The DemystifySci Podcast

Today's guest is Professor Kyle Harper, author of The Fate of Rome, a radical reimagining of the fall of the Roman Empire. It is a saga of plague, volcanism & climate shifts, and coups, that reveals multiple fractures in the empire long before its final collapse. We touch on the crisis of the third century, currency collapse, imperial fractures, and the role of new urban diseases: the Anto...

Today's episode features a conversation with author Nick Collins concerning the obscure origins of the Mesopotamian "Cradle of Civilization." Collins points to a shared origin of Sumer and the Indus Valley Civilization, painting a picture of an interconnected culture connected by maritime trade. We discuss the rising of the oceans at the dawn of city-states, drowned coastlines, seafa...

We're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we examine the loss of material mediators in fundamental physics and then apply a simple set of axioms to imagine what the future of that abandoned physics might look like. Previously we introduced a material model of extended atomic architecture and used it to explain the basics of light transactions. This week, we look at...

Today's episode features Professor Stacy McGaugh, Director of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University. We discuss his journey to Modified Newtonian Dynamics [MOND] via a slow growing dissatisfaction with dark matter as the sole hypothesis to explain anomolous galaxy rotation curves, touching on the missing mass, dark matter halos, and empty WIMP detectors along the way. McGaugh champions...

We're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we examine the loss of material mediators in fundamental physics and then apply a simple set of axioms to imagine what the future of that abandoned physics might look like. Previously we introduced a material model of extended atomic architecture and used it to explain the basics of light transactions. This week, we get deep...

Today we're talking with philosopher Steve Patterson about how a lack of conceptual clarity in the foundations of 20th century mathematics led to problems not only downstream of this in physics, but eventually feeding irrationalist movements in diverse disciplines. From points with no size summing to lines, to sets of infinite quantities, formalism traded truth for usefulness, and that habit w...

We're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we examine the loss of material mediators in fundamental physics and then apply a simple set of axioms to imagine what the future of that abandoned physics might look like. Previously we introduced a material model of extended atomic architecture and used it to explain the basics of light transactions. This week, we get deep...

Today we're joined by Dr. Brook Ziporyn, a scholar of Classical Chinese from the University of Chicago, and translator of Zhuangzi and the Daodejing. He makes the case that classical Chinese rescues us from the hard problem of consciousness where meaning comes from context and relation instead of isolation. Identity is carved out of an undivided whole, and what's cut away is devalued in th...

We're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we are finally ready to talk about a mechanistic explanation for electromagnetic radiation - finally, we settle the question 'what is light, really?' To do this, we give physical form to the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics and explain light as an interatomic handshake across physical, filamentary ex...

DemystifySci is the place where we bring people together in search of the theories that will change the world, and Paradigm Drift is your chance to have a hand in that future. Theorists, randomly chosen, get 60 seconds to present their revolutionary idea... and then we see if it's gonna stand the test of time or if it's back into the tank for a little while longer.#ParadigmDrift, #FirstPri...

This week we're bringing you along to the Yucatán where we investigate the rise and collapse of our nearest ancient civilization, the classic Mesoamerican Maya. We make the argument that each Maya city states ran on a deal between the people and their leaders, where the few promised defense, calendars, and above all - clean, fresh water in a land without rivers. Ultimately, each city didn'...

This week we continue to read from our book, Paradox Lost, exploring the hidden meaning of the word "mass" in the Newtonian sense, and see how this maps onto modern usage of the word. We apply the material principles of natural philosophy to understand mass as a product of atomic architecture in networks of physically chained atoms, experiencing basic mechanical adhesion and, ultimately,...

Today we're joined by Arnaud Delorme, a computational neuroscientist at UCSD EEGLAB creator, and one of the most cited brainwave researchers, who is also fascinated by the emerging field of consciousness and parapsychology. Across a long career studying mediums, monks, and meditation, he's never claimed to have proven anything paranormal, but refuses to dismiss what the instrument actually...

This week we are broadcasting live from Mexico, on an unrelated assignment, and we continue our discussion of the material atom, reading from our upcoming book Paradox Lost. Picking up where we left off last week, we seek an explanation for electron guns like cathode ray tubes that doesn't involve the projectile action of electric particles. Instead we model the electron as circulation of atom...

This is part two from a recent conversation with Luke Kemp from Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. In part one we asked what made humanity suddenly pivot to the nation-state all around the world at the cusp of the bronze age. In part two Kemp argues that colonial expansion stretched a single Goliath across the globe, and we now live in a single integrated system o...

Today we give you an episode in two parts from a recent conversation with Luke Kemp from Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. We discuss the sudden and simultaneous rise of the nation state all over the globe as humanity emerged from the paleolithic. Prior to the bronze age of empires, humanity used kept the concentration of societal power in check by relying on rid...

This week we continue our discussion of the material atom live. Picking up where we left off last week, we go deeper into our book Paradox Lost and uncover the hidden mechanics of magnetism. The conversation follows from the past two week's livestreams where we argued for a new way of looking at the electron and charge: as patterned atomic surface motion. This week, we build out the details of...

This is the second episode from our recent meetup with Chris Lehto where we explore his work on the Fractal Universe, where macrobiological entities become a real possibility in the cosmos by way of adherence to NASA's own checklist definition for life. We explore the fractal organization of biological structures, what it means to be a subunit in a living system, and Lehto argues the case that...

This week we are going to the core of what it means to be alive. If we don't understand where matter turns into the living then how can we be sure we're not missing biological processes all over the universe? Chris Lehto joins us for this first part of a two part series on his work surrounding the Fractal Universe, where we establish the historic basis for our present understanding of what...

Electric charge has always been handed to us as a fact fixed to the electron, a quantity carved into the particle like a name. But charge may be less a thing the atom has than a thing the atom does, a surface motion that our instruments register with ever increasing precision. In this solo livestream drawn from our upcoming book, Paradox Lost, we explain the exact motions we propose at the atomic...

Archaeologist Jens Notroff of the German Archaeological Institute takes us into Göbekli Tepe and the Taş Tepeler world, where hunter-gatherers raised T-shaped pillars and carved the aurochs into stone long before the first Bronze Age king wore a crown. No palaces and no royal graves, only a fingerprint pressed into wet plaster and a child's footprint set in a mudbrick, the small human traces t...

The electron arrives in every textbook the same way, a point with no size, no interior, no address, a charge that lives nowhere and hazily explains everything, and nobody stops to tell you what got traded away to buy that convenience. We start at the outer surface of the atom and walk backward through J.J. Thomson and the cathode ray tubes, through the long slow formalization that turned a glow in...

Our recent guests, Dr. Eric Cline and Dr. Jesse Millek have wildly different takes on the Bronze Age Collapse, and the picture that comes clear when you lay them side by side is not the one the textbooks handed down. The Sea Peoples did not come off the water and burn the world; the world was already coming apart from the inside, empires overreaching, trade thinning rather than snapping, cities em...

Professor Angus Fletcher, from Ohio State's Project Narrative, comes back for a second lap around the machinery of belief, where the mind runs on story long before it runs on proof. From Oedipus to Copernicus to Darwin, every paradigm shift in the history of science turns out to be won by elegance, timing, and a culture hungry to hear it, never by data alone. Math describes the world with asto...

For a hundred and fifty years we were told the same story, that the Sea Peoples came in off the water around 1200 BC and burned the Late Bronze Age to the ground, city by city, until nothing was left but ash for centuries. Netherlands Institute for the Near East Archaeologist Jesse Millek walks back into that rubble with a lantern and finds most of it was never there, that more than half the destr...