didn't happen?Charles C. Mann   I know. It's just amazing to me! I don't know. This is one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained, and I went out to walk the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass and when you pick it up, sometimes there are little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. Every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens. And you can look through it! You can see that it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see that things are magnified. So you think “How long has there been crabgrass? Or leaves? And water?”  Just forever! We've had glass forever! So how is it that we had to wait for whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. In book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, but not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys! What was it? And so, you know, there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity. One of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean, that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel on child's toys. Why didn't they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply that to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they had these travois, which are these things that you hold and they have these skids that are shaped kind of like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground, you don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this, and you think “maybe this was the ultimate way to save labor. I mean, this was good enough. And you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work”  so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don't know. As for assembly with steel, I think there's some values involved in that. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them and they are sharp as hell. You don't run your finger along the edge because they just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade and it doesn't rust. Nice. But it's much more brittle. So okay, they're there, and the Spaniards were really afraid of them. Because a single blow from these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse. They saw people whack off the head of a horse carrying a big strong guy with a single blow! So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in the sense that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers in grunts, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do at war. That would've lasted for years and I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario where they're not just blinkered but instead expressive on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig about old Aztec warfare. It's an amazing book which is about the military history of The Aztecs and it's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit but he finally just says we don't know why they didn't develop all these technologies, but this worked for them.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic material––Charles C. Mann   Or Japan giving up the gun! They actually banned guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, and they said “Ahhh nope! Don't want them.” and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war. Dwarkesh Patel   Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways. Charles C. Mann   Yeah, that's a depressing thought.Religious DemoralizationDwarkesh Patel   Right. In Fukuyama's The End of History, he's obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But there's this point he makes at the end where he's like, “Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years or so just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it.” Anyway, when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story or superstitious explanation–– some way of explaining what was happening. What was it?Charles C. Mann   You have to remember, the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards, or the English, or the native people, had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad, and the air was bad. That was malaria, right? That was an example. To them, it was God that was in control of the whole business. There's a line from my distant ancestor––the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my umpteenth, umpteenth grandfather, that's how waspy I am, he's actually my ancestor––about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms, and more or less native people did too! So they thought over and over again that “we must have done something bad for this to have happened.” And that's a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God either punished you or failed you. And this was it. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads. People thought “Their god is coming in and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God.” Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on! But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, “Well, maybe I should hit up their God.”Critiques of Civilization Collapse TheoriesDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, super fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter's book, there's Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?Charles C. Mann   No. Well not the ones that I've read. And there are two reasons for that. One is that it's not really a mystery. If you have a society that's epidemiologically naive, and smallpox sweeps in and kills 30% of you, measles kills 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time, that's really tough! I mean COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's 1/330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids, it was elderly people like my aunt–– I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer. Because I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that, and you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.That relates to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in the ways that they sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Mayan collapse. But there are 30 million Mayan people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. In the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost exit province. And that is where the Commandante Cero and the rebellions were going on. We were looking at some Mayan ruins, and they were too beautiful, and I stayed too long, and we were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, “Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this.” And the guy comes and looks at us and says, “Who are you?” And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look, and he says, “Go on.” And you know, the journalist in me takes over and I ask, “What do you mean, just go on?” And he says, “We're hunting for Mexicans.” And as I'm driving I'm like “Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.” And that those were Mayans. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when there are Mayan radio stations, there are Maya schools, and they're speaking Mayan in their home. It's true, they don't have giant castles anymore. But, it's odd to think of that as collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of “What do you mean collapse?” And you see that in Against the Grain, the James Scott book, where you think, “What do you mean barbarians?” If you're an average Maya person, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. So after the collapse, you're probably better off. So all of that I feel is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment. Particularly the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond has, where he talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land, in the middle of the ocean, and Dutch guys come there and it's the only wood around for forever, so they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair, and they enslave most of the people who are living there. And we know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.Virginia Company + HubrisDwarkesh Patel   Why did the British government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanctions to the Virginia Company, even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and half the people that go die? Why didn't they just stop?Charles C. Mann   That's a really good question. It's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer, because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say, they were thinking, not purely economically. Part of it is that the backers of the Virginia Company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They're burning through their cash, they did these rosy presentations, and they said, “It's gonna be great! We just need this extra money.” Kind of the way that Uber did. There's this tremendous burn rate and now the company says you're in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company. A second thing is that there was this dog-headed belief kind of based on the inability to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing these little skinny Philippines-like islands. So there's the thought that you just go up the Chesapeake, go a couple 100 miles, and you're gonna get to the Pacific into China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow path. Sir Francis Drake and some other people had shown that there was a West Coast so they thought the whole thing was this narrow, Panama-like landform. So there's this geographical confusion. Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. Basically, you dig up money in the hills and there's this long-standing belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas, we just need to find out where. So there's always that hope. Lastly, there's the Imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys with a colony. You see that later in the 19th century when Germany became a nation and one of the first things the Dutch said was “Let's look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed,” and they set up their own mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” aspect, it just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class. So then you got to have an empire that in this weird way, seems very culturally part of it. I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to index other things. You see that over and over again, all over the world. So that's part of it. All those things, I think, contributed to this. Outright lying, this delusion, other various delusions, plus hubris.Dwarkesh Patel   It seems that colonial envy has today probably spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. Is this kind of like when you have the impulse where if you're a nation trying to rise, you have that “I gotta go here, I gotta go over there––Charles C. Mann   Yeah and “Show what a big guy I am. Yeah,––China's Silver TradeDwarkesh Patel   Exactly. So speaking of China, I want to ask you about the silver trade. Excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up with China and how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. They needed more reliable mediums of exchange, so they had to give up real goods from China, just in order to get silver, which is just a medium of exchange––but it's not creating more apples, right? I was thinking about how this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today, (obviously to a much smaller magnitude) but in the sense that you're using up goods. It's a small amount of electricity, all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake and you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think about this analogy? Is there a similar situation where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?Charles C. Mann   That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way money works, right? I go into a store, like a Starbucks and I buy a coffee, then I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it, and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is of course replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money. Things that to us seem very silly like the cowry shell or in the island of Yap where they had giant stones! Those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. I would get some coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as (in Bitcoin's case) strings of zeros and ones. That part of it makes sense to me. What's extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly–– which is what you're talking about in China where people had a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get that money. I don't have to work hugely to get a $1 bill, right? It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing. But you're right, that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's, to a lesser extent, what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. To me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change and he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. And I was asking “Well who would be your customers?” and he says Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And that's really crazy! To completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. So there's a kind of funny aspect to this. That was partly what was happening in China. Unfortunately, China's very large, so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes, but it definitely weakened the country.Wizards vs. ProphetsDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, and that story you were talking about, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano and use the geothermal energy from the volcano to incentivize people to come there and mine cheap Bitcoin. Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct, or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because we have the introduction of potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases the population until it reaches a carrying capacity. Obviously, what follows is the other kinds of ecological problems this causes and you describe these in the book. Is this evidence of the wizard worldview that potatoes appear and populations balloon? Or are the prophets like “No, no, carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.”Charles C. Mann   Okay, so let me interject here. For those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And it's about these two camps that have been around for a long time who have differing views regarding how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, that's my name for them––Stuart Brand called them druids and, in fact, originally, the title was going to involve the word druid but my editor said, “Nobody knows what a Druid is” so I changed it into wizards–– and anyway the wizards would say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and then we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say “No. Natural systems are governed by laws and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limit or planetary boundary.” there are a bunch of different names for them that say you can't do more than so much.So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it's 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, but only has seven or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools, and that's you know, rice. So there's this paradox, which is “How do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water?” If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. So prophets believe that there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian Limits after Malthus and the question is: With the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?The great thing about history is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water. Population soars immediately afterward, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, that becomes adaptable when China becomes a wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short (it's a couple of centuries), it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So, this provides evidence for both sides. One increases human capacity, and the second unquestionably increases human numbers and that leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's a thick coin with two sides. By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them. So I––Charles C. Mann   I certainly have time! I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer and I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, maybe. Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects I find fascinating.Dwarkesh Patel   Oh, it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about the Wizard and the Prophet. I just interviewed WIll McCaskill, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him about Norman Borlaug and said that he's saved a billion lives. But then McCaskill pointed out, “Well, that's an exceptional result” and he doesn't think the technology is that contingent. So if Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stalks anyways. So counterfactually, in a world where Ebola doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. Do you agree? What is your response?Charles C. Mann   To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this, and I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist, who's a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did.. it's really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding dogmas of his day, that all matters! His insistence on feeding the poor… he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered but it would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim! Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about. So, in some sense, I think he's (Will McCaskill) right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the green revolution right after, if the actual implementation of these different strains of biochar sent in India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just totally won over by the prophets and they decide to not implant this technology at all. If you think about what happened to nuclear power in the 70s, in many different countries, maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution. So it's important to beat the Prophet. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it. But one way you could put it is: It's important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get a good bit of technology in there.Charles C. Mann   This is just my personal opinion, but you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible at diagnosing problems, and very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution… they were dead right, they were completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like how I feel about my editors–– my editors will often point out problems and I almost never agree with their solutions. The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me in this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu, I listened to this and I thought, “Oh! I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat, and they made it into Indian wheat.” You know, I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew or really grasped that they really had done that! By the way, a person for you to interview is Marci Baranski–– she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution and she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.In Defense of Regulatory DelaysDwarkesh Patel   So if we applied that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that were as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or that it would have taken way too long or something?Charles C. Mann   It's possible. Bureaucracies can always go rogue, and the government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. There's a current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken these top-secret documents to his house in Florida and done whatever he wanted to? Just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret toxic documents and should not have been in a basement. Let's just say that's true. Whatever the President says is declassified is declassified. Let us say that's true.  Obviously, that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process because you can imagine all kinds of things–– you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario.Now say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassification and immediately add more delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power, you know–– all the things that you do. So you have this problem with the government, which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine. It's completely screwy. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30 when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison! And, you know, hundreds of people died. You think like who would do that? But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay, and then something was solidified. Which they did start here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. I was tracing it crudely, but I think you see the trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well managed. It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews and were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?So that would be the counter-example: you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. They let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, especially for the chestnuts, they've made extraordinary efforts to test. I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. *chuckles* You know, I just feel that there's this great problem. These flaws that you identified, I would like to back off and say that this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And the vaccines are an interesting example here. Because one of the things you talked about in the book–– one of the possible solutions to climate change is that you can have some kind of geoengineering. Right? I think you mentioned in the book that as long as even one country tries this, then they can effectively (for relatively modest amounts of money), change the atmosphere. But then I look at the failure of every government to approve human challenge trials. This is something that seems like an obvious thing to do and we would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. So I wonder, maybe the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.Geoengineering Charles C. Mann   So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend, Neal Stephenson, called Termination Shock. Which is about some rich person just doing it. Just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not actually against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. So I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it's way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that that's way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. I don't mean to imply that 10 years is nothing. But it's really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of?Dwarkesh Patel   Well, it's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise, like people say maybe it was just bound to be the state. Charles C. Mann   I think that was a very successful case of regulatory capture, in which the proponents of the technology successfully created this crazy…. One of the weird things I really wanted to explain about nuclear stuff is not actually in the book.

