Physical Attraction (PhysicsPodcast.com)

[Reupload with the actual, correct file this time - sorry! 

Thomas] 

When Teller's dream of a hydrogen, fusion bomb was eventually realised, it was another physicist, Ulam, who really came up with the winning design... and the first steps along the road to nuclear fusion on Earth.

Physical Attraction is the podcast about physics, science, and technology. You can find further details about the show at www.physicspodcast.com - where you'll find the contact form, for any comments, questions, or concerns you may have. [I'm very good at responding to stuff that isn't spam.] 

You can also donate to the show via www.paypal.me/physicspodcast and you can subscribe to our Patreon via www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction . Both will give you the opportunity to purchase our past bonus episodes for a nominal donation! 

The best way you can support the show, though, is to tell as many people about it as you possibly can. 

You can engage with us on social media - Twitter @physicspod and Facebook, Physical Attraction. 

Until next time, take care. 

In this episode, we get into some of the specific technologies that might be called upon to deliver negative emissions at scale. Specifically, we're looking at the advantages, disadvantages, and concerns surrounding BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage.)

Hello and welcome to this episode of Physical Attraction. I’ve been excited about this for a while. Today, on the show, for the first time ever, we have not one but TWO guests, who have co-written an excellent book together. They are both currently researching nuclear fusion, and they have written a book about the future of fusion energy called… well, the Future of Fusion Energy.

Dr Justin Ball is currently studying plasma theory at Lausanne, and Jason Parisi works on turbulent transport in highly magnetized plasmas just a few buildings away from me here at the University of Oxford.

Their book is an excellent guide to the science, history, and future of fusion energy, and of real help in compiling the marathon efforts in the show so far, so I was excited to be able to grab both of them for an interview to talk about fusion. Since this comes after I’ve already been yakking about fusion for ages, the conversation does assume some knowledge of what nuclear fusion is, but should be easy to follow if you’ve listened to some of the episodes in this series already.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Physical Attraction. My guests were Justin Ball and Jason Parisi. If you’d like to find out more, please do get their book – The Future of Fusion Energy – which is a highly entertaining and informative read. They also both have websites in the same format – Justin-ball.com and Jason-Parisi.com – and they can both be found on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing.

Remember, comments, questions, concerns, feedback, etc. can all be directed to me on Twitter at physicspod, or via the contact form on our website at www.physicspodcast.com – it’s always so wonderful to hear from listeners, and this is your chance to help me make the show as good as it can be! You can help us out by leaving a review on iTunes, purchasing past bonus episodes from the website, or just telling as many people as possible about the show to help spread the word if you like what we do.

Until next time, then, take care.

Ten apocalypses later, we're finally here. 

It's easy to forget, living our comfortable lives, that there are hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles that could destroy civilisation at the drop of a hat... after just one order. Or maybe - an accident. 

In this episode, I'll talk about the history of nuclear weapons; some of the incidents when we came closest to annihilation; and what the world would look like after a nuclear war.

You can follow us on Twitter @physicspod, and visit the website at www.physicspodcast.com

There, you can donate to the show, and contact us with your comments, questions, concerns, praise, abuse, ideas for future shows, and so on.

In this episode, we'll discuss how you can use dimensional analysis to measure the yield of the blast of a nuclear bomb, and weird units from banana equivalent doses to the distance at which sheep remain picturesque.

You can listen to all of our archived episodes up at www.physicspodcast.com or listen to our sister podcast, Autocracy Now, at www.autocracynow.libsyn.com.

On the physicspodcast website, you will find a contact form where you can discuss any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions for future show topics or interview guests - we'd love to hear from you.

You can also contact us via Twitter @physicspod or @autocracynow. 

This episode was brought to you by the American National Standards Institute. To find out more, visit https://www.ansi.org/. 

The National Ignition Facility is, to date, the largest inertial confinement fusion experiment ever developed - and carried with it a huge amount of hope and hype that breakeven might be reached with this new device.

www.physicspodcast.com

@physicspod

In this episode, we'll discuss the discovery and possible applications of superconductors - these seemingly miraculous materials which have an electrical resistance that drops to zero at a low enough temperature.

Contact us at www.physicspodcast.com
Or follow us on Twitter @physicspod

And tell as many people as you can about the show if you've enjoyed it or if you learned something worth knowing. 

It's a bonus news episode, in which I ramble on about the COVID-19 vaccines and the possibility of defending against future pandemics.

To close our series on Softbank's Vision Fund, I interviewed tech journalist and scholar Edward Ongweso Jr. of "This Machine Kills" podcast about Softbank, the corrosive nature of VC on the tech sector and our society, and the Vision that Masoyoshi Son really dreams of... along with whether it will all fall apart, and how we can build a society that uses technological innovations in a less destructive way.

We're going there. In this episode, I discuss why civilization is not going to imminently collapse due to climate change, explain why doomism is a new form of denialism, and debunk some of its most misleading claims.

In this episode, we get into the heart of Isaac Newton's scientific contribution. His laws of mechanics and gravitation fundamentally changed the way that we viewed both motion, and one of the (now four) fundamental forces. They would become the theory that dominated our understanding for the next three centuries, and even when relativity is discovered, Newton's laws are accurate enough across a wide enough range of circumstances to allow us to put humans on the Moon. 

We'll dive into these laws, explain them, and discuss how they govern so many phenomena in the world around us - from snooker to the cosmos. 

You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or where-ever you get your podcasts, and visit our website at www.physicspodcast.com where you'll find a contact form to get in touch with the show, and donate buttons if you want to help the show out.

Also listen to our sibling podcast www.autocracynow.libsyn.com - Autocracy Now, about the lives of famous dictators: currently, Stalin. 

We have a guest on the show today - Ben Franta. Ben is a scientist, science historian, science writer, and activist. He studied for a PhD at Harvard working on solar cells; while he was at Harvard, he became involved in the movement to persuade that University to divest from fossil fuels. After finishing his first PhD, he moved to Stanford to take up a PhD in the History of Science, where he now studies the history of climate politics, and the influence of fossil fuel companies on that politics. His recent article in the Guardian, published on New Year's Day, explained how Edward Teller knew about global warming in 1959 and warned the fossil fuel industry - thirty years before it hit the mainstream.

The first half, which you're about to hear, is a general discussion of the politics of climate change: why has this problem proved so difficult to deal with?

If you enjoyed what our guest had to say, you can find his work via
his LinkedIn
"Benjamin Franta": https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminfranta/

and follow him on Twitter @BenFranta.

The article that Ben referred to, which details the case for climate activism, was written by Geoffrey Supran and Ploy Achakulwisut; it's on Mashable, and it's called "How You Can Fight Climate Change." 

https://mashable.com/2017/05/06/how-you-can-fight-climate-change/

As always, you can follow us on Twitter @physicspod, and go to our website at physicspodcast.com, where you'll find a donate link that will help you support the show if you're so inclined. Until next time.


*** Erratum: 
Ben mentioned that the UK currently gets some of its electricity imported from Iceland: this is actually a proposed scheme that's not currently operating, but hopefully will in the near future. There is indeed a cable between the UK and France that helps both countries match supply and demand, and the same is true between Denmark and Norway, which both draw the majority of their power from wind and hydroelectricity respectively. It's the way forward! https://www.landsvirkjun.com/researchdevelopment/research/submarinecabletoeurope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skagerrak_(power_transmission_system)

Bonus midweek edition, coming to you as close to LIVE as is humanly possible...

