MULTIVERSES

The Gomboc is a curious shape. So curious many mathematicians thought it could not exist. And even to the untrained eye, it looks alien: neither the product of human or natural processes. This week Gábor Domokos relates his decade-long quest to prove the existence of a (convex, homogenous) shape with only two balance points.  The Gömböc is not just a mathematical curio, its discovery led to a...

From what human need does philosophy emerge? And where can it lead us?  Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York, and a scholar of Heidegger, Pessoa, Football (Liverpool FC), and humour — among other things. He crosses over between analytic and continental traditions and freely draws on quotes from Hume, poetry and British pop bands.   Simo...

Large language models, such as ChatGPT are poised to change the way we develop, research, and perhaps even think. But how do we best understand LLMs to get the most from our prompting? Thinking of LLMs as deep neural networks, while correct, is not very useful in practical terms. It doesn't help us interact with them, rather as thinking of human behavior as nothing more than the result of neurons...

The physical solidity of books encourages notions of "the text" or "the canonical edition". The challenges to this view from post-modernist thought are well known. But there are other ways in which this model of a static text may fail.  Our guest this week is Peter Robinson (my dad!) who takes us through his work on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This is a paradigmatic case of a work of literatu...

For hundreds of years, things changed slowly. Innovations were infrequent and spread inchmeal. Population, culture, and the atmosphere, all were static decade-to-decade.  We now see rapid change. It's hard to contemplate what now? let alone what next? Peter Schwartz is a futurist, SVP for Scenario Planning at Salesforce, author of The Art of Long View, and a founder of the Long Now Foundation...

AI is already changing the world. It's tempting to assume that AI will be so transformative that we'll inevitably fail to harness it correctly, succumbing to its Promethean flames. While caution is due, it's instructive to note that in many respects AI does not create entirely new challenges but rather exacerbates or uncovers existing ones. This is one of the key themes that emerge in this discuss...

Plants have transformed the surface of the earth and the contents of our atmosphere. To do this they've developed elaborate systems of roots and branches which (sometimes) follow uncanny mathematical patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence. Our guest this week, Sandy Hetherington, leads Edinburgh's Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group. They take a no-holds-barred approach to understanding pl...

Does the Earth contain enormous clean energy reserves? For many years the received logic was that hydrogen does not occur naturally in significant quantities without being bound to other atoms (such as in H20, water, or CH4, methane). To obtain the gas — whether as a fuel or for use in fertilizers — we need to strip it from those molecules, typically by electrolysis and steam reformation. But our...

Thought experiments have played a starring role in physics. They seem, sometimes, to pluck knowledge out of thin air. This is the starting point for my discussion this week with the philosopher Harald Wiltsche: what are thought experiments? How do they function — are they platonic laboratories with no moorings in observations or a way of supercharging our reasoning about phenomena? What do they de...

Genomics is leading a revolution in our understanding of disease. But the ways we pursue genomics research and the use we make of that knowledge demand careful thinking. Anna is a researcher at The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, she holds a PhD in Systems Biology from Oxford (where we met) and has worked in medtech startups. As someone who has looked at genomics from multipl...

Christian Bök is an award-winning poet pushing the boundaries of the medium and exploring the capabilities of language itself. Rather than focusing on self-expression, Christian uses poetry as a laboratory for understanding language — probing its plasticity and character. His notable work, the bestseller Eunoia , draws inspiration from the avant-garde rules of Oulipo and takes it a step further by...

Is the fate of the universe predetermined? Many physicists and philosophers argue it is, particularly those who adopt the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Our guest this week is Ruediger Schack. With Christopher Fuchs and Carlton Caves, he is one of the originators of a new way of interpreting quantum mechanics, QBism, according to which we — as agents — are co-creators of the worl...

Science and poetry are sometimes caricatured as opposing paradigms: the emotional expression of the self versus the objective representation of nature. But science can be poetic, and poetry scientific. Our guest this week, Sam Illingworth, bridges these worlds. He’s researched scientists who were also poets, and organized workshops for scientists and laypeople using the medium of poetry to create...

Space and time appear in charts as axes oblivious to the points they demarcate. Similarly, we may feel that we, and all the objects of our worlds, are like such points — and spacetime is a container in which we sit. Julian Barbour is a physicist who has spent six decades arguing against this. He takes the relationist approach of Leibniz and Mach: there is no space without objects and no time witho...

We live in a branching universe. If it can happen, it does happen. These are the almost incredible claims of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet today’s guest, David Wallace, makes a case that this is the most grounded way of reading our best theory of nature. While at first sight quantum mechanics seems to say that things (famously, cats!) can occupy impossible states, David...

Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries (TI). TI is pioneering air-to-fuel technology to manufacture methane (natural gas) from the air. Currently, we continue to extract enormous quantities of hydrocarbons from the crust, burn them, and release carbon dioxide. Instead, TI wants to mine the air: displacing the transport of carbon from the crust to the atmosphere. Casey Handler has a P...