Rory Sutherland is a British advertising executive who became fascinated with behavioral science. Between his TED talks, books and articles, he has become one of the field's greatest proponents. Rory is currently the Executive Creative Director of OgilvyOne, after gigs as vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK and co-founder of the Behavioural Sciences Practice, part of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies. He is the author of The Spectator's The Wiki Man column and his most recent book, which we highly recommend, is Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. Our discussion with Rory was original published in January 2020, but Rory's evergreen insights continue to be popular with our listeners so we decided to republish this episode. You can also listen to Rory discuss his latest book Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? alongside his co-writer Pete Dyson, in episode 290. We start this discussion with Rory by asking him about his book and some of his insights from it. His approach to advertising, marketing and product design is informed by his ability to look for the things that aren't there. He once described a solution to improving customer satisfaction on the Chunnel Train between London and Paris by suggesting that a billion dollars would be better spent on supermodel hosts in the cars than on reducing ride time by 15 minutes. He's a terrifically insightful thinker. Our conversation ran amok down all sorts of rabbit holes, as expected, including ergodicity, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Silver Blaze,” high-end audio and the dietary habits of the world-famous runner, Usain Bolt. In Kurt and Tim's Grooving Session, we discuss some of our favorite takeaways from Rory's conversation including, “The Opposite of a Good Idea is a Good Idea” and others. And finally, Kurt teed up the Bonus Track with a final reflection and recap of the key points we discussed. As always, we would be grateful if you would write us a quick review. It helps us get noticed by other folks who are interested in podcasts about behavioral science. It will only take 27 seconds. Thank you, and we appreciate your help. © 2022 Behavioral Grooves   Links Rory Sutherland: https://ogilvy.co.uk/people/rorys “Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life”: https://amzn.to/3xbibt3 “Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?”: https://amzn.to/3cZPyIy Episode 290, Transport Your Thinking; Why We Need To Reframe Travel | Rory Sutherland & Pete Dyson: https://behavioralgrooves.com/episode/transport-rory-sutherland-pete-dyson/ “Friction”: https://www.rogerdooley.com/books/friction/ Murray Gell-Mann, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann Robin Williams “Scottish Golf”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx8TzR1-n4Q Don Draper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Draper Ergodicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity John James Cowperthwaite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Cowperthwaite SatNav: https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/satnav Daniel Kahneman, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman What You See is All There Is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow Arthur Conan-Doyle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze Tim Houlihan's Blog on “Silver Blaze”: https://tinyurl.com/ufumkj6 Ben Franklin T-Test: https://tinyurl.com/wocdsdk Volkswagen Fighter: https://tinyurl.com/qpyqh87 David Ogilvy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ogilvy_(businessman) Jock Elliot: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/dec/01/guardianobituaries.media Battle of Leyte Gulf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf Croft Audio: http://www.croftacoustics.co.uk/main.html Mu-So single speaker: https://www.naimaudio.com/mu-so WFMT Chicago: https://www.wfmt.com/ TK Maxx: https://www.tkmaxx.com/uk/en/ Berlin Hotel with Big Lebowski: https://www.michelbergerhotel.com/en/ Shure: https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones?lpf[top][types][]=microphones Zoom: https://zoom.us/ Satisficing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing Usain Bolt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usain_Bolt Sheena Iyengar, PhD: https://www.sheenaiyengar.com/ Jelly Jar Study: https://tinyurl.com/oo6g6eb Big Band Music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_band   Musical Links Aretha Franklin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aretha_Franklin Southern California Community Choir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California_Community_Choir Abba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBA Felix Mendelssohn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Mendelssohn George Frideric Handel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Frideric_Handel Johann Sebastian Bach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach Johann Christian Bach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christian_Bach