Inspired by last week's episode, Seduced By A Robot, I downloaded a neural network and started to play around with it. See what happens when I feed it:

• The works of Shakespeare
• My Facebook conversation history
• A biography of Stalin
• and, of course, the twitter feed of President Trump

The neural network I used was the tensorflow char-rnn - an open-source framework by Chen Liang - and I got the idea from Janelle Shane, who you can find at www.lewisandquark.tumblr.com. 


Also: an appeal for listener questions!

I want to do a listener questions episode, but to do that, I need... listener questions.

Tweet us @physicspod, email us at physicspod@outlook.com. Any question will be considered, no matter how outlandish, and the ones that work out will be featured on a future episode. Here are some ideas:

• Something you wanted to know about physics
• Something you wanted to know about seduction (which I achieve masterfully in 100% of cases)
• Something that's been bothering you in your personal life or in the world at large
• Hateful abuse phrased as a question

Send them in! And see you Saturday for a regular episode.

The laws of thermodynamics govern the flow of energy - from your coffee cup to the sparse plasma floating between stars to the formation of black holes. 

And, in short, they are:

You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't get out of the game.

These laws, which were first derived by dreaming of ideal heat engines, turned out to have profound and vital physical and philosophical consequences. Far from just relating to an arbitrary concept called "temperature", they can teach us about how the Universe began - and how it will all, inevitably end.

This episode deals with the First Law of Thermodynamics - regarding the conservation of energy. So kick your heels back in nice warm surroundings and take a listen. 

You can listen to all of our archived episodes up at www.physicspodcast.com or listen to our sister podcast, Autocracy Now, at www.autocracynow.libsyn.com.

On the physicspodcast website, you will find a contact form where you can discuss any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions for future show topics or interview guests - we'd love to hear from you. You can also donate to the show there, or buy some bonus episodes to help support us: we have a Patreon, or you can label your Paypal donation and I will send you the episodes.

You can also contact us via Twitter @physicspod or @autocracynow. Thanks for listening, and tell fellow thermodynamic systems about the show!

Everything we have been able to infer about the Universe began in total ignorance. Many early theories about how the Universe was structured were wildly incorrect - but astronomers were building up the toolkits that would later allow us to understand.

The laws of thermodynamics govern the flow of energy - from your coffee cup to the sparse plasma floating between stars to the formation of black holes. 

And, in short, they are:

You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't get out of the game.

These laws, which were first derived by dreaming of ideal heat engines, turned out to have profound and vital physical and philosophical consequences. Far from just relating to an arbitrary concept called "temperature", they can teach us about how the Universe began - and how it will all, inevitably end.

This episode deals with the Third Law of Thermodynamics - regarding the impossibility of attaining absolute zero. We'll also discuss the seeming paradox that, while you cannot reduce matter to a temperature of absolute zero in a finite time, you can have negative absolute temperatures.... according to certain definitions of temperature.  

You can listen to all of our archived episodes up at www.physicspodcast.com or listen to our sister podcast, Autocracy Now, at www.autocracynow.libsyn.com.

On the physicspodcast website, you will find a contact form where you can discuss any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions for future show topics or interview guests - we'd love to hear from you. You can also donate to the show there, or buy some bonus episodes to help support us: we have a Patreon, or you can label your Paypal donation and I will send you the episodes.

You can also contact us via Twitter @physicspod or @autocracynow. Thanks for listening, and tell fellow thermodynamic systems about the show!

This week, we have a guest on the show - Kit Yates, who is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath, and who's written an excellent book "The Maths of Life and Death" on various applications of maths in biology, from epidemics to exponential growth. He's been interviewed extensively in the media lately to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, and we talked about that and the rest of his work, as well as the book, in this interview. 

Remember you can find Kit's work at kityates.com and you can find us as physicspodcast.com, contact form, twitter, patreon, tell others, rate and review, etc.

I’m very excited today to talk to Dr Robert Elliot Smith, who – after a thirty-year career working in AI and working with algorithms - has written one of the best books I’ve ever read about artificial intelligence and the impact of algorithms on society – Rage Inside the Machine. More than this, though, it’s really about… the dangers that can arise from trying to boil down complex aspects of what it means to be human, or what is valuable and important, to numbers and metrics which can be processed by these machines. Which I think is a much more fundamental issue, and lies at the heart of a great deal of systemic injustice and misunderstanding, even before the age of algorithms came along to turbo-charge all of these problems.

We had a wonderful, wide-ranging interview and Dr Smith was very patient and willing to deal with my pretty scattershot questions attempting to cover a lot of what is in his book. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Physical Attraction, and thanks again for Dr Smith for coming on the show. His book, Rage Inside The Machine, is one of the most brilliant texts you’ll read on AI – a glorious mix between technical detail explained in a way that’s not too oversimplified, personal stories profound insight into this interface between computers and algorithms and what it means to be human. It’s genuinely great, we just scratched the surface here really, and I know I’ll end up reading it multiple times for the full detail of what’s being said… and just because it’s also one of those books where you feel your brain expanding when you read it. In a good way. Do get a copy.

You can find that at Rage Inside The Machine.com where you will also find Rob’s blog and some of his other appearances on podcasts if you are interested. He’s also an occasional Tweeter at Dr RE Smith, so go check it out.

As for us, you know what to do! The website is physicspodcast.com, there’s a contact form there where you can get in touch with any comments, questions, concerns, things you liked, and didn’t like, and so forth. You can donate to the show via PayPal, or subscribe to our Patreon, where there are currently over a dozen bonus and early-release episodes for you to enjoy. You won’t be charged on the Patreon until a new paid bonus episode is released – and even then the pledge can be as low as a dollar or two I think – so if you want to support people who create the independent content you enjoy, that’s a good way to do it.

Everything is made up of fundamental particles. You have the leptons: that’s the electron, muon, tau, and their ghostly neutrinos that help us to conserve momentum. You have the quarks, which make up all of the hadrons. The up, down, and strange quarks: and their heavier cousins, the top, bottom, and charm quarks. Mixing quarks can give you baryons, like the proton and neutron. It can give you mesons, like the pion particles.

But you also have four forces.


There’s gravity, which pulls on everything with mass. There’s electromagnetism, which pulls on everything with charge. There’s the weak nuclear force, which is involved in the decay of neutrons and other particles, and it’s also how the ghostly neutrinos interact. And, finally, there’s the strong nuclear force: which binds the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, and binds the quarks within each proton and neutron.

It turns out that the final part of the Standard Model is associated with these forces. Because, although we can imagine force fields that extend throughout space like Maxwell did, it turns out that forces have ‘carriers’. In some sense, when one particle exerts a force on another, another particle jumps between them to spread that influence. These force carriers are bosons.


In this episode, we'll complete our picture of the Standard Model by adding the force carriers and the Higgs Boson into the mix. And then, we'll dive into the terrifying world of BDSM - BeyonD the Standard Model.


You can listen to all of our archived episodes up at www.physicspodcast.com or listen to our sister podcast, Autocracy Now, at www.autocracynow.libsyn.com.

On the physicspodcast website, you will find a contact form where you can discuss any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions for future show topics or interview guests - we'd love to hear from you.

You can also contact us via Twitter @physicspod or @autocracynow. 

