Stay ConnectedPoint of Inquiry is the Center for Inquiry’s flagship podcast, where the brightest minds of our time sound off on all the things you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table: science, religion, and politics.
Guests have included Brian Greene, Susan Jacoby, Richard Dawkins, Ann Druyan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugenie Scott, Adam Savage, Bill Nye, and Francis Collins.
Point of Inquiry is produced at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y.
Copyright: © Center for Inquiry
This year's flu season has been dubbed the worst in recent history, despite the fact that the flu vaccine is fairly effective and readily available. But of course, not everyone experiencing flu-like symptoms actually has the flu—with so many cold viruses and bacterial infections being passed around, it seems that everyone has been sick this January. Long nights, low humidity, holiday parties all combine to create the perfect breeding ground for the tiny organisms that make us miserable.
Singers like myself are particularly sensitive to illnesses that make it impossible for us to do our jobs and so, as I traveled to Raleigh last week for a conference of science writers, journalists, bloggers and broadcasters, I couldn't help but think about bugs and viruses in between hand washings. It's no surprise then, that when I had the opportunity to chat with one of the most prolific and popular science writers in the world—Carl Zimmer—we climbed through the looking glass and into the microscopic realm of germs.
Carl Zimmer is an award-winning science writer whose work is often published in the New York Times, National Geographic, Time, Scientific American, and other outlets.
His books include a history of neuroscience called Soul Made Flesh, Parasite Rex, and Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
He is also a co-author of 3 critically-acclaimed textbooks on evolution and his popular blog The Loom is now hosted by National Geographic. A popular public speaker and a frequent guest on Radiolab and This American Life, Zimmer is also the only science writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.
Host: Chris Mooney
We are thrilled by our guest this week, who is not only one of the world's most famous economists and economics commentators, but also a Nobel Laureate in his field: Paul Krugman.
In case he needs any introduction: He is a professor of economics at Princeton and a columnist for the New York Times, as well of the author of the blog on its website entitled "The Conscience of a Liberal."
The occasion for our interview is the release of his latest book, End this Depression Now, in paperback. It is just out and, besides being a very lucid explanation of our current economic predicament, it is also a work that goes straight at the heart of a central concern of this show—what is science, and what isn't, in a field that is perhaps even more political than other aspects of science... economics.
Host: Chris Mooney
Our guest this week is Sean Carroll—theoretical physicist at CalTech, and skilled science communicator.
I've known Sean and his work for almost a decade, and I've invited him on to talk about his latest book: The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World.
Sean Carroll is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on theoretical physics and cosmology, especially the origin and constituents of the universe. He has contributed to models of interactions between dark matter, dark energy, and ordinary matter; alternative theories of gravity; and violations of fundamental symmetries. Carroll is also the author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. He has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television. He blogs at Preposterous Universe.
Host: Chris Mooney
Our guest this week is Maria Konnikova, who is the author of a simply fascinating new book about training your mind so you're as sharp as the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
It's entitled Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.
In addition to her new book, Konnikova writes the "Literally Psyched" column for Scientific American, and is a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia University.
She's also written for The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, and other publications. Mastermind is her first book.
Host: Chris Mooney
This is our first show of 2013, and notably, we're still here.
A lot of people actually thought the world was going to end at the end of last year, which, presumably, means that now it's rejoicing time.
And also reflection time. Time for reflection on all the things that people are capable of believing, as well as the things that might really lead to global catastrophe someday.
To help us in that process, we've invited back our expert on all things related to the world ending and not ending: Phil Plait.
He needs no introduction, except to say that he's the Bad Astronomer. He's the Bad Astronomer at Slate, on Twitter, and on every other platform you can imagine.
Phil Plait is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope data and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. His two books are Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" and Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the Universe Will End.
Host: Indre Viskontas
It's become almost a truism that in their spare time, skeptics tend to gravitate towards TV shows, novels and games that portray the very monsters, myths and conspiracies that they work so hard to debunk. A great story is just as entertaining to the most hardened skeptics as it is to the rest of the population. And because they are often more knowledgeable about the history of a particular monster or myth, skeptics might even enjoy fictional depictions of pet topics more than the uninitiated general public.