In this episode Conal Elliott gives a more concrete presentation on what is Denotational Design is and how to use it in practice. It is a continuation of episode #17, in which we had an in-depth philosophical conversation to explain why he believes that Denotational Design is a superior form of reasoning in the realm of computer science. We also continue a discussion raised by Dan Ghica on the last episode on the need for Operational Semantics and the role of elegance in reasoning and design. Along the way we also address the questions sent by the listeners in these last episodes. Links Conal's website Play/work with Conal Conal's twitter: @conal The simple essence of automatic differentiation Compiling to categories Generic parallel functional programming Denotational design with type class morphisms Quotes "A theory appears beautiful or elegant [...] when it's simple; in other words when it can be expressed very concisely in terms of mathematics that we've already learned for some other reasons." - Murray Gell-Mann, Beauty and Elegance in Physics. "In Galileo's time, professors of philosophy and theology—the subjects were inseparable—produced grand discourses on the nature of reality, the structure of the universe, and the way the world works, all based on sophisticated metaphysical arguments. Meanwhile, Galileo measured how fast balls roll down inclined planes. How mundane! But the learned discourses, while grand, were vague. Galileo's investigations were clear and precise. The old metaphysics never progressed, while Galileo's work bore abundant, and at length spectacular, fruit. Galileo too cared about the big questions, but he realized that getting genuine answers requires patience and humility before the facts." - Frank Wilczek, (The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces) "We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief' or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception." - Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