In which I post cringe (unrelated prose and poetry) and lose subscriber to commemorate the 3rd anniversary of this show going on the air. 

www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction, that's www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction . If you go there, and subscribe selecting the $3/episode option, the RSS feed and access to all of the online bonus episodes will be yours. I want to make the subscription $3/bonus episode, so that you're only paying for the content I actually produce and give you rather than some neverending monthly subscription. But I will trail the bonus episodes in advance, so that you know what you're getting. The first one is the second half of the aliens episode that just went up on the feed; in the future, we'll have episodes about failed predictions for the end of the world, and for thermodynamics we'll have free energy projects that just didn't work out. If you're a patron, you can ask me about bonus episodes you'd especially like to hear, and I will do my best to respond to popular suggestions.

If you DON'T want to subscribe via patreon, there are other options. You can go to www.paypal.me/physicspod. There you will see a paypal link that will allow you to send money directly to me. If you send $3 and put in the "note" alongside the sending your email, and the bonus episode you wish to purchase, I will send you a download link to that episode. That way anyone who has Paypal can request an individual bonus episode. At some point in the future if this goes well, I'll look into setting up an online store that will make it easier for people to pay for the individual episodes they want, but for now, best to do things via Paypal and via www.physicspodcast.com. All of the relevant information and links will be at www.physicspodcast.com, so that's the place to go if you're interested; we also have a contact form there where I can explain any details in further... detail.

Thanks so much for listening and telling others about the show. I've recieved a wonderful response from many of you so far and I want to keep going for as long as possible, because I love doing this project, and I hope you guys enjoy it too.

In this episode, we discuss the Kaya decomposition - splitting CO2 emissions into CO2/energy, Energy/GDP, GDP/person, and population. We'll talk about its usefulness and limitations in tracking what drives carbon emissions.

In this episode, we discuss the leaked FinCEN files - which illustrate trillions of dollars in suspicious financial flows - as well as Nikola, the wannabe Tesla whose "hydrogen truck" was actually just rolling down a gentle slope.

The first of a few quick episodes where I continue going into coronavirus therapy by ranting on to you about all of the things I've learned about the current epidemic... with references to scientific papers so you can read them and find out how wrong I was.

We discuss:

• Estimates for the rate of disease progression in different countries
• Results from the early serology (antibody) tests of the virus (sadly still thin on the ground)
• Why Bayes' theorem means that the accuracy of antibody tests is so important
  
  

Welcome to Thermonuclear Takes, our roundup of all the news in science and technology that’s been fascinating me lately. Some of it will relate to things that we’ve discussed on the show before; some of it will relate to things that we’ll discuss in the future – and some will be just plain interesting.

This episode, we're going to be talking about Ben Franta's latest reporting that Exxon Knew about climate change in advance, and we'll discuss why Solar Freakin' Roadways might not be such a good idea.

You can visit our page at www.physicspodcast.com

There, you can contact us with questions, comments, concerns - I love getting your messages! 

You can donate to us on Paypal
You can subscribe to our Patreon
Subscribing to us on iTunes really helps us to get the show noticed

And follow the show on Twitter @physicspod or follow the Facebook page at Physical Attraction for all the latest updates. 

At the start of the tokamak revolution, there was a huge proliferation of different designs for tokamaks from universities and establishments around the world - but gradually, as it became clear that making progress would require larger and larger machines, these efforts broadly ended up concentrated in three main devices. 

The Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK, the JT-60 in Japan, and the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) in the US. 

www.physicspodcast.com 

This is a bonus episode coming out on the Physical Attraction feed. The topic is even less related to physics than usual, but since it's extra, I hope you'll forgive me.

As I mentioned a few episodes ago, this wasn't the first podcast I ever made. In fact, I scripted and recorded about twenty episodes of a show - Autocracy Now - on historical dictators. It's not something I'm an expert in - just a topic of fascination!

Then I started the physics show. And it became clear to me that it would be impossible to juggle writing, recording, and scripting *two* podcasts a week - and doing my PhD in physics - and writing for Singularity Hub and other websites to supplement the meagre income you get for doing a PhD.

But I still had all of these episodes recorded, with no idea when to release them, gradually gathering dust in a corner of my hard-drive. And it took months to research and record them. So I've decided I will be releasing them on a bi-weekly basis, via the Autocracy Now feed.

You can subscribe to that feed where-ever you get your podcasts, and via www.autocracynow.libsyn.com - that's the website to visit.

By the time the last episode comes out, if I stick to my schedule, it will be 2019. If anything, I'll be even busier then, so I don't know if the show will continue beyond that point - we'll have to see what happens. But I hope you enjoy the sister podcast while it lasts, and Physical Attraction will keep going for some time to come yet. To save time, I'll put any updates concerning either show on this main feed, but for the rest of the Autocracy Now episodes, subscribe to that feed.

The first of the bonus episodes I'll be releasing is about the Roman Emperor, Commodus. The second is the first in what became a fourteen-part epic series on the life of Soviet dictator and mass-murdering tyrant, Stalin. I hope you enjoy them - and, if you do, subscribe to Autocracy Now as well!

Taking a break from our nuclear fusion odyssey this week, I have a very special episode for you today. This week, our guest is Dr Kate Devlin. She’s a senior lecturer in computer science who studies artificial intelligence and human-robot interaction, and she wrote a magnificent book: Turned On, Science, Sex and Robots. Now, the tagline is that the book is about love and sex with robots – and there is a great deal of fascinating stuff in there about that – but it’s also a wonderful history of humanoid robotics, in reality and in fiction, and a great survey of the academic research into human-robot interactions in general. As artificial intelligence and chatbots become more omnipresent, and also take on a bigger role in our culture, whole new fields of psychology and sociology open up. We’ve already talked a little about chatbots in past episodes, and Dr Devlin’s book was one of the best and most entertaining works that I’ve read about artificial intelligence and robots in a long time, so I was super excited to get this interview.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Physical Attraction, and many thanks to our guest, Dr Kate Devlin. You can find her book – Turned On, Science, Sex and Robots – where-ever good books are sold, but I also highly recommend the audiobook… if, like me, you’re getting those monthly Audible credits, it’s wonderfully narrated by the author. You can also find out more about her work at www.drkatedevlin.com , and if you Google around, there are some Ted Talks and things of that variety to keep you entertained.

And now for our housekeeping. A reminder that I’m still planning this 100^th episode competition, but the due date is being continually extended – send your answers to the question “What Is Physics?” in text or audio format via the contact form on our website, and you’ll be in with a chance to win books from some of our previous interview guests and a place on the show.

The nuclear fusion series will be resuming shortly, and I can’t wait to share it all with you, but I’m also not averse to puncturing it with a few off-topic breaks now and then as a palate-cleanser. But if you have any comments, questions, or concerns about the show, you can contact us via the contact form at www.physicspodcast.com, and you can find me on Twitter @physicspod. If you want to support the show, we have a Patreon account, at www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction – and I’ve actually just put up some “b-sides”, there, shows that I recorded but didn’t release for one reason or another, that subscribers can now enjoy listening to – alongside all the bonus episodes on Alien Attacks, Free Energy Scams, and failed end-of-the-world-predictions. Of course, if you don’t want to donate, the best thing you can do to support us is always always to tell as many people about the show as you possibly can.

Until next time, then, take care!

In this episode, we explore the tantalising - but maybe impossible - dream of blanketing the world's deserts in solar panels to supply all of our energy needs.

