What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss
4.4 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I’m excited to announce the fourth episode of our new series, What’s New in Science, co-hosted by Sabine Hossenfelder. Once again, Sabine and I each brought a few recent science stories to the table, and we took turns introducing them before diving into thoughtful discussions. It’s a format that continues to spark engaging exchanges, and based on the feedback we’ve received, it’s resonating well with listeners.
It was a bit of a slow month for science news, but we did find six stories worth examining, including what sounds like a preposterous claim, turning rain into electricity! It turns out it doesn’t violate any laws of physics, but is not likely to address our energy needs.
The Hype of the Month award goes to the claim of biosignatures on planet K2-18, which got worldwide coverage, even though experts were pretty certain it was wrong from the get go, and subsequent analysis finds no such evidence.
A claim that gravity is just a computation is examined, and dismissed, while evidence for exotic antimatter nuclei at CERN is sound science, even if it is not earth shattering. It reminds us that exotic physics must be considered in exotic locations like the early big bang, or the cores of neutron stars.
Sabine was excited about a new result regarding laser fusion, even if it is more likely to be useful for weapons production than commercial energy production, and this time, I was the one to bring up a new result in Quantum Computing, this time using ‘qu-quints’ to simulate an actual physics system, although a simple one in two dimensions.
It was another lively and thoughtful exchange, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome to the Orgence podcast. One of my favorite parts of the month is |
| 0:12.3 | What's New in Science with my friend and colleague Sabina Hussenfelder who's here today. |
| 0:17.1 | And we, as usual, talk about what's new in science this month in the past month, |
| 0:22.3 | sometimes things that are hyped, sometimes things that are actually exciting. It depends. |
| 0:27.4 | It's been kind of a slow month as Sabine and I were talking about beforehand. I don't know if it's |
| 0:31.9 | because it's the end of the school year in the northern hemisphere at least, or whether it's because |
| 0:37.0 | of all of the government |
| 0:38.5 | cutbacks and concerns about what's going on and people are holding off, writing up, |
| 0:42.6 | or if it's just an accident, which is probably the answer. |
| 0:45.9 | I don't have any real ideas about that. |
| 0:48.1 | I don't know, Sabina, if you have any, but it is a slow month. |
| 0:51.2 | You would agree? |
| 0:52.3 | Yeah, these things just happen like it comes and goes. |
| 0:55.9 | Yeah, you know, you can't control discovery. |
| 0:58.9 | Anyway, so we have, as usual, the format we established a few months ago. |
| 1:05.3 | We'll do, we have six topics, and I'm going to, and Sabina will lead off. |
| 1:10.9 | Okay, so I'm going to start with something that's between hype and actually exciting. |
| 1:19.0 | So it did get a few headlines, but not too many. |
| 1:22.6 | It's a way of creating electricity from rain. |
| 1:32.3 | And I think one of the headlines I saw was that it's going to overhaul the power grid or something and it's like a new form of renewable energy and so on. |
| 1:37.3 | So I looked at the paper fully expecting this to be complete nonsense, but it's not that bad. |
| 1:43.3 | I actually think it's kind of interesting. It's just that, you know, it's not that bad. I actually think it's kind of interesting. |
... |
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