The Boltzmann Brains

How can biologists do a controlled experiment when even genetic clones aren't identical? How can they compare plants in two labs when those labs use different soil and different lighting? Sometimes these sorts of things don't matter, and sometimes they mean your experiment is worthless! How do you know which is which?? Is there any hope for biology? Eric is a physicist who spent the last 2...

The universe we can see is big … really big. But what if it’s just a tiny piece of something way, way, way bigger? In this episode, Eric teaches Sam about the evidence for this bizarre possibility. If we can’t even see 99 percent of the universe, how can we know it’s there? Can science really draw useful conclusions about something we can’t observe now and won’t be able to observe in the future? S...

In this episode Sam takes the lead to discuss two of his favorite "paradoxes" from probability. The Monty Hall problem is a much-discussed challenge concerning the best strategy to win a car on a game show. The Sleeping Beauty problem describes a situation philosophers can’t seem to agree about, even today. Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmai...

In this episode Sam and Eric discuss the evidence that our universe began about 14 billion years ago in a very hot, dense state, then gradually expanded and cooled. As late as 1920, Einstein thought this idea was obviously nonsense. Fifty years later, it was rock-solid science. Is the Big Bang Theory testable? After all, we can't grow a universe in a lab. How can scientists do their job in a s...

In middle school, most of us were taught the "scientific method" – a simplified list of steps meant to help kids understand how scientists approach the world. But how accurate is it, really? In this episode, we get to talking about the history of science, and discuss how the reality of scientific research stacks up against the famous "method". First, we discuss Galileo - the fi...

In this episode, Eric starts us off with an oldie but a goodie: In a Star Trek episode from 1989, Commander Data (an android) is put on trial by the Federation for refusing to be disassembled. Is Data just a man-made appliance, or is he a new kind of intelligent life, entitled to the right of self-determination? Next, Sam lays out some philosophical background on the twin questions of consciousnes...

BBrains pod: Is Philosophy Useful? Hi all! We’re Sam and Eric - the Boltzmann Brains. Sam is a philosopher, so of course he thinks philosophy is super-useful. But Eric has seen philosophers drift into irrelevance more than once, so maybe not? We're going to argue it out.  At least, that was the plan, until Sam immediately agreed that philosophy had some pretty profound limits. So, why pursue p...

Hi all! We’re Sam and Eric - the Boltzmann Brains. Today we’re doing dueling TV shows! Sam is a philosopher who loves The Good Place. Eric is a physicist who loves The Big Bang Theory. We’re going to discuss whether these shows look anything like reality. We’ll give both shows a grade (we used to be professors, after all), and along the way we’ll address such pressing questions as: Is moral philos...