Sigh. Yeah I did a thing about the Gamestop, meme stocks, financial asset bubbles, and so on, if only so that these opinions don't have to rattle around in my head taking up space.

In this Climate 201 episode, we introduce the different greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, analyse how their different lifetimes and ability to absorb radiation and warm the planet work, and discuss different ways of comparing their effects.

As Lenin's health declined, Stalin sought to outmanouver his rivals in the Bolshevik party and consolidate single-handed, dictatorial control over Russia. 

Follow us on Twitter @autocracynow, our sister podcast @physicspod, and subscribe to the show where-ever you listen to podcasts. Visit our online home at www.autocracynow.libsyn.com. 

If you want to support independent podcasters and enjoyed this show, consider donating to help keep us going, or buying a bonus episode of the physics show - details on the website at www.physicspodcast.com 

Arguments surrounding climate change have become subtler. Outright denial is gradually shifting to rhetoric that supports delaying urgent action. In this review of a paper by Steinberger, Lamb et al, I run down the new "discourses of climate delay".

What's stopping us from getting magnetic confinement fusion reactors that work? 

Is it really just... simple engineering problems?

www.physicspodcast.com

Hi all - something a little different this week.

I was recently interviewed by Richard Foster-Fletcher, of the Boundless AI podcast, on topics as varied as artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, and self-driving cars.

As a bonus for those that just can't get enough, this is the full, unedited interview, where you can hear just how good I am at responding to questions spontaneously...

We discuss some of Isaac Newton's most notable discoveries, from the invention of calculus (simultaneously with Leibniz) and his early grappling and wrestling with a physical theory of light. Was Newton contemplating wave-particle duality in the 17th century? 

You can follow the podcast on Twitter @physicspod and follow us on Facebook at the Physical Attraction page.

Visit our website at www.physicspodcast.com where you can find A YEAR'S WORTH of back episodes, alongside donation links and opportunities to buy bonus episodes if you want to thank the show and help us keep running. There's also a contact form for any comments, concerns, questions, or feedback! 

And you can listen to our sister show, about historical dictators - currently an epic series on the life and times of Joseph Stalin - over on Autocracy Now's feed - www.autocracynow.libsyn.com 

On this episode, we conclude our series examining the work of Project Drawdown and its climate mitigation solutions, and discuss the additional benefits that arise from implementing many of them.

In this episode, I try to explore a little more the politics behind the simple question: why is it that virtually every other proclamation of physicists is accepted, but the consensus around anthropogenic climate change has been so difficult for people to accept? 

Remember: you can follow us on Twitter @physicspod
You can find the website at www.physicspodcast.com

And on either one of those, you'll find a sparkly donate button where you can give to us on Paypal if you want to help us cover our costs.

Towards the end of Stalin's life, he became ever more paranoid, embittered, isolated, and vengeful. As his various ministers and members of the Politburo jockeyed for power and position around him, using his fits of paranoia to exact revenge on one another, the only thing that united them all was fear.

This is the final omnibus in the series from our sister podcast, Autocracy Now, which brings the biography of Stalin to its conclusion. 

Listen to the rest of the show over at www.autocracynow.libsyn.com

To close out this series of news episodes, we discuss the depressing failure of carbon capture and storage projects in Australia, as well as the far-too-slow approach to climate change adaptation across the world.

This year, the UK assembled 108 citizens from across all demographics of the society and from around the country to discuss the best ways to address climate change. In September 2020, they reported back.

In this second episode, we go over the Climate Assembly's mammoth 556-page report, and discuss its recommendations on how the UK should get to Net Zero emissions.

You can read the report for yourself at www.climateassembly.uk

You can get too caught up in praising the beauty of science and conflating that with praising the individual. I think we should recognise and appreciate brilliance, but stop short of hero-worship. It’s reductive. It diminishes people. It removes important parts of who they were. It can, in its worst excesses, be downright dangerous.

Nevertheless, that’s not a problem I have today, even though I’m going to tell this story partly biographically. Because Edward Teller, for all his brilliance in physics, is not the kind of person you’d want to worship as a hero. Yet it’s Teller, for good or ill, rightly or wrongly, who is most associated with the first successful large-scale harnessing of the power of fusion by human beings: the hydrogen bomb.

If you’ve ever seen the film Dr Strangelove, or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb”, you’ll know something of the popular perception of Teller. If you haven’t, you should immediately find a copy and watch it. From the moment that Teller was brought onto the Manhattan project, he was pushing for it to expand – not just to create a bomb that would harness the power of nuclear fission, but a fusion bomb. A hydrogen bomb, that would – according to theoretical calculations – be thousands of times more powerful. It would begin a long career in physics and the military that would see Teller consistently and endlessly advocate for more and more powerful weapons – total nuclear supremacy over the Soviet Union. It was an obsessive quest that led some of his oldest friends and colleagues to turn on him, in the end. The physicist Isidore Rabi later said: “He is a danger to all that is important. I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller.”

Physical Attraction is the podcast about physics, science, and technology. You can find further details about the show at www.physicspodcast.com - where you'll find the contact form, for any comments, questions, or concerns you may have. [I'm very good at responding to stuff that isn't spam.] 

You can also donate to the show via www.paypal.me/physicspodcast and you can subscribe to our Patreon via www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction . Both will give you the opportunity to purchase our past bonus episodes for a nominal donation! 

The best way you can support the show, though, is to tell as many people about it as you possibly can. 

You can engage with us on social media - Twitter @physicspod and Facebook, Physical Attraction. 

Until next time, take care. 

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Thermonuclear Takes - our occasional bonus episodes that deal with topics in the news when there's just TOO MUCH EXCITING STUFF out there to talk about. 

This episode:

• The teenager who built a nuclear fusion reactor in his bedroom - should ITER give up and go home? (Spoiler: no.) 
• A new study that suggests possible catastrophic climate feedbacks at high temperatures has been published
• OpenAI's new neural network is like nothing we've ever seen, and can imitate human writing more convincingly than I'd thought possible yet

You can find the show at www.physicspodcast.com and contact us with your comments, questions, concerns, etc.

Twitter @physicspod
Facebook - Physical Attraction. 

N/B: Owing to a ridiculously hectic schedule until the end of the year, episodes will continue to be released on a fortnightly basis until further notice - thanks for understanding. 

We hear an awful lot about carbon capture, utilisation, and storage as a technology that could help to mitigate climate change. In this episode, we review the science, the policy, existing CCS plants, and the potential for the captured carbon to be utilised. Will CCS ever materialise?

"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

• Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1915), chapter 4

And yet, throughout the years and decades and centuries, countless people have tried to convince others that they hold the key to violating the laws of thermodynamics and generating limitless amounts of free energy. Here, in the spirit of narrative fun, we explore the vast array of free energy scams that have been perpetrated over the years - from the age of PT Barnum style "inventors" to the age of GoFundMe and the tragic tale of the self-recharging battery. It didn't work. None of them work. Not the nuclear reactor that was secretly powered by wires. Not the magic liquid that could turn water into gasoline. Free energy is a scam as old as time, and yet people still seem to be taken in by it - often to the tune of millions of dollars.

If you take only one thing from Physical Attraction, let it be this: 

It's much easier and infinitely likely that the laws being broken are laws that prohibit fraud, and not the Laws of Thermodynamics.

You can listen to all of our archived episodes up at www.physicspodcast.com or listen to our sister podcast, Autocracy Now, at www.autocracynow.libsyn.com.

