Alex O'Connor
speaker
2,073 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 May
Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's interested in the how question.
Some people think the why question just shouldn't exist.
That's fine to say.
But science itself is definitely in the business of describing science.
Scientists will happily tell you that anything which is true about physics can be described mathematically.
But if you think about what maths is, it's equations.
They don't do anything.
Stephen Hawking, at the end of A Brief History of Time, quite famously, I wish I could recite it from memory.
It's so beautiful.
He writes about how he hopes that maybe one day our basic scientific theories will condense into one great big theory of everything, that there'll be one beautiful equation that sort of governs everything about the universe.
But he says we'll still be left with the question of what breathes fire into the equations.
Equations don't make things move.
They describe how things move when they're in motion, right?
So we're left with this great big explanatory gap.
If people are in any doubt about this, there's a wonderful clip of Richard Feynman.
It's a BBC interviewer asking him about magnets.
He says, you know, when I push two magnets together, they repel each other.
What's going on there?
And Feynman's like, well, you know, the magnets are repelling each other.
And he goes, yeah, no, but you know, what's happening there?
Showing 481–500 of 2,073 · page 25 of 104
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