MULTIVERSES
Episodes
A Story For Humanity — Minhyong Kim on Why Maths Will Never End
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Gauss famously described mathematics as the queen of the sciences. But how should we think of this discipline? Is it an aloof ruler, mysteriously gove...
Molecules & Mirrors —Vanessa Seifert on the Philosophy of Chemistry
05 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do molecules have a "handedness" when the physics that determines their structure does not?* This is a question emblematic of the philo...
Consciousness is not Computation — Christof Koch
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Christof Koch is a pioneering neuroscientist and one of the most prominent advocates of a scientific approach to consciousness. He has spent decades w...
Where Does It End? — Adrian Moore on The Infinite
14 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Infinity may seem simple, just the absence of limits. But the closer we examine it, the more it unravels into paradox and mystery. Can some infinities...
37| Mind-Wandering — Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva on the Science of Spontaneous Thought
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mind-wandering is often dismissed as a distraction, an idle drift away from productive thought. But what if this spontaneous movement of the mind is n...
36| History of Science: Mythmaking & Contingency — Patricia Fara
23 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Scientific discoveries can often be codified in simple laws, neatly stated in textbooks with directions on applying them. But the enterprise of scienc...
35| Hypercomputation: Why Machines May never Think Like Humans — Selmer Bringsjord
08 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
AI can do many things equally well as humans: such as writing plausible prose or answering exam questions. In certain domains, AI goes far beyond huma...
34| Animal Minds — Kristin Andrews on why assuming consciousness would aid science
27 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There is no consensus on what minds are, but there is plenty of agreement on where they can be found: in humans. Yet human consciousness may account f...
33| Taking Chance Seriously — Alastair Wilson on Quantum Modal Realism
19 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Things happen. Or they don’t. How then should we make sense of claims that something might happen?If all these claims do is express doubt, then the ...
AI Moonshot — Nell Watson on the Near & Not So Near Future of Intelligence
21 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The launch of ChatGPT was a "Sputnik moment". In making tangible decades of progress it shot AI to the fore of public consciousness. This attention is...
Do Electrons Exist? — Céline Henne: Physicist's Views on Scientific Realism & Instrumentalism
04 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Physics helps get stuff done. Its application has put rockets in space, semiconductors in phones, and eclipses on calendars. For some philosopher...
30| Thinking Beyond Language — Anna Ivanova on what LLMs can learn from the brain
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It can be tempting to consider language and thought as inextricably linked. As such we might conclude that LLM's human-like capabilities for manipulat...
29 | What are words good for? — Nikhil Krishnan on Ordinary Language Philosophy
12 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Words. (Huh? Yeah!) What are they good for? Absolutely everything.At least this was the view of some philosophers early in the 20th century, that the ...
28| Music Evolution & Empirical Aesthetics — Manuel Anglada Tort
28 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Music may be magical. But it is also rooted in the material world. As such it can be the subject of empirical inquiry. How does what we are told ...
27| Why Knowledge is Not Enough — Jessie Munton
14 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If all my beliefs are correct, could I still be prejudiced?Philosophers have spent a lot of time thinking about knowledge. But their efforts have focu...
26| Networks, Heartbeats & the Pace of Cities — Geoffrey West
29 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do whales live longer than hummingbirds? What makes megacities more energy efficient than towns? Is the rate of technological innovation sustainab...
25| Peter Nixey — AI: Disruption Ahead
15 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's easy to recognize the potential of incremental advances — more efficient cars or faster computer chips for instance. But when a genuinely new t...
24| How Philosophy Serves Science — David Papineau
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Are philosophy and science entirely different paradigms for thinking about the world? Or should we think of them as continuous: overlapping in their c...
23| Paulina Sliwa — Moral philosophy as puzzles of daily life
18 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do men do less housework? What happens when an apology is offered? What are we looking for when we ask for advice?These are the sorts of problems ...
22| Sean McMahon — Astrobiology: what is life & how to know it when we see it?
04 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Life. What is it? How did it start? Is it unique to Earth, rare or abundantly distributed throughout the universe?While biology has made great strides...