On the physicspodcast website, you will find a contact form where you can discuss any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions for future show topics or interview guests - we'd love to hear from you. If you're trying to sell me your free energy device, please, feel free to pitch it so that I can laugh and then report you to the authorities.

You can also donate to the show there, or buy some bonus episodes to help support us: we have a Patreon, or you can label your Paypal donation and I will send you the episodes.

You can also contact us via Twitter @physicspod or @autocracynow. Thanks for listening, and tell fellow thermodynamic systems about the show!

This week, we have a guest on the show - Professor Felicity Boardman, who works at the University of Warwick on the ethics of genetic screening and genome editing. Specifically, she is co-leader of the Imagined Futures project, which looks at the impact of new genetic technologies on those with rare genetic conditions.

This is a little outside the topics we usually cover on this show - but at the same time, it's an extremely important and under-appreciated topic - how the genetic technologies of today are already impacting people. We had an excellent conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.

You can find Professor Boardman's work at the Warwick website, her previous articles on The Conversation, and several talks on YouTube - I urge you to check them all out.

Remember, you can find us online @ physicspodcast.com and on Twitter @physicspod. Do send any comments, questions, concerns, topics you'd like to see covered and so on to the contact form on the website, and I'll endeavour to email you back! [I generally respond but it comes from my personal email address, so you might want to check if it's getting filtered.]
We have a Patreon, where you can subscribe for a few dollars per bonus episode - you won't be charged until a new bonus episode is released, and there are already a few there for you to download on subscribing.

Earlier this year, a couple of scientists in a laboratory did something incredible. Using nothing but the genetic code and a well-equipped lab, they raised the dead. 

Specifically, the extinct horsepox virus was brought back to life. The scientists said that they didn't do the experiment out of any malice for horses, but just to demonstrate that - with a few good biotech experts, a decent lab, and $100,000 - anyone would soon be able to bring viruses back from the dead.

So what about when that virus is smallpox, capable of killing millions, with the only surviving samples stored as bioweapons by the US and the Russians? Could it be that the biotech revolution - which has such power to save us from our ills and woes - might doom us as well? And what happens when this power gets into the hands of more and more people; the power over life and death? 


As ever, you can follow us on Twitter @physicspod, where we're amazingly active and will respond to any queries you have about the end of the world and similar terrors. You can tell us what you think of the ranking so far, make your own suggestions, and even donate to the show if you like. If you've enjoyed it, please consider rating and reviewing the show on iTunes, which helps us get noticed! 

"Leave the physicists be," said Stalin to his chief of police, Beria. "We can always shoot them later."

In this series of episodes, we'll take you inside the world of science in the USSR - with a particular focus on how they developed the atomic bomb. The gulags were not the only prisons in the Soviet Union; in fact, they constructed entire secret cities, called "Atomgrads", to house the scientists working on the bomb project. 

Technical experts were detained in prisons called sharashka. It was a simple exchange: you got to stay somewhere warm, and live under slightly better conditions than in the gulags - and in exchange, you worked on weapons and other projects to help the Soviet state.

More broadly, the Communist state was a bundle of contradictions. They were focused on the power of science and technology to drag Russia into the 20th century, but also they were dogmatic and suspicious of any outside influence. Huge amounts were invested in technical education, but pseudoscience made it to the height of power and policy-making in the state. 

What was life like for these scientists? How did Soviet science react to its contradictions?

We'll explore all this and more in this episode.

If you've enjoyed the show, please tell everyone you know to listen and spread it like a super-virulent biological weapon. 

You can contact the show with any comments, questions, or concerns via www.physicspodcast.com or find us on Twitter @physicspod. Getting feedback from listeners is always wonderful, so please drop us a line. 

In the latest coronavirus episode, we discuss research that has been done into the viable exit strategies from lockdown, including the idea of a contact-tracing app, and discuss some early estimates as to how effective this might be and what would be required to make it a success.

The invention of the laser in 1960 opened up an entirely new approach to nuclear fusion - dramatically, and drastically compressing individual pellets of fuel with lasers. 

www.physicspodcast.com
@physicspod

Sometimes, a news story that relates to some of the topics we talk about on this show catches my eye. That's when you know it's time for a Thermonuclear Take!

(tl;dr, experimenting with new bonus episode format.) 

This episode, we're going to talk about the recent heatwaves over Europe, Japan and North America, and the thorny issues of Climate Change attribution. We'll also discuss that Steffen et al. paper about a Hothouse Earth: Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Will climate feedbacks doom us to 4-5C of warming if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement? Can anyone state that definitively? A perspective. 

Naturally the aim of these bonus episodes is to be topical and provoke debate, so why not get in touch with us via Twitter @physicspod or via www.physicspodcast.com where you'll find all the archival episodes, alongside opportunities to donate to the show? 

If you're more interested in historical than current events, our podcast series about Stalin is in the midst of covering the Second World War... 

Trajectories of Earth System in the Anthropocene
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115

In 1950-1, Argentine dictator Juan Peron and German scientist Ronald Richter announced that they had cracked the secret of limitless energy from nuclear fusion, and would soon sell energy "in pint-sized bottles, like milk" to every household in the nation. 

Of course, the slight problem was that this technology was really (perhaps) a century away, and Ronald Richter was a crackpot. But they still had their impact on the history of nuclear fusion. This is their story. 


Physical Attraction is the podcast about physics, science, and technology. You can find further details about the show at www.physicspodcast.com - where you'll find the contact form, for any comments, questions, or concerns you may have. [I'm very good at responding to stuff that isn't spam.] 

You can also donate to the show via www.paypal.me/physicspodcast and you can subscribe to our Patreon via www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction . Both will give you the opportunity to purchase our past bonus episodes for a nominal donation! 

The best way you can support the show, though, is to tell as many people about it as you possibly can. 

You can engage with us on social media - Twitter @physicspod and Facebook, Physical Attraction. 

Until next time, take care. 

As a followup to our series on thermodynamics, the briefest of introductions to one of the most fascinating and beautiful areas of physics - Statistical Mechanics.

In this series, we'll be telling the story of the Softbank Vision Fund, the $100bn technology venture capital fund that was supposed to revolutionise the world and bring forward a glorious techno-future.

The Vision Fund that now looks like it's inflated a massive, unsustainable bubble in tech companies (and companies that pretend to be tech companies).

First - the story of Softbank, pre-Vision Fund, and its visionary founder, Masoyoshi Son, who made both the best and worst investments in living memory.

In this episode, we cover the different kinds of universal horizon, whether the Universe has an edge, and talk about how theoretical physicists pondered how it all might've began.

When you're trying to narrate the history of the entire Universe, where do you begin?

I decided to start in a radio studio in London in March 1949, when the term "Big Bang" was first coined, in the first on our series on cosmology. 

In this, the last of our short series of coronavirus updates, I will be telling you everything I've found out about the hunt for a coronavirus vaccine - when we can expect it to be ready, the testing that needs to be undergone, and some of the techniques that might be used.

With thanks to Derek Lowe of Science Magazine whose blog post on this I used as a main source for many of the details.

Inertial confinement fusion has a secret weapon - after all, it's just a scaled-down hydrogen bomb, which gives us hope that it might not be too difficult to fuse fuel under these conditions. This was supposedly confirmed by underground nuclear tests called Halite and Centurion... but all the details are classified.

www.physicspodcast.com

@physicspod

In this mini-series, we'll be discussing the Climate Assembly in the UK - what happens when 100 randomly-selected ordinary citizens are given time and space to debate UK climate change policy.