A case in point is author and podcaster Scott Sigler, whose fascination with monsters led him not only to read and watch stories about monsters, but even to invest all of his creative energy and talent into writing horrifying and thrilling science fiction novels. But is there a risk of propagating myths through storytelling? Does science fiction help or hurt critical thinking? To get some insights into these questions, we talked to Scott about his writing process, his characters and what truths we can learn about ourselves through fiction.
New York Times best-selling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of Nocturnal, Ancestor, Infected, and Contagious, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing, and the co-founder of Dark Øverlord Media, which publishes his Galactic Football League series. Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who call themselves "Junkies," have downloaded over fifteen million individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social media space. Scott reinvented book publishing when he released Earthcore as the world's first "podcast-only" novel, harkening back to the days of serialized radio fiction. He's been covered in Time magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, and The Huffington Post, among others. He still records his own audiobooks and gives away every story-for free-to his Junkies at ScottSigler.com.
Host: Chris Mooney
We usually record Point of Inquiry at a distance. Over the phone. Skyping.
But for this show, I packed up my gear and hailed a cab—to the Center for Inquiry's brand new Office of Public Policy in downtown, Washington, D.C.
The Center for Inquiry is here to literally make this country listen to reason... and science. It's a sensibility that is simply in far too short of a supply in this town.
So I sat down with Ronald A. Lindsay, CFI's president, and Michael De Dora, head of the Office of Public Policy, to talk about their plans to make our legislators and leaders just a little more rational and science based.
Ronald A. Lindsay is president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has led the organization since 2008.
Michael De Dora is director of the Center for Inquiry Office of Public Policy and its representative to the United Nations.
Host: Chris Mooney
It's rare that I can say about a guest that, I read his books when I was a kid.
But David Brin is just such a guest. He's the celebrated science fiction author of the Uplift novels, The Postman, and many other books—most recently, Existence. I read the Uplift books when I was tearing through sci-fi as a teenager.
But on top of that, Brin is also a trained scientist and public policy commentator. And in his commentary, as in his novels, he's concerned with the same themes that motivate this show: How can we protect science from the forces that want to do it in? And, can people really be rational?
So, we're excited to have him on the show.
Host: Chris Mooney
When we last had Bill McKibben on this show in 2010, I was mainly treating him as another bestselling science author—one who happens to focus on climate change.
Well.
Something kinda big happened in the intervening years, and McKibben has become, simply put, the country's leading environmental spokesman and advocate through his organization 350.org.
From protests against the Keystone XL pipeline to, most recently, his "Do the Math" tour, rallying of college students to call for their universities to divest from fossil fuel companies... McKibben now speaks for a stunning mass movement of concerned people.
Many of them are young. And many of them are terrified at what is happening to the planet that, in his last book, McKibben renamed "Eaarth," because, he said, the old name just didn't really capture it any longer.
So, we are simply thrilled to welcome him back on the show.
Host: Indre Viskontas
Because we live in an uncertain world, we arm ourselves with facts to gain a sense of control and therefore some modicum of comfort. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow even though it disappears tonight. But what happens when facts, those bits of information that we believed captured some fundamental truth about our world, are shown to be no longer true? With the exponential rise in our knowledge about our universe comes a tsunami of data overturning what we once thought we knew with complete certainty. Are there patterns that emerge from this wasteland of myths that once were accepted facts.
One tried and true solution is to apply math to the problem, and network scientist and author Samuel Arbesman has done just that in his recently published book on the Half-life of Facts.
Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist. He is a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. In addition, he blogs at Wired.com, and his essays about math and science have appeared in such places as the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, Arbesman was a research fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, where he used network science and applied mathematics to study innovation, scientific discovery, and prosocial behavior. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University in 2008, and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University in 2004. He has also coined a new word, named an asteroid, and created an eponymous constant and the Milky Way Transit Authority subway map.
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