In this episode Conal Elliott gives a more concrete presentation on what is Denotational Design is and how to use it in practice. It is a continuation of episode #17, in which we had an in-depth philosophical conversation to explain why he believes that Denotational Design is a superior form of reasoning in the realm of computer science. We also continue a discussion raised by Dan Ghica on the last episode on the need for Operational Semantics and the role of elegance in reasoning and design. Along the way we also address the questions sent by the listeners in these last episodes. Links Conal's website Play/work with Conal Conal's twitter: @conal The simple essence of automatic differentiation Compiling to categories Generic parallel functional programming Denotational design with type class morphisms Quotes "A theory appears beautiful or elegant [...] when it's simple; in other words when it can be expressed very concisely in terms of mathematics that we've already learned for some other reasons." - Murray Gell-Mann, Beauty and Elegance in Physics. "In Galileo's time, professors of philosophy and theology—the subjects were inseparable—produced grand discourses on the nature of reality, the structure of the universe, and the way the world works, all based on sophisticated metaphysical arguments. Meanwhile, Galileo measured how fast balls roll down inclined planes. How mundane! But the learned discourses, while grand, were vague. Galileo's investigations were clear and precise. The old metaphysics never progressed, while Galileo's work bore abundant, and at length spectacular, fruit. Galileo too cared about the big questions, but he realized that getting genuine answers requires patience and humility before the facts." - Frank Wilczek, (The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces) "We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief' or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception." - Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

In this episode Conal Elliott gives a more concrete presentation on what is Denotational Design is and how to use it in practice. It is a continuation of episode #17, in which we had an in-depth philosophical conversation to explain why he believes that Denotational Design is a superior form of reasoning in the realm of computer science. We also continue a discussion raised by Dan Ghica on the last episode on the need for Operational Semantics and the role of elegance in reasoning and design. Along the way we also address the questions sent by the listeners in these last episodes. Links Conal's website Conal's twitter: @conal The simple essence of automatic differentiation Compiling to categories Generic parallel functional programming Denotational design with type class morphisms Quotes “A theory appears beautiful or elegant […] when it's simple; in other words when it can be expressed very concisely in terms of mathematics that we've already learned for some other reasons.” - Murray Gell-Mann, Beauty and Elegance in Physics. “In Galileo's time, professors of philosophy and theology—the subjects were inseparable—produced grand discourses on the nature of reality, the structure of the universe, and the way the world works, all based on sophisticated metaphysical arguments. Meanwhile, Galileo measured how fast balls roll down inclined planes. How mundane! But the learned discourses, while grand, were vague. Galileo's investigations were clear and precise. The old metaphysics never progressed, while Galileo's work bore abundant, and at length spectacular, fruit. Galileo too cared about the big questions, but he realized that getting genuine answers requires patience and humility before the facts.” - Frank Wilczek, (The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces) “We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief' or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.” - Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

Math and music share their mystery and magic. Three notes, played together, make a chord whose properties could not be predicted from those of the separate notes. In the West, music theory and mathematics have common origins and a rich history of shaping and informing one another's field of inquiry. And, curiously, Western composition has evolved over several hundred years in much the same way economies and agents in long-running simulations have: becoming measurably more complex; encoding more and more environmental structure. (But then, sometimes collapses happen, and everything gets simpler.) Music theorists, like the alchemists that came before them, are engaged in a centuries-long project of deciphering the invisible geometry of these relationships. What is the hidden grammar that connects The Beatles to Johann Sebastian Bach — and how similar is it to the hidden order disclosed by complex systems science? In other words, what makes for “good” music, and what does it have to do with the coherence of the natural world?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we'll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.This week on the show, we speak with mathematician and composer Dmitri Tymozcko at Princeton University, whose work provides a new rigor to the study of the Western canon and illuminates “the shape of music” — a hyperspatial object from which all works of baroque, classical, romantic, modern, jazz, and pop are all low-dimensional projections. In the first conversation for this podcast with MIDI keyboard accompaniment, we follow upon Gottfried Leibniz's assertion that music is “the unconscious exercise of our mathematical powers.” We explore how melodies and harmonies move through mathematical space in ways quite like the metamorphoses of living systems as they traverse evolutionary fitness landscapes. We examine the application of information theory to chord categorization and functional harmony. And we ask about the nature of randomness, the roles of parsimony and consilience in both art and life.If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentions and additional resources:All of Tymoczko's writings mentioned in this conversation can be found on his Princeton.edu websiteYou can explore his interactive music software at MadMusicalScience.comThe Geometry of Musical Chordsby Dmitri TymoczkoAn Information Theoretic Approach to Chord Categorization and Functional Harmonyby Nori Jacoby, Naftali Tishby and Dmitri TymoczkoThis Mathematical Song of the Emotionsby Dmitri TymoczkoThe Sound of Philosophyby Dmitri TymoczkoSelect Tymoczko Video Lectures:Spacious Spatiality (SEMF) 2022The Quadruple HierarchyThe Shape of Music (2014)On the 2020 SFI Music & Complexity Working Group (with a link to the entire video playlist of public presentations).On the 2022 SFI Music & Complexity Working GroupFoundations and Applications of Humanities Analytics Institute at SFIShort explainer animation on SFI Professor Sidney Redner's work on “Sleeping Beauties of Science”The evolution of syntactic communicationby Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, Vincent JansenThe Majesty of Music and Math (PBS special with SFI's Cris Moore)The physical limits of communicationby Michael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cristopher MooreSupertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to ElectromagnetismSFI Seminar by Simon DeDeoWill brains or algorithms rule the kingdom of science?by David Krakauer at Aeon MagazineScaling, Mirror Symmetries and Musical Consonances Among the Distances of the Planets of the Solar Systemby Michael Bank and Nicola Scafetta“The reward system for people who do a really wonderful job of extracting knowledge and understanding and wisdom…is skewed in the wrong way. If left to the so-called free market, it's mainly skewed toward entertainment or something that's narrowly utilitarian for some business firm or set of business firms.”– Murray Gell-Mann, A Crude Look at The Whole Part 180/200 (1997)Related Episodes:Complexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex SystemsComplexity 72 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of EpistemologyComplexity 70 - Lauren F. Klein on Data Feminism: Surfacing Invisible LaborComplexity 67 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & MathematicsComplexity 46 - Helena Miton on Cultural Evolution in Music and Writing SystemsComplexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What appeared first in math, complex numbers or vectors? What is the relation between them? Would the square root of negatives be a problem if equations were developed with vectors instead of regular numbers? - ​Hi Wolfram. Can you tell a bit about the history of Real Variables, the Rational Numbers and why analysis was so important. Why not stick to integers. Why Cantor and Dedekind was so important. Thanks - What's the largest number you've ever used in a computation? Have you used anything bigger than Graham's number or Rayo's number? - moving from roman numerals to the numbers we use today helped merchants in those days, right? I believe that's what I read. - Was Tau used befor Pi? - ​Did Feynman overestimate Fredkin? Have the string theorists underestimated Fredkin? - ​Did you work much with Murray Gell-Mann? Any shareable stories? -What is your opinion on the resurgence of UFO's?