In this first episode, I talk about what a Citizens' Assembly is, and some of the pros and cons of this democratic institution. Next time, we'll discuss this specific assembly, the report and recommendations they came up with.

The Climate Assembly UK released its 556-page report on Thursday 10th September, and it can be read in full here: https://www.climateassembly.uk/

Well, the manifestation of a global catastrophic risk means that it's time for us to bring back the very first guest on this show, from back in 2017. Phil Torres is a scholar of existential risks - you can find him on Twitter @xriskology and his website at xriskology.com, and we are delighted to ask him back to the show to discuss the field of existential risks in the time of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Give me a tanker full of iron, and I'll give you a new Ice Age." It might sound like something Hank Scorpio would say, but this episode will deal with the very real idea of stimulating plankton blooms to remove CO2 from the atmosphere - ocean iron fertilization.

I sat down with Professor Rebecca Willis, author of the new book Too Hot To Handle, about the democratic challenge of climate change, how politicians deal with climate issues, the Climate Assembly here in the UK, and the ten-point plan for effective climate policy.

This week, we have a guest on the show - Rodrigo Aguilera. Specifically, we're talking to him about his book "The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the 21st Century". We shouldn't be happy with a narrow and limited definition of "progress" when we have the capacity to achieve so much more. But if we want to see things like the elimination of poverty, the application of human ingenuity and compassion and rationality and empathy towards solving the problems that exist in the world - this must begin with an accurate assessment of where we actually are, right now; what has led to progress in the past; and how we can get further in the future.

You're about to hear the second part of the interview, where we will dig into the flaws associated with "New Optimism" in more detail, and at the end we have a discussion about how we might hope to make the glass a little bit fuller in the future.

The show that explains physics, one chat-up line at a time. Coming soon to an internet near you.

A step by step description of an experiment run at JET, with information from the Culham Website (CCFE).

www.physicspodcast.com

@physicspod

One of the best and most enjoyable parts of hosting this show is when my favourite authors are kind enough to speak to me. I'd like to thank Simon for an excellent, enlightening, entertaining discussion: if you enjoy listening to it half as much as I enjoyed the conversation, you're in for a real treat.

Today, as part of our series on science in the USSR, I'm delighted to say that we have an interview with Simon Ings, the author of a wonderful book on the subject - Stalin and the Scientists. Simon began his career writing science fiction stories, novels and films writing books on perception (The Eye: A Natural History), 20th-century radical politics (The Weight of Numbers), the shipping system (Dead Water) and augmented reality (Wolves). He co-founded and edited Arc magazine, a digital publication about the future, before joining New Scientist magazine as its arts editor, and writing Stalin and the Scientists. He very kindly agreed to be interviewed for our little show; as usual, I detained my guest for a very long time, and so I've split the interview into two parts.

The second part of our interview followed scientists through the Soviet Union's tumultuous time under Stalin - through the Gulags and the Great Terror, through the horrors of the Second World War and the Sharaskhi. We discuss the legacy of the Soviet Union and move towards what we can learn about science in our society today. 

If you want to find out more about Simon's work, you can buy Stalin and the Scientists online and at all good bookstores - and I highly recommend you do - and he's online at www.simonings.com and also tweets @simonings.

As for us: follow the show @physicspod , or visit the website for more information at www.physicspodcast.com : there you'll find a contact form where you can bombard us with questions, comments, concerns, topic suggestions, guest suggestions, praise, anonymous threats - anything you like!

If you've enjoyed the show, you can help us a number of ways. We have a paypal donate link which you'll find on the site. You can subscribe to our Patreon. But most of all, please, please - tell as many people as possible to listen. Tie them down if necessary. 

As the climate change debate has advanced, the arguments surrounding it have become more subtle. Outright denial of the climate problem is rare - so rhetoric has shifted to delaying urgent action. In this review of a paper by Steinberger, Lamb et al, I run down the new "discourses of climate delay"

In this slightly news-y episode, we pick up on last week's episode and talk about progress that governments have made in enacting green economic stimulus to follow the coronavirus, as well as the negative redistributive and climate impacts of quantiative easing.

We discuss the Joint European Torus - the most successful tokamak fusion reactor to date, and the source of a great deal of our knowledge about the outer limits of performance for magnetic confinement fusion.

www.physicspodcast.com

@physicspod

Our inaugural episode! Explaining physics, one chat-up line at a time. This episode, I'm going to explain some of my motivations behind creating the show, and then we're going to be looking at how stars are born, how they're formed, and how they die.

And, of course, this show's chat-up line:

"Are you in the early stages of stellar formation? Because things are about to get... hot and heavy."

In this Climate 201 episode, we look at some of the climate change mitigation solutions proposed by Project Drawdown, in an effort to be more quantiative about what needs to be done to address our greenhouse gas emissions.

In this episode of our Climate 201 series, we continue discussing the practical emissions-reduction solutions from Project Drawdown - talking about regenerative agriculture, managing refridgerants, and why we abandoned electric cars which were the majority of automobiles in the 1880s!

A triple helping of our sister podcast, as we follow Stalin's career from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to the Battle of Stalingrad. 

Hi all. This episode, we're interviewing Brynley Pearlstone, who hosts the Scicurious podcast, which focuses on LGBTQ scientists. We talk about his scientific work on gravitational waves, and about outreach in physics more generally. Enjoy!

Building a nuclear fusion power plant is no easy feat. Fusion naturally occurs in temperatures comparable to those at the heart of the Sun - temperatures so hot as to instantly vaporise virtually any substance on Earth.


Physical Attraction is the podcast about physics, science, and technology. You can find further details about the show at www.physicspodcast.com - where you'll find the contact form, for any comments, questions, or concerns you may have. [I'm very good at responding to stuff that isn't spam.] 

You can also donate to the show via www.paypal.me/physicspodcast and you can subscribe to our Patreon via www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction . Both will give you the opportunity to purchase our past bonus episodes for a nominal donation! 

The best way you can support the show, though, is to tell as many people about it as you possibly can. 

You can engage with us on social media - Twitter @physicspod and Facebook, Physical Attraction. 

Until next time, take care. 

Direct Air Capture - machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Could this be the solution to a scaleable negative emissions industry? We'll discuss the pros and cons of the technology in this episode.

We have a guest on the show today! His name is Stuart Armstrong, and he works at the Future of Humanity Institute that we’ve mentioned several times over the course of the TEOTWAWKI specials who are looking at big-picture existential risks. Stuart Armstrong’s research at the Future of Humanity Institute centers on the safety and possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), how to define the potential goals of AI and map humanity’s partially defined values into it, and the long term potential for intelligent life across the reachable universe. He has been working with people at FHI and other organizations, such as DeepMind, to formalize AI desiderata in general models so that AI designers can include these safety methods in their designs.

This week, we have a guest on the show - Paul Gambill. Paul is the CEO of Nori, a startup that is aiming to create a marketplace for negative emissions - removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I first became interested in Nori when I saw that they were offering the opportunity to buy negative emissions for the low price of $15/tonne. The increasing importance of negative emissions in our climate change scenarios is something I'm very interested in + will be the topic of future episodes, so I was excited to get into the subject of making this a reality in our conversation. We had a wide-ranging discussion about climate change, the role of negative emissions, and what he's hoping to do with the company.

