133 | Ziya Tong on Realities We Don't See
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2021
⏱️ 98 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are drastically limited; we only see a narrow spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and we only hear a narrow band of sound. We don’t feel neutrinos or dark matter at all, even as they pass through our bodies, and we can’t perceive microscopic objects. While science can help us overcome some of these limitations, they do shape how we think about the world. Ziya Tong takes this idea and expands it to include the parts of our social and moral worlds that are effectively invisible to us — from where our food comes from to how we decide how wealth is allocated in society.
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Ziya Tong received a B.A. in psychology and sociology from the University of British Columbia, and an M.A. in communications from McGill University. She has served as host, writer, director, producer, and reporter from a number of science programs, most notably Daily Planet on Discovery Canada. She is a Trustee of the World Wildlife Fund, and served on the Board of WWF Canada. Her book The Reality Bubble: How Science Reveals the Hidden Truths that Shape Our World was published in 2019.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and I'm pretty sure |
| 0:04.5 | I don't need to tell anyone who is listening to this podcast that there's a difference between the world of our everyday |
| 0:11.3 | Senses though the world we see around us and the picture of that world that we construct mentally with tables and chairs and people and stuff like that |
| 0:19.3 | And the world as it really is and this distinction between the world that we immediately see and the world as it is |
| 0:25.9 | comes in a number of different flavors, you know, we could talk about quantum mechanics and we could talk about the fact that |
| 0:31.9 | the real world in some sense as far as we know it right now should be thought of as a quantum wave function of a set of fields in |
| 0:40.1 | space time rather than a bunch of objects with, you know, masses and positions located in the universe |
| 0:46.6 | But there's another sense it's sort of a more down to earth sense in that, you know, we just don't see or sense |
| 0:52.7 | I should say everything that is around us and in the most obvious way |
| 0:57.2 | We don't see the entire electromagnetic spectrum, right? We see visible light. We don't see radio waves or x-rays or whatever |
| 1:03.3 | We don't see neutrinos or gravitational waves or all the dark matter particles that are passing through us |
| 1:09.2 | There's a very direct sense in which we don't see all of the world and there's another kind of deeper sense |
| 1:15.3 | Which is that we tend to pay attention to certain aspects of the world, right? |
| 1:20.2 | To things that happen on more or less human scales |
| 1:24.3 | So we know that you know there's microorganisms inside our body and whatever and we know that there are |
| 1:29.5 | events that only happen once every million years or something like that |
| 1:33.2 | But those don't really impinge upon our everyday awareness and to some extent science |
| 1:39.3 | Helps us overcome these limitations, right? We can look at very tiny things very big things |
| 1:44.7 | We can think about very short time scales and very long time scales |
| 1:48.7 | So today's guest is Ayton who's very well known in Canada |
| 1:52.8 | She's the co-host of Daily Planet, which is a science program on Discovery Canada |
| 1:58.0 | And she's also a producer host writer director for a number of different science shows |
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