Caitlin McShea is that special kind of curious that you cannot help but be inspired by, and she has the intellect to spread that curiosity over any domain. For the past ten years in roles varying from director of art galleries, curator and coordinator of exhibits, and now as a program manager at the Santa Fe Institute, she has been giving language, image, and concreteness to some of the most imaginative and futuristic thoughts of our age.Show Notes:Life's Edge Carl Zimmer (03:00)Four Lost Cities Annalee NewitzOur conversation on the Alien Crash Site podcast - youtube or audio (06:10)The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) (07:00)Interplanetary Project (16:50)'Wicked' problems (24:45)What is complexity? (25:30)Murray Gell-Mann (26:50)Gilles Deleuze (27:30)Valery Plame (34:00)James Drake (35:00)Feynman diagrams (35:10)David Krakauer (36:30)Jorge Luis Borges (39:20)How Emotions are Made Lisa Feldman Barrett (41:40)Two types of entropy in communication - Vanessa Ferdinand (50:00)Ted Chiang "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (52:30)Roadside Picnic the Strugatsky Brothers (53:00)What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami (58:00)Lightning Round (59:00)Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia MarquezPassion: Visual artsHeart sing: CharcuterieScrewed up: EducationFind guest online:Twitter: @SantaFeMcShea'Five-Cut Fridays' five-song music playlist series  Caitlin's playlist

Celebrando las mentes más brillantes. Aquí en PhD Gell man es uno de los impulsores y estudiosos más brillantes de la física de partículas y naturaleza general. Dale play para que veas lo que logro y como nos movió hacia adelante --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/agustin-valenzuela/support

Uno de los premio Nobel por su trabajo en el descubrimiento del quark. ¿Que es un quark y que tan importante es? Dale play. Gracias por compartir y espera mi libro de: El universo en arroz con habichuelas. Gracias. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/agustin-valenzuela/support

Die Idee dieses Podcasts ist es nicht, Themen zu behandeln, die eine besonderen Bezug zu aktuellen Ereignissen haben, sondern Themen, die von grundsätzlicher Bedeutung sind und eine wesentliche Rolle für unsere Zukunft spielen. Daher gibt es auch keine Covid-19 Episode. Allerdings wurden und werden in diesem Podcast Themen besprochen, die für die Corona-Krise von zentraler Bedeutung sind. In der Vergangenheit waren das etwa folgende Episoden: Episode 6: Messen was messbar ist, über Daten und rationale Entscheidungen. Episode 10: komplizierte Komplexität Episode 11: Ethik und Wissenschaft, warum es wichtig ist, ethische Entscheidungen nicht Wissenschafter zu überlassen. Episode 17: Kooperation oder Wettbewerb, gerade in der aktuellen Krise sehen wir, welche Rolle Kooperation spielt. Und diese Episode behandelt ein, eigentlich zwei Themen, die ebenso fundamental für die Zeit einer Krise und notwendiger Veränderungen in der Zukunft sind. Der erste Begriff ist Frozen Accidents, der auf Murray Gell-Mann und Francis Crick zurückgeht. »Now, most single accidents make very little difference to the future, but others may have widespread ramifications, many diverse consequences all traceable to one chance event that could have turned out differently. Those we call frozen accidents.«, Murray Gell-Mann In dieser Episode werde ich den Begriff zur Improvisation nutzen um einen zweiten, den der Status Dominanz einzuführen und zu erklären.  Wir sehen an zahlreichen Beispielen um uns herum, wie stark der Status Quo, teilweise von Frozen Accidents (mit)verursacht eine Anziehung entwickelt (durch Strukturen und Systeme), die wir kaum mehr in der Lage sind zu verändern. Auch unsere Risikoeinschätzung wird dadurch stark beeinflusst. Wer würde etwa heute eine Technologie einführen, die jedes Jahr 1,5 Millionen Menschen das Leben kosten und eine Vielzahl davon schwer verletzt? Und nicht zuletzt stellt sich die Frage für die Zukunft: was bedeutet dies für die dringen notwendigen und fundamentalen Veränderungen in unserer Gesellschaft? Referenzen Frozen Accidents: Why the Future Is So Unpredictable WHO, Why it can't handle the pandemic, The Guardian Das Paradox der vermiedenen Katastrophe, (an)sichten Frozen Accidents und Status Dominanz, (an)sichten Irakkrieg und Demokratie Donald Rumsfeld denies he thought democracy in Iraq was 'realistic' goal, The Guardian 'Wrong then, wrong now': US clash with Iran echoes march to Iraq war, The Guardian Kenneth Pollack, The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis of the Reconstruction

