What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss
4.4 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2025
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“Science is the only News” -Steward Brand
Steward Brand may have been exaggerating, but not by much. So Sabine Hossenfelder and I decided it is high time to take him at his word.
Sabine is one of the most watched science popularizers online, and a physicist I enjoy listening to and discussing science with. She is opinionated, as am I, and we don’t always agree, which makes things even more interesting. I am very happy that she has agree to collaborate on a new and exciting series for The Origins Podcast.
Once a month Sabine and I will pick 4-5 science stories that have been in the news, and discuss them. We will try and dispel hype, cut through confusion, and give a deeper context to stories that might otherwise simply end up as soundbites on major news networks. We agree on fundamentals, but we each have our own way of thinking about them.
What most people don’t realize is that science, including theoretical physics, is a social activity, with an active dialectic between scientists working at the forefront. Watch our real time discussions to get a sense of how different physicists approach outstanding problems, how we elaborate on them with each other, and how we sometimes differ on what approaches we think are likely to be fruitful.
Our first discussion both lively and illuminating, and got us off to a very good start for this new podcast segment that I high hopes for. From the recent hype about quantum computing and many worlds, to panspermia, commercial nuclear fusion, and the politics of climate change, hang on to your hats, and enjoy!
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.
Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. I'm really excited to introduce a new segment of the Origins podcast, What's New in Science, with Sabina Hosenfelder and me. |
| 0:22.1 | Sabina is a well-known science popularizer from Germany. She's got a very popular YouTube |
| 0:27.3 | channel. She's a physicist like myself and is opinionated like I am. And we had the idea |
| 0:34.0 | of talking about science and the news with a critical eye. |
| 0:39.2 | A lot of science is discussed in the news rather uncritically. |
| 0:42.3 | And I couldn't think of a better person to have that kind of co-hosting role |
| 0:46.3 | with a discussion about popular topics in science than Sabina. |
| 0:49.6 | And I was very happy she agreed to do it. |
| 0:51.7 | And this, our inaugural episode, we talk about four current topics in |
| 0:56.1 | science, ranging from relatively esoteric ones to ones that are more practical. And all of them |
| 1:02.0 | have been in the news in recent times. We talk about recent hype associated with claims of quantum |
| 1:07.4 | computing, about climate change and what's happening related to the most |
| 1:13.2 | recent election in the United States. |
| 1:15.8 | Recent remarkable discoveries from the asteroid Benu from material brought back to Earth that |
| 1:21.4 | has bases of nucleotides for the four of the five bases of DNA nucleotides as well as numerous amino acids |
| 1:31.3 | and the implications of that for finding life elsewhere in the universe. |
| 1:35.3 | And finally, claims for nuclear fusion being practical at an industrial level. |
| 1:40.3 | A bunch of startup companies are making claims and we investigate those. |
| 1:47.9 | It was a wonderful discussion and particularly nice to see our different perspectives. |
| 1:58.1 | I think it's important for the public to see that especially at the cutting edge of science that people can have different perspectives of new results, even if we of course agree on the fundamentals. |
| 2:01.5 | And Sabina is a wonderful person to be able to have that discussion with and I was incredibly excited about the way it came out. And I'm hoping this will be |
| 2:06.2 | a regular segment on our podcast and very popular. So I hope you enjoyed as much as we did. |
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