Released as a special treat/taster of what Patreon backers get.

N/B: This series of episodes was written before the coronavirus pandemic. I've decided the best thing to do is to present them as was and maybe have another episode reflecting on what the pandemic means for their conclusions later on.

======================================

Inequality tends to increase unless there's a catastrophe. Does technology help us - either in addressing catastrophes, or in reducing inequalities?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Physical Attraction. I’ve been excited about this for a while. Today, on the show, for the first time ever, we have not one but TWO guests, who have co-written an excellent book together. They are both currently researching nuclear fusion, and they have written a book about the future of fusion energy called… well, the Future of Fusion Energy.

Dr Justin Ball is currently studying plasma theory at Lausanne, and Jason Parisi works on turbulent transport in highly magnetized plasmas just a few buildings away from me here at the University of Oxford.

Their book is an excellent guide to the science, history, and future of fusion energy, and of real help in compiling the marathon efforts in the show so far, so I was excited to be able to grab both of them for an interview to talk about fusion. Since this comes after I’ve already been yakking about fusion for ages, the conversation does assume some knowledge of what nuclear fusion is, but should be easy to follow if you’ve listened to some of the episodes in this series already.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Physical Attraction. My guests were Justin Ball and Jason Parisi. If you’d like to find out more, please do get their book – The Future of Fusion Energy – which is a highly entertaining and informative read. They also both have websites in the same format – Justin-ball.com and Jason-Parisi.com – and they can both be found on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing.

Remember, comments, questions, concerns, feedback, etc. can all be directed to me on Twitter at physicspod, or via the contact form on our website at www.physicspodcast.com – it’s always so wonderful to hear from listeners, and this is your chance to help me make the show as good as it can be! You can help us out by leaving a review on iTunes, purchasing past bonus episodes from the website, or just telling as many people as possible about the show to help spread the word if you like what we do.

Until next time, then, take care.

In 1928, Huey Long was riding high. He'd beaten all opposition and achieved the second step in his life-plan. Get elected to minor public office, check. Get elected to the Governorship, check. There's little doubt given everything we know about him that he was already angling for a seat in the Senate - although in his early addresses he was already lying about "ridding the state of corruption and waste... without ambition for ever again holding another public office." A bold claim for a man who had "become President" on his to-do list.

But in order to do that, he would have to deliver on his outlandish promises that he'd made in the campaign to be Governer. He had to keep his base onside and prove that he wasn't the lying demagogue that his hated media constantly portrayed him to be. In the meantime, the powers that be in the state of Louisiana dusted themselves off and began strategizing how they would manipulate the young and inexperienced Governor to keep their interests at heart.

They had dealt with demagogues before; Huey was not unique in that respect, although few of them had made it to his lofty position. Confidence was probably high amongst the establishment that most of them could work with Huey, that things would continue more or less as they had before, and in a few years - promises largely broken - the political machines could wrestle back control. This was how many people thought it was going to go. A lot of them were mistaken. 

“I would rather go down to a thousand impeachments than admit that I am the Governor of the state that does not dare to call the Standard Oil company to account so that we can educate our children and care for the destitute, sick, and afflicted.”  

Huey called mass rallies, warning his supporters to “beware the lying newspapers, pay no attention to what they say”. At the rallies, he quoted his favourite poem, Invictus:

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul!”

This is the story of the impeachment of Huey Long. 

This is the much-anticipated second part of the Phil Torres Tapes! We have a guest on the show today – Phil Torres. Phil Torres is an author, Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, former contributor at the Future of Life Institute, and founding Director of the X-Risks Institute. He has published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Skeptic, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, Journal of Future Studies, Bioethics, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Foresight, Erkenntnis, and Metaphilosophy, as well as popular media like Time, Motherboard, Salon, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Alternet, The Progressive, and Truthout.

I was absolutely delighted that he agreed to be interviewed for a show like ours, and so I urge you to seek out his website – risksandreligion.org – and buy one of his books. There’s “The End – what Science and Religion have to tell us about the Apocalypse”, which is on my shelf already, and, recently, we have Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing, which is is an introduction to the whole field of existential risks. So I would urge you all, if you’re interested in this topic – that of risks to the entire human species, which I think we can agree affects us all – to buy one of those books.

This is the second part of our conversation, which focuses on AI, Superintelligence, and the control problem. How can we deal with AI, how will it impact our lives and have we any hope of controlling a superintelligent AI? There's plenty more general discussion about existential risks, too. 

Follow Phil @xriskology and the show @physicspod. 

Units and Dimensional Analysis, Pt I: The Metric Revolution

No physicist would be anywhere without dimensional analysis. In this episode, we answer the surprisingly complicated question - how long is a metre?

www.physicspodcast.com for previous shows, information, donations. 

@physicspod on Twitter

www.autocracynow.libsyn.com for Autocracy Now, a show about historical dictators. 

Our series of episodes on nuclear fusion begins with the Rutherford Gold Foil experiment, which first discovered the nucleus and changed our understanding of the atomic world forever. 

From an experiment "every bit as astonishing as if you shot a 15-inch shell at tissue paper and it bounced back", to the poor graduate students who had to stay up all night in pitch dark counting tiny flashes, we'll discuss this seminal experiment and its results. 


Physical Attraction is the podcast about physics, science, and technology. You can find further details about the show at www.physicspodcast.com - where you'll find the contact form, for any comments, questions, or concerns you may have. [I'm very good at responding to stuff that isn't spam.] 

You can also donate to the show via www.paypal.me/physicspodcast and you can subscribe to our Patreon via www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction . Both will give you the opportunity to purchase our past bonus episodes for a nominal donation! 

The best way you can support the show, though, is to tell as many people about it as you possibly can. 

You can engage with us on social media - Twitter @physicspod and Facebook, Physical Attraction. 

Until next time, take care. 

This week, we have a guest on the show - Rodrigo Aguilera. Rodrigo is an economist - born in Mexico, lives in London, and his writing has appeared all over the place in various forms over the years. Specifically, we're talking to him about his book "The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the 21st Century". Now; this may sound like a rather gloomy take to pick, but the point that he is making is essentially that we shouldn't be happy with a narrow and limited definition of "progress" when we have the capacity to achieve so much more. But, of course, if we genuinely do want to see progress: if we want to see things like the elimination of poverty, the application of human ingenuity and compassion and rationality and empathy towards solving the problems that exist in the world - if, in other words, we actually want things to get better, rather than just complacently gesturing at lines on graphs which tell us things are getting better - this must begin with an accurate assessment of where we actually are, right now; what has led to progress in the past; and how we can get further in the future.

Rodrigo was incredibly generous with his time, and so I've split the resulting interview into two parts: you're about to hear the first one, where we will talk about what the "New Optimism" theory is; I hope you enjoy it.

This episode, we have a guest on the show that I'm very excited about. Professor Steve Keen is an economist and author who has been a longstanding critic of neoclassical economics, which has included writing the bestselling Debunking Economics book and hosting the podcast of the same name, as well as developing several alternative models of the macroeconomy. In recent years, he has turned his attention to how neoclassical economics has tried to deal with the issue of climate change... and, well, the fact that his paper is called "The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change" probably tells you something of how he has responded to it.