Står din tvilling verkligen och viker tvätt just nu i ett parallellt universum? Helena Granström funderar över hur fysikens teorier förhåller sig till verkligheten. ESSÄ: Detta är en text där skribenten reflekterar över ett ämne eller ett verk. Åsikter som uttrycks är skribentens egna. Essän sändes första gången 2017. Vill du förstå universums expansion? Föreställ dig en bulldeg. Degen är späckad med russin och håller som bäst på att jäsa placera dig nu i ett av dessa russins ställe, och fråga dig vad du ser. Svaret är oberoende av vilket russin du väljer: Om bulldegen inte är alltför ogenomskinlig, ser du hur alla omkringliggande russin rör sig bort från dig. Poängen med den här analogin är alltså att alla russin rör sig bort från varandra, men att detta inte beror på att russinen är i rörelse i degen, utan på att själva degen expanderar. Degen, det vill säga rymden. Russinen, det vill säga galaxerna. Okej? Låt oss, när vi ändå är igång, försöka förstå den allmänna relativitetsteorin. Föreställ dig en studsmatta. Visst, där är den, platt och fin. Lägger du till exempel en pingisboll någonstans på ytan ligger den alldeles still. Men! Pröva nu att placera ett bowlingklot i mitten av mattan. Vad händer? Jo, förstås, ytan kommer att bukta nedåt, ungefär som på en skål, och lägger du nu dit en pingisboll kommer den ofrånkomligen att rulla in mot mitten. Sådärja! Allmän relativitetsteori: Rummet talar om för massa hur den skall röra sig, massa talar om för rummet hur det skall krökas, för att citera den amerikanske fysikern John Wheeler. Faktum är att massa talar om inte bara för rummet utan också för tiden hur den skall krökas studsmattans tvådimensionella yta i exemplet representerar alltså i själva verket en 3+1-dimensionell rumtid, och någon motsvarighet till den tredje dimensionen som mattan kröker sig i finns egentligen inte. I exemplet med studsmattan är det dessutom gravitationen som drar ned bowlingklotet mot marken och skapar buktningen i gummiytan, och som får pingisbollen att rulla ned längs den. I verkligheten är gravitationen ingenting annat än rumtidens krökning i närvaro av massa det är alltså ingen annan yttre kraft som får kroppar att söka sig till varandra, bara ett slags minsta motståndets princip hos kroppar i rörelse, och deras egen krökning av rumtidsväven. Det är någonstans här vi tvingas inse att verkligheten är komplicerad det som gör den begripliga bilden begriplig, är att den är förenklad. Richard Feynman, en av 1900-talets främsta fysiker, yttrade en gång sin motvilja mot att likna den elektromagnetiska kraft som skapar attraktion mellan två magneter vid ett gummiband. Visst, den drar ihop dem precis som ett gummiband skulle göra men, invände han, vad är det egentligen som får ett gummiband att bete sig som ett gummiband? I sista instans, samma elektromagnetiska kraft som vi ville förklara med gummibandsliknelsen resonemanget går i cirkel! Är det då ens i princip möjligt att genom enkla bilder förmedla subtila fysikaliska fenomen som rumtidens krökning? Det enkla svaret är förmodligen: Nej, inte utan att tänja på sanningen. Men hur sanningen faktiskt ser ut är heller inte uppenbart låt oss ta Einsteins speciella relativitetsteori som exempel. Den här teorin, som är mycket väl bekräftad, framställer rumtiden som en sorts fyrdimensionell limpa, med skivor som var och en svarar mot ett nu. Eftersom olika observatörer definierar sitt nu på olika sätt finns det många sätt att skiva limpan på och av det skälet gör den här modellen ingen skillnad mellan förflutet och framtid. Men, hur ser egentligen korrespondensen ut mellan den teoretiska modellen och den verklighet den avbildar? Skall det anses fastslaget att framtiden är fullständigt bestämd och existerar i lika hög grad som det förflutna? Eller, är teorin ingenting annat än en användbar bild en metafor som förmår fånga viktiga aspekter av tillvaron, men inte dess helhet? Om bulldegen och studsmattan i första hand är oprecisa, pedagogiska liknelser avsedda att förmedla något av fysikens smak och doft till lekmannen, är relativitetsteorin, liksom fysikens övriga modeller, en matematiskt väldefinierad konstruktion, som tillåter oss att träda in i den och därifrån genom beräkningar utvinna ny kunskap om världen; kunskap som sedan kan mätas mot observationer och experiment. Men, bara för att en modell förmår producera korrekta förutsägelser, måste den då vara sann? Den amerikanske fysikern Murray Gell-Mann fann vid 1960-talets början ett matematiskt argument för att partiklarna i gruppen hadroner, däribland protoner och neutroner, borde vara uppbyggda av mer fundamentala beståndsdelar. Om man antog existensen av sådana partiklar, med laddning av en typ man aldrig tidigare sett, förenklades teori och beräkningar avsevärt. Gell-Mann kallade de hypotetiska partiklarna för kvarkar, ett ord lånat från James Joyces nydanande roman Finnegans wake. Kvark, på engelska quark, inte långt ifrån quirk som i något udda udda, men likafullt användbart. Och det var också så Gell-Mann själv betraktade sin upptäckt som ett matematiskt redskap, utan motsvarighet i den fysiska verkligheten. Den konkreta kvarkmodellen den är för dumskallar!, lär han vid något tillfälle ha slagit fast. Några år senare kom de första experimentella beläggen för kvarkarnas existens från en accelerator i Stanford. Även med realistens övertygelse om att det finns en objektiv verklighet att upptäcka, inser vi att kunskap om denna verklighet endast kan nå oss genom den mänskliga erfarenhetens raster, om det så är i form av sinnesintryck eller matematik. Hur skall man veta vad som är bild, och vad som är verklighet? Om modellerna är liknelser, exakt vad är det som de efterliknar? I och med kvantmekanikens framväxt under 1900-talets första hälft, skapades en medvetenhet hos fysikerna om att relationen mellan matematik och naturligt språk, liksom mellan matematik och verklighet, är långt ifrån okomplicerad. Inom kvantfysiken, menade den danske fysikern Niels Bohr, kan språket på sin höjd användas som i diktkonsten. Är partikel en meningsfull bild? Ibland. Är våg en meningsfull bild? Ibland. Är det begreppet fält vi bör använda oss av för att förstå hur krafter och materia interagerar? Tja, vem vet det har i alla fall hjälpt oss att göra mycket exakta förutsägelser om verkligheten. Det vardagliga språkets metaforer betonar någon eller några aspekter av det de gestaltar, men utelämnar andra detta gäller även de matematiska modeller som vi upprättar för att beskriva verkligheten. Matematiken har en anmärkningsvärd förmåga både att beskriva den fysiska världen, och att hjälpa oss finna ny kunskap om den men den har också förmågan att lika övertygande beskriva världar som bevisligen inte är våra. Kanske är detta något att hålla i minnet, när vi låter ekvationerna leda oss fram till existensen av parallella universum och dolda dimensioner. Framför allt bör vi minnas det när vi använder kategorier och bilder förankrade i vår sinnliga erfarenhet, för att beskriva de aspekter av verkligheten som undflyr våra sinnen. Som Bohr framhöll kan den språkliga poesin etablera fruktbara associationer och antyda djupa sanningar men den bör inte alltid läsas bokstavligt. Det finns goda skäl att tro att samma sak gäller för de vetenskapliga modellerna. Helena Granström, författare med bakgrund inom fysik och matematik

