Searching for Order in the Universe
Wonder Cabinet
Wonder Cabinet Productions
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2020
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When things don't go the way they're supposed to — viruses, star systems, presidents, even fish — we're often desperate to explain the chaos. In this episode, we search for order in the universe.
Original Air Date: August 08, 2020
Guests:
Patrik Svensson — Lulu Miller — Alexander Boxer — Margaret Wertheim — S. James Gates Jr.
Interviews In This Hour:
The Weird World Of Eels — We Call Them Fish. Evolution Says They're Something Else. — The Original Algorithm Was Written In The Stars — Seeing The World With A Mathematician's Eyes
Further Reading:
Nautilus: Eels Don’t Have Sex Until the Last Year of Their Life—NYAS: The Mystery of Our Mathematical Universe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey friends, it's Anne. |
| 0:03.6 | And this week on to the best of our knowledge, we're thinking about one of those gigantic conundrums that we all struggle with, maybe especially right now. |
| 0:13.3 | How to find order in chaos. Because when things don't behave the way they're supposed to, viruses, star systems, presidents, even fish, we kind of can't rest until we find an explanation. |
| 0:30.7 | This episode, looking for order in a chaotic universe. |
| 0:41.3 | Wisconsin Public Radio It's to the best of our knowledge. |
| 0:49.3 | I'm Anne Strange Champs. |
| 0:51.3 | Sometimes, the most profound questions come out of the simplest experiences. |
| 1:04.8 | I have very strong memories from my childhood, fishing for ills with my father. |
| 1:13.4 | This is Patrick Svenson. |
| 1:17.3 | I think I started when I was six or seven years old. |
| 1:22.6 | It was always just me and my father, down by a small stream close to where my father grew up on a farm. |
| 1:36.3 | We went fishing for eels on the summer night. It was a very special place. A lot of green grass, willow trees, the bats flying through the moonlight. |
| 1:52.0 | It was what me and my father did. We fished for eels. |
| 1:58.0 | It was something that combined us. |
| 2:03.6 | I always watched my mother prepare the eels. |
| 2:13.6 | She chopped them up and she put salt and pepper on them and then she fried them with butter in the pan. |
| 2:20.3 | When she put them in the pan, they started moving. |
| 2:25.3 | Those small pieces of eel start to wriggle and shake. |
| 2:43.0 | I always found it fascinating and a little bit scary too. |
| 2:50.0 | It made me think about what's really the difference between life and death? Where is the exact order between? |
| 2:58.2 | It's the mystery, of course. |
| 3:07.0 | Eels are philosophically and scientifically slippery. |
... |
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