21| How and why do animals play? — Gordon Burghardt
21 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many animals play. But why? Play has emerged in species as distinct as rats, turtles, and octopi although they are separated by hundreds of milli...
20| Simon Kirby — Language Evolution & Emergence of Structure
07 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Language is the ultimate Lego. With it, we can take simple elements and construct them into an edifice of meaning. Its power is not only in mapping si...
19| The Meaning of Net Zero — Myles Allen
16 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
To stop global warming it is not enough to stop atmospheric CO2 rising. That is not the meaning of net zero.Despite net zero being a core concept in t...
18| Feeling Right: Emotions & Ethics — James Hutton
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Can we trust our emotions as a guide to right and wrong?This week's guest James Hutton is a philosopher at the University of Delft who argues that emo...
17| Santiago Bilinkis — Artificial Intelligence: Risks & Rewards
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Could AI's ability to make us fall in love with be our downfall? Will AI be like cars, machines that encourage us to be sedentary, or will we use it l...
16| Gábor Domokos — The Gömböc, a shape at the limit of possibility
05 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Gomboc is a curious shape. So curious many mathematicians thought it could not exist. And even to the untrained eye, it looks alien: neither the p...
15 | Simon Critchley — Philosophical itches & how to scratch
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From what human need does philosophy emerge? And where can it lead us? Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of Philosophy at the New School in...
14| ChatGPT as a Glider — James Intriligator
07 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Large language models, such as ChatGPT are poised to change the way we develop, research, and perhaps even think. But how do we best understand LLMs t...
13| Phylogeny & The Canterbury Tales — Peter Robinson
24 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The physical solidity of books encourages notions of "the text" or "the canonical edition". The challenges to this view from post-modernist thought ar...
12 | The Long Now — Peter Schwartz
10 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For hundreds of years, things changed slowly. Innovations were infrequent and spread inchmeal. Population, culture, and the atmosphere, all were stati...
11| AI, Risk, Fairness & Responsibility — John Zerilli
20 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
AI is already changing the world. It's tempting to assume that AI will be so transformative that we'll inevitably fail to harness it correctly, succum...
10| Plants, Roots, Spirals and Palaeobotany — Sandy Hetherington
13 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Plants have transformed the surface of the earth and the contents of our atmosphere. To do this they've developed elaborate systems of roots and branc...
9| The Hunt for Hydrogen — Rūta Karolytė
06 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Does the Earth contain enormous clean energy reserves? For many years the received logic was that hydrogen does not occur naturally in significant qua...
8 | Harald Wiltsche — Thought Experiments, Mach, Galileo & Phenomenology
29 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Thought experiments have played a starring role in physics. They seem, sometimes, to pluck knowledge out of thin air. This is the starting point for m...
7| Anna Lewis — Genomics, polygenic risk scores, genetic ancestry, race & ethics
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Genomics is leading a revolution in our understanding of disease. But the ways we pursue genomics research and the use we make of that knowledge deman...
6| Christian Bök — Poetry, Constraints, DNA & The Xenotext
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Christian Bök is an award-winning poet pushing the boundaries of the medium and exploring the capabilities of language itself. Rather than focusing o...
5| QBism: The World is Unfinished — Ruediger Schack
08 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is the fate of the universe predetermined? Many physicists and philosophers argue it is, particularly those who adopt the Many Worlds interpretation o...
4| Science & Poetry — Sam Illingworth
01 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Science and poetry are sometimes caricatured as opposing paradigms: the emotional expression of the self versus the objective representation of nature...
3| Julian Barbour — Relational Space and Time
25 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Space and time appear in charts as axes oblivious to the points they demarcate. Similarly, we may feel that we, and all the objects of our worlds, are...
2 | David Wallace — The Emergent Multiverse
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We live in a branching universe. If it can happen, it does happen.These are the almost incredible claims of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum ...
1 | Casey Handmer — Mining the Air
11 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries (TI).TI is pioneering air-to-fuel technology to manufacture methane (natural gas) from the air. C...