Rory Sutherland is a British advertising executive who became fascinated with behavioral science. Between his TED talks, books and articles, he has become one of the field’s greatest proponents. Rory is currently the Executive Creative Director of OgilvyOne, after gigs as vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK and co-founder of the Behavioural Sciences Practice, part of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies. He is the author of The Spectator’s The Wiki Man column and his most recent book, which we highly recommend, is Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. We started our discussion with Rory by asking him about his new book and some of his insights from it. His approach to advertising, marketing and product design is informed by his ability to look for the things that aren’t there. He once described a solution to improving customer satisfaction on the Chunnel Train between London and Paris by suggesting that a billion dollars would be better spent on supermodel hosts in the cars than on reducing ride time by 15 minutes. He’s a terrifically insightful thinker. Our conversation ran amok of all sorts of rabbit holes, as expected, including ergodicity, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Silver Blaze,” high-end audio and the dietary habits of the world-famous runner, Usain Bolt. In Kurt and Tim’s Grooving Session, we discuss some of our favorite takeaways from Rory’s conversation including, “The Opposite of a Good Idea is a Good Idea” and others. And finally, Kurt teed up the Bonus Track with a final reflection and recap of the key points we discussed. As always, we would be grateful if you would write us a quick review. It helps us get noticed by other folks who are interested in podcasts about behavioral science. It will only take 27 seconds. Thank you, and we appreciate your help.  © 2020 Behavioral Grooves   Links Rory Sutherland: https://ogilvy.co.uk/people/rorys “Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life”: https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062388414/alchemy/ “Friction”: https://www.rogerdooley.com/books/friction/ Murray Gell-Mann, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann Robin Williams “Scottish Golf”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx8TzR1-n4Q Don Draper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Draper Ergodicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity John James Cowperthwaite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Cowperthwaite SatNav: https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/satnav Daniel Kahneman, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman What You See is All There Is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow Arthur Conan-Doyle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze Tim Houlihan’s Blog on “Silver Blaze”: https://tinyurl.com/ufumkj6 Ben Franklin T-Test: https://tinyurl.com/wocdsdk Volkswagen Fighter: https://tinyurl.com/qpyqh87 David Ogilvy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ogilvy_(businessman) Jock Elliot: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/dec/01/guardianobituaries.media Battle of Leyte Gulf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf Croft Audio: http://www.croftacoustics.co.uk/main.html Mu-So single speaker: https://www.naimaudio.com/mu-so WFMT Chicago: https://www.wfmt.com/ TK Maxx: https://www.tkmaxx.com/uk/en/ Berlin Hotel with Big Lebowski: https://www.michelbergerhotel.com/en/ Shure: https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones?lpf[top][types][]=microphones Zoom: https://zoom.us/ Satisficing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing Usain Bolt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usain_Bolt Sheena Iyengar, PhD: https://www.sheenaiyengar.com/ Jelly Jar Study: https://tinyurl.com/oo6g6eb Big Band Music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_band   Musical Links Aretha Franklin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aretha_Franklin Southern California Community Choir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California_Community_Choir Abba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBA Felix Mendelssohn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Mendelssohn George Frideric Handel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Frideric_Handel Johann Sebastian Bach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach Johann Christian Bach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christian_Bach  

What are some of the greatest things humans have achieved that most people don't know about?Andrew GrimmEver wondered why the world was basically the Middle East and the tropics for many generations and then some people moved to the colder places like Europe and such?I have an answer and its one you probably didn't expect.Hay.yes, that dry bundle of grass that most farmers now take for granted is one of the most important reasons why people were able to move into colder climates.You see, hay is durable dry feed for animals during the winter months (especially horses), and before that, if you moved to the colder areas, you may have had yourself to feed, but you couldn't run any livestock.Hay changed all that.From the period when Hay was first cultivated and used, this enabled people to finally travel to some of the much colder climates and actually last through more than a single winter without preserves and pickles.Freeman Dyson:"My suggestion is not original. I don't remember who gave me the idea, but it was probably Lynn White, with Murray Gell-Mann as intermediary. The most important invention of the last two thousand years was hay. In the classical world of Greece and Rome and in all earlier times, there was no hay. Civilization could exist only in warm climates where horses could stay alive through the winter by grazing. Without grass in winter you could not have horses, and without horses you could not have urban civilization. Some time during the so-called dark ages, some unknown genius invented hay, forests were turned into meadows, hay was reaped and stored, and civilization moved north over the Alps. So hay gave birth to Vienna and Paris and London and Berlin, and later to Moscow and New York."So the next time you visit a major European city and look around at its 500 plus year magnificence .. you can thank the use of Hay on a regular basis for that.

