Point of Inquiry

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Sean Carroll—theoretical physicist at CalTech, and skilled science communicator. I've known Sean and his work for almost a decade, and I've invited him on to talk about his latest book: The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World . Sean Carroll is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Hi...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Maria Konnikova , who is the author of a simply fascinating new book about training your mind so you're as sharp as the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. It's entitled Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes . In addition to her new book, Konnikova writes the "Literally Psyched" column for Scientific American , and is a doctoral candidate in psych...

Host: Chris Mooney This is our first show of 2013, and notably, we're still here . A lot of people actually thought the world was going to end at the end of last year, which, presumably, means that now it's rejoicing time. And also reflection time. Time for reflection on all the things that people are capable of believing, as well as the things that might really lead to global catastrophe someday....

Host: Indre Viskontas It's become almost a truism that in their spare time, skeptics tend to gravitate towards TV shows, novels and games that portray the very monsters, myths and conspiracies that they work so hard to debunk. A great story is just as entertaining to the most hardened skeptics as it is to the rest of the population. And because they are often more knowledgeable about the history o...

Host: Chris Mooney We usually record Point of Inquiry at a distance. Over the phone. Skyping. But for this show, I packed up my gear and hailed a cab—to the Center for Inquiry's brand new Office of Public Policy in downtown, Washington, D.C. The Center for Inquiry is here to literally make this country listen to reason... and science. It's a sensibility that is simply in far too short of a supply...

Host: Chris Mooney It's rare that I can say about a guest that, I read his books when I was a kid. But David Brin is just such a guest. He's the celebrated science fiction author of the Uplift novels, The Postman , and many other books—most recently, Existence . I read the Uplift books when I was tearing through sci-fi as a teenager. But on top of that, Brin is also a trained scientist and public...

Host: Chris Mooney When  we last had Bill McKibben on this show  in 2010, I was mainly treating him as another bestselling science author—one who happens to focus on climate change. Well. Something kinda big happened in the intervening years, and McKibben has become, simply put, the country's leading environmental spokesman and advocate through his organization  350.org . From protests against the...

Host: Indre Viskontas Because we live in an uncertain world, we arm ourselves with facts to gain a sense of control and therefore some modicum of comfort. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow even though it disappears tonight. But what happens when facts, those bits of information that we believed captured some fundamental truth about our world, are shown to be no longer true? With the exponent...

Host: Chris Mooney One of the first people I ever got to know in skepticism was Steven Novella. He was a professor at Yale, just starting out as an organized skeptic—I was a student, just getting fired up about the same stuff. Since then, Steve has become hugely successful as a skeptic leader and as a communicator of skeptical ideas, particularly when it comes to his area of specialty, alternative...

Host: Chris Mooney Before the "complementary and alternative medicine" fad, and before UFO craze, lived a man whom you might call the first modern pseudoscientist. His name was Immanuel Velikovsky. He had a strange theory about a comet—that turned out to be Venus—shaping the course of human history. He tangled with Carl Sagan about it—and with the scientific community about it. And then, he was mo...

Host: Chris Mooney On this show, we often debate the state of American secularism—covering topics like the rise of the so-called "nones," or the unending battle to rescue the country from the pernicious influence of Christian right. Our guest this week, Jacques Berlinerblau, has a provocative thesis about all this. He says that American secularism has clearly and distinctly lost major ground. And...

Host: Indre Viskotnas Despite our individual differences, highlighted especially during an election, much of what we see, hear, smell or feel is shareable: that is, when standing in front of an object, we can more or less agree that it has a particular color, shape, texture, size and so on. But what if I tell you that I see an object clearly which you do not? Or hear a voice that doesn't have a ph...

Hosts: Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney At the 2012 CSICON conference in Nashville, Tennessee, your Point of Inquiry hosts Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney finally actually found themselves in the same place. The result was a show that features both of them covering current events—the 2012 election, the passing of CFI founder Paul Kurtz—and each also conducting an interview! Our guests: Jon Ronson...

Host: Indre Viskontas The month of October is associated with falling leaves, autumn winds and hallowe'en. But for sports fans in the US, it also signals a high point in America's national pastime: baseball's postseason. After a long run of 162 games, the last weeks of October are ripe with matchups in which legends are made and broken. Any skeptic worth his or her salt, however, can't help but ma...

Host: Chris Mooney In this show, we talk to two founders of ScienceDebate, a nonprofit organization that in the last two election cycles has pushed to get the presidential candidates to talk about and debate science policy. So far, there has been no actual presidential science debate. But this year, ScienceDebate got Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to  answer 14 top science policy questions , leading...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Lisa Randall , the Harvard theoretical physicist and one of the most heavily cited and influential researchers in her field. She's a member of a number of distinguished scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences—but she's also a very popular science author, behind the bestselling Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe's Hidden Dimen...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is a return guest of the show, Massimo Pigliucci. We  last heard  about his book Nonsense on Stilts , which was about how to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. But his newest effort is in some ways even more ambitious. It's called Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to a More Meaningful Life . And in it, Pigliucci lays ou...

Host: Indre Viskontas There is no doubt that our world is populated with cheats and liars. Most of us, slaves to the availability heuristic, think of major cheaters like Bernie Madoff, Tiger Woods, and Barry Bonds as inflicting the most damage onto society. But just how honest are we, with others and with ourselves? The surprising finding from several studies conducted by Dan Ariely and his collab...

Host: Chris Mooney How many atheists are there in the world? Where do they live? What kind of people are they, and how do they get that way? Are they happy? Are they prosperous? Do they drag their societies down into a cesspool of immortality—as is often alleged—or, is it precisely the opposite? All of these questions are amenable to scientific study. With, like, data. It's just that people didn't...

Host: Chris Mooney Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to make American politics just a little more rational, just a little more evidence based? Wouldn't it be even nicer if there was a website, or an app, that helped that process along? Maybe, just maybe, a promising innovation called  TruthMarket  can help with the problem. It's a site where people who care about the truth crowd-fund campaig...

Host: Chris Mooney Several times on this show, we've discussed the topic of ideological asymmetry. In other words, are people of all political persuasions equally biased, equally prone to reasoning based on their emotions to support prior commitments? A  new scientific paper  (PDF) has recently come out that reopens this question, so naturally, we had to invite on one of its authors. His name is P...

Host: Indre Viskontas According to the USDA, Americans produce and consume more beef, veal, and chicken than any other nation in the world. As a result, the status of animal welfare in the meat production industry should be of some concern to all Americans, regardless of dietary habits. One of the world's leading experts in livestock handling practices is Dr. Temple Grandin, professor of animal sc...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Arie Kruglanski . He's a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland College Park, and has been a pioneer in the study of closed-mindedness-or, the "need for closure"—including how it drives fundamentalist belief systems and violent extremism. Dr. Kruglanski has served on National Academy of Sciences panels related to cou...

Host: Chris Mooney This week's guest is Joe Romm. You may know him as a top blogger on global warming and energy—but that's not why we're having him on. In an impressive show of versatility, Romm the scientist has written a book about how to persuade people. It's entitled Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga . In essence, it's a treatise on t...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Peter Montgomery, senior fellow with People for the American Way and author of a new report entitled  Twelve Rules for Mixing Religion and Politics , released last week with a new introduction by Bill Moyers. Point of Inquiry invited Montgomery on the show to discuss these very useful rules of the road, but also to ask a key question: Will the religious ri...