Transcript

 “Our minds are made up of all the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature – the architecture of our brains was born from the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happens in flowers, and jellyfish and Higgs particles…”

says astrophysicist Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities. Creative Writing, Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in his new book The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew. 

In this podcast he talks to Pod Academy’s Craig Barfoot about the Big Bang (apparently it wasn’t like an explosion), and how the universe created time and space when it started to expand.  He also takes us on a trip around multiverses, the many universes that science predicts exist, but which may be very different indeed from our own universe.

But while it is possible that science may soon explain everything in the physical world, will it ever, he muses, be able to explain the feeling of being in love?

Professor Lightman is an astrophysicist and also a poet and novelist. His best selling novel,  Einstein’s Dreams, about the young Albert Einstein working on his theory of relativity but troubled by dreams explores human beings’ relationship to time. It has been translated into thirty languages.

It is this combination of science and humanities which is at the heart of this podcast.

 

Tags: Big Bang, Multiverses, Physics