Murray Gell-Mann, 1969 Nobel Laureate in Physics who identified the quark, died May 24th.

Murray Gell-Mann, 1969 Nobel Laureate in Physics who identified the quark, died May 24th.

Pictured: Nan Winton Matthew Bannister on Murray Gell-Mann, the American physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He coined the name "quarks" for the fundamental building blocks of matter. Nan Winton, the first woman to read the TV news on the BBC. She faced discrimination in the male-dominated BBC newsroom. James McCord, the CIA agent who was involved in the Bay of Pigs and the Watergate break in. Gregory Gray, the Irish singer who went from boy band to cult musician. Interviewed guest: Professor Geoffrey West Interviewed guest: Graham Farmelo Interviewed guest: Tina Ellen Lee Interviewed guest: Maggie Brown Interviewed guest: Michael Carlson Interviewed guest: Tom Robinson Interviewed guest: Noel McLaughlin Producer: Neil George Archive clips from: The Key To The Universe: The Search For The Laws Of Creation, BBC Two 27/01/1977; Horizon, BBC Two 25/07/1964; Panorama, BBC One 21/09/1959; Panorama, BBC One 09/03/1959; Arena, BBC Two 15/03/1997; U.S. Senate Select Committee On The Watergate Affair, BBC Sound Archive 18/05/1973; Watergate: Inside The Scandal That Took Down A Presidency, ABC News 17/06/2017.

A tribute to the life of Nobel Prize-winning scientist and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Murray Gell-Mann, who died on May 24. Gell-Mann discovered the subatomic particle the Quark, and worked in many disciplines, including linguistics, archaeology, history and economics.

La tertulia semanal en la que repasamos las últimas noticias de la actualidad científica. En el episodio de hoy: ¿Realmente se ha descifado el códice Voynich? (minuto 41:20); El plan Artemisa de la NASA para establecerse en la Luna (2:02:00); Historias del eclipse que confirmó la teoría de la Relatividad General (29:30); El dilema de Starlink, la nueva iniciativa de Space X (15:30); Adiós a Murray Gell-Mann (8:20). En la foto, de arriba a abajo y de izquierda a derecha: María Ribes, Alberto Aparici, Héctor Socas, Enrique Joven, Carlos Westendorp. Todos los comentarios vertidos durante la tertulia representan únicamente la opinión de quien los hace… y a veces ni eso. CB:SyR es una colaboración entre el Área de Investigación y la Unidad de Comunicación y Cultura Científica (UC3) del Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias y el Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos de Tenerife.

La tertulia semanal en la que repasamos las últimas noticias de la actualidad científica. En el episodio de hoy: ¿Realmente se ha descifado el códice Voynich? (minuto 41:20); El plan Artemisa de la NASA para establecerse en la Luna (2:02:00); Historias del eclipse que confirmó la teoría de la Relatividad General (29:30); El dilema de Starlink, la nueva iniciativa de Space X (15:30); Adiós a Murray Gell-Mann (8:20). En la foto, de arriba a abajo y de izquierda a derecha: María Ribes, Alberto Aparici, Héctor Socas, Enrique Joven, Carlos Westendorp. Todos los comentarios vertidos durante la tertulia representan únicamente la opinión de quien los hace… y a veces ni eso. CB:SyR es una colaboración entre el Área de Investigación y la Unidad de Comunicación y Cultura Científica (UC3) del Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias y el Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos de Tenerife.

L'info ce soir, ce sont des sciences: - Le physicien américain Murray Gell-Mann, l’inventeur de la théorie des quarks, est mort. Il détestait la physique au lycée, a finalement continué pour obtenir un prix Nobel en 1969.- L’Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS) entérine la reconnaissance d’un « trouble du jeu vidéo ». Les scientifiques ne sont pourtant pas d’accord entre eux sur cette pathologie.- L’évolution prouve que les fainéants survivent mieux. Une étude sur des centaines de mollusques, parue dans la revue Proceedings of the Royal Society B et repérée par Futura Sciences, révèle ce n'est pas forcément l'espèce la plus capable qui survit, mais celle qui a la meilleure efficacité énergétique.- La guerre des fourmis, bande dessinée du scientifique Franck Courchamp et du dessinateur Mathieu Ughetti (éditions Equateurs sciences). Recommandée par Libération, la BD évoque leurs superpouvoirs.Crédits sons : Longing – Joakim Karud/Musique libre de droits/Bisquit soul de Noodgroove – Fugue Icons8.com/Bruitages : universal-soundbank.com/ Pour plus d'informations sur la confidentialité de vos données, visitez Acast.com/privacy See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, we follow the development of the strong force from Yukawa through to the work of Murray Gell-Mann and Georg Zweig and the first quark-gluon model of matter.

The 50th Anniversary of Quarks Honoring Murray Gell-Mann. Produced in association with Caltech Academic Media Technologies. © 2013 California Institute of Technology

The 50th Anniversary of Quarks Honoring Murray Gell-Mann. Produced in association with Caltech Academic Media Technologies. © 2013 California Institute of Technology

The 50th Anniversary of Quarks Honoring Murray Gell-Mann. Produced in association with Caltech Academic Media Technologies. © 2013 California Institute of Technology

The 50th Anniversary of Quarks Honoring Murray Gell-Mann. Produced in association with Caltech Academic Media Technologies. © 2013 California Institute of Technology

Murray Gell-Mann, premio Nobel de Física e investigador del Santa Fe Institute explica su teoría de los quarks.