I was lucky enough to detain him for quite a while, so I've split the interview into two parts. They complement each other, but they can be listened to independently, depending on what you're interested in.

The second part dives deep into the critique of the neoclassical economics of climate change: specifically, how economists have consistently been overconfident in their projections of climate damages and arguably helped lead us towards weak climate policies, and how we might hope to change this in the future. I think this is an incredibly important message and subject to discuss and debate, because unfortunately this stuff has been extremely influential - to the point where one of the main culprits has the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics - so I really urge everyone to listen to that.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Physical Attraction, and thank you to Steve Keen for being so generous with his time and agreeing to be interviewed. You can find Steve on Patreon at www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen where you will have access to a good number of podcasts and posts on economics for free, and where you can subscribe for further access to more shows. He's also on Twitter @ProfSteveKeen where you can keep up with the latest news on this work.

You can find us online at physicspodcast.com. There, you'll find the episode guide on the About page, where you can find all of the episodes we've done on subjects ranging from the birth of stars to the end of the world, and the episodes in the ongoing Climate 201 series which talk about the science, economics, and policy of climate change in much, much greater depth. There you can also get in touch with me with any comments, questions or concerns you might have through the contact form, and you'll also find links to support the show on Paypal for a one-time donation or Patreon for longer-term subscriptions. Thanks very much to everyone who has done that already. Until next time then, please do - take care.

What are "nature-based solutions" to climate change? Can we restore the ecosystems that we've destroyed? And how can restoring mangroves help us to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?

Nectome took the tech social media world by storm when they announced, at Y Combinator, that they'd kill you for $10,000. Well, they'd kill you and preserve your brain, possibly leading to some kind of digital immortality when they upload your brain to a computer. This was met with excitement, skepticism, and - ultimately - MIT severed ties with the company.

We look into the science, ethics, and philosophy of Nectome's proposed brain-uploading scheme. Could it really work? Or is it just a techno-fantasy?


www.physicspodcast.com

-> Contact us with comments, concerns, suggestions for content, anything you like. 

@physicspod on Twitter

Thanks to Shelly Fan of Singularity Hub and various writers of the MIT Technology Review. 

Over the course of this series, we've described how Softbank's $100bn Vision Fund promised to invest in the future and failed to deliver. In this episode, we ask: why should we care? We discuss the wider landscape of technology and innovation, and question why it can't deliver the things we really need.

In 1958, to great fanfare, the ZETA experiment at Harwell announced that they had achieved thermonuclear reactions, controlled in the lab. It was considered a huge breakthrough along the road towards nuclear fusion, and tabloids at the time trumpeted the experiment as allowing "limitless energy from sea water", and called it "Britain's Sputnik". But not everyone was convinced. 


Physical Attraction is the podcast about physics, science, and technology. You can find further details about the show at www.physicspodcast.com - where you'll find the contact form, for any comments, questions, or concerns you may have. [I'm very good at responding to stuff that isn't spam.] 

You can also donate to the show via www.paypal.me/physicspodcast and you can subscribe to our Patreon via www.patreon.com/PhysicalAttraction . Both will give you the opportunity to purchase our past bonus episodes for a nominal donation! 

The best way you can support the show, though, is to tell as many people about it as you possibly can. 

You can engage with us on social media - Twitter @physicspod and Facebook, Physical Attraction. 

Until next time, take care. 

Last episode on the Future of Work, I described the problem – artificial intelligence is going to potentially make a lot of people unemployed in the near-term future; and the range of opinions, you can kind of pick and mix from:

It’s the robot job apocalypse! Society as we know it will soon be over!

It’s okay, we’ll just give everyone a Universal Basic Income and they can all start small businesses or learn to code or something.

It’s okay, we’ll just retrain everyone so that all the coal miners are making solar panels now.

It’s okay, AI won’t replace that many people and has been greatly exaggerated; just because a job has the potential to be automated, doesn’t mean that it will be automated. Instead AI will become a tool that enhances our productivity

It’s okay, AI will replace a lot of people but we’ll just come up with new jobs. No one is smashing spinning jennys nowadays and there aren’t thousands of unemployed loom-weavers on the streets of Manchester because everyone moved on, got new demands, and now they all work in PR.

As for me – I fall in the middle of the two extreme viewpoints, the “we’re all doomed” and “it’s fine” viewpoints. Nice and convenient, you might say. Let me explain in a rant. 


I imagine a lot of people listening are going to disagree with me. I'm not always right! Send your *constructive* criticism to www.physicspodcast.com , the contact page, or get in touch with us via Twitter @physicspod 

If you like what you hear, or just that I took the time to say it, consider helping me towards my own basic income via the Patreon account or the donate button, both of which you'll find on www.physicspodcast.com . You won't even need blockchain to do it. 

In the second part of our series on energy efficiency and its role in combatting climate change, we talk about how buildings can be made more energy efficient... and some of the factors that prevent this from happening.


Thanks to Podcorn for sponsoring this episode. To find out how you can find new sponsors for your podcast, head to podcorn.com/podcasters.

We have a guest on the show today – Phil Torres. Phil Torres is an author, Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, former contributor at the Future of Life Institute, and founding Director of the X-Risks Institute. He has published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Skeptic, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, Journal of Future Studies, Bioethics, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Foresight, Erkenntnis, and Metaphilosophy, as well as popular media like Time, Motherboard, Salon, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Alternet, The Progressive, and Truthout.

I was absolutely delighted that he agreed to be interviewed for a show like ours, and so I urge you to seek out his website – risksandreligion.org – and buy one of his books. There’s “The End – what Science and Religion have to tell us about the Apocalypse”, which is on my shelf already, and, forthcoming, we have Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing, which is going to act as an introduction to the whole field of existential risks, which people have been thinking about for a good deal of time now. So I would urge you all, if you’re interested in this topic – that of risks to the entire human species, which I think we can agree affects us all – to buy one of those books.

This is the first part of our conversation, which touches on what is meant by an existential risk, some specific examples from the modern world in terms of nuclear profileration and nuclear accidents; transhumanism, and how our societies and institutions can deal with existential risks more effectively. We talk about the field in general and how we can hope to think more constructively about the end of the world - without waving a 'The End is Nigh' sign! The second part, which focuses on AI, will be released shortly.

Follow Phil @xriskology and the show @physicspod.

In this episode of our series on Softbank's Vision Fund, we talk about how their investment in fintech company Greensill Capital is potentially part of a series of investments that might create conditions for a new financial crisis, much like that seen in 2008-9.

In this episode, we cover one of the biggest scientific scandals in history: the tragic, tawdry tale of Fleischmann, Pons, and "Cold Fusion".

www.physicspodcast.com

@physicspod

I explore the possible impact that the COVID-19 pandemic will have on our efforts to deal with climate change.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble published his findings. The redshifts from distant galaxies were proportional to their distance away from us. Theoretical cosmologists would pounce on them as evidence that the Universe must be expanding.

As you may already know, yesterday, the Nobel Prize in Physics, 2017 was announced: it went to Kip Thorne, Barry Barish, and Rainer Weiss for their contributions towards the LIGO collaboration that detected gravitational waves.

In this special episode, I'll talk a little bit about the history of the Nobel prizes, explain what they were looking for at LIGO, how they found it, and what it means. So if you ever wondered what a gravitational wave was but were too afraid to ask, hopefully, it'll help you out.

Stay tuned at the end for a marathon housekeeping session where I once again appeal for listener questions.