Matt Ridley: The Origins of COVID-19
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Release Date: 04/07/2022
Hakeem Oluseyi: An unexpected life in Science, and unpopular truths
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
I confess that Hakeem Oluseyi had not really risen on my radar screen until the last year or two. I was aware of the National Society of Black Physicists, having sometimes gotten notices about is meetings, but, being generally unsupportive of current efforts to compartmentalize scientists by their identity, I hadn’t really paid much notice to it. Then, in one of those ironies that periodically makes one feel better about the vicissitudes of fortune, I learned more about him only after people had attempted to cancel him. When I read about Hakeem’s brave and impressive campaign to uncover...
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Martin Rees: If Science is to Save Us, Part 2
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
This is part two of the second podcast dialogue we are airing with renowned astrophysicist, Astronomer Royal, and former President of the Royal Society, Lord Martin Rees. The first time I sat down with Martin for the Podcast we discussed his life in science, and topics ranging from the state of modern cosmology to the potential conflicts between science and religion (which he views as minimal, and I don’t). Martin’s thinking, and his expertise, go far beyond these topics however. Based on his experience at the Royal Society, as an elected member of the House of Lords, and working with the...
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An Origins Podcast EXCLUSIVE: A Dialogue with Cormac McCarthy About Science, on the occasion of his newest book releases
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Cormac McCarthy is a literary icon. Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel All the Pretty Horses, and the Pulitzer Prize for his apocalyptic novel The Road, Norma’s earlier novel, Blood Meridian has been labelled The Great American Novel. Many people did not know that this cultural giant is also fascinated by, and amazingly knowledgeable about science. Reading his newest books, The Passenger and Stella Maris (released this week!), however, and that becomes obvious. The protagonists are mathematical and physics prodigies, and just as one may...
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Geoff Marcy: The Search for Exoplanets and Life Elsewhere in the Universe
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Geoff Marcy has been pioneer in the search for extra-solar system planets since the first discovery of an exoplanet surround a main sequence star was made in 1995 by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. Within months, Marcy and his team had not only confirmed this result but detected numerous other exoplanets. Seventy of the first one hundred exoplanets were discovered by Marcy’s team, including the firs exoplanet located as far away from its star as Jupiter is to the Sun, and the first exoplanet discovered by observing its transit of its host star, a technique that will be used by JWST to...
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Andy Knoll: The First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Andy Knoll is a Renaissance Scientist. He is a geologist, paleobiologist, and geochemist and has applied key ideas from chemistry, biology, physiology and more to understanding the key developments associated with life on Earth—both how geology and chemistry have impacted on life, and vice versa. He has made ground breaking contributions to the understanding of almost every phase of life, from early Pre-Cambrian single cell life, to the emergence of more complex lifeforms, to mass extinctions. His group was the first to demonstrate that the rapid rise of CO2 was probably responsible for the...
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Charles Murray: On Human Diversity
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
After writing the book, The Bell Curve, Charles Murray became a controversial figure in the US Social Science scene, and was much maligned in the public arena. His work has been misinterpreted as being racist and sexist, and at Middlebury College students forcibly stopped his guest lecture and rioted. As often the case with stereotypes, Murray is instead a thoughtful scholar who has tried to base his social science research on data from empirical science, something that should be standard, but isn’t. I wanted to discuss his most recent book, Human Diversity, with him. It is far from...
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(Audio) John Mather: From the Big Bang to Searching for Life
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
John Mather is an astrophysicist at NASA who has been involved in important space missions to probe our fundamental understanding of the Universe for over four decades. He helped lead the design and deployment of the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE), which launched in 1989 to probe the cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang with a precision that could not be obtained from terrestrial experiments because of absorption of radiation by the atmosphere. The experiments on COBE, and its successor missions WMAP and PLANCK, literally have turned cosmology from an art to a...
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Origins Podcast with Michael Shellenberger: From Apocalypse Never to Running for Governor
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
I was very happy to have the chance to speak to Michael Shellenberger some time ago, after his book Apocalypse Never appeared. Having written my book, The Physics of Climate Change, I was intrigued by his take on the fact that climate change is not an existential threat. Once I read his book, I realized we agreed on many things, with perhaps the differences being on emphasize rather than substance. Nevertheless, we did have some disagreements, and we had a very spirited, and I hope respectful, discussion about climate change and its implications, but also on the other issues that need to be...
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Jonathan Rauch: Free Thought, Democracy, and the Nature of Science
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Jonathan Rauch was 30 years ahead of the curve. In his book Kindly Inquisitors, written in 1993, he described the very mechanisms by which ideology can undermine both the search for truth, and the democratic ideal of free thought—mechanisms which have now become endemic in our society. But more than that, in that book, and in The Constitution of Knowledge, written in 2021 he lays out more clearly than anyone I have ever read, the philosophical and sociological basis of science. The search for truth, and the proper functioning of democratic government both require the same social contract:...
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Alan Guth: Inflation of The Universe & More
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
In 1979 Alan Guth, then a postdoc at Cornell, made what is perhaps the most important contribution to our theoretical understanding of the evolution of the Universe in the past half century. His realization that the early universe could have undergone a brief period of what he dubbed as “Inflation” provided the first and to date the only explanation of the large scale properties of the Universe compatible with observations, and based on well-defined, calculable, microphysical physics principles. Since that time, Inflation has become the paradigm of modern cosmology, and it made fundamental...
info_outline(The Origins Podcast will appear every other Thursday.)
Matt Ridley is a veteran journalist and science writer, with a training in genetics. He is also a Conservative member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and I were able to discuss his training, and his move from scientist to journalist, as well as the spectrum of his experiences in his various roles. We then moved on to the centerpiece of our dialogue: His newest book, Viral, written with geneticist Alina Chan. Together they produced what I view to be a masterpiece of science writing and detective work, exploring the origins of Covid-19. Our discussion, like the book, allowed us to illustrate a lot of the science related to the virus, and the current pandemic.
There are numerous surprises. One of the most remarkable was the realization that much of the important detective work uncovering the possible origin of the pandemic came from self-trained internet sleuths who were able to uncover masters theses, as well as online registries that had either not been referenced in the professional literature, or incorrectly referenced.
One comes away from the discussion with the realization that we still do not know for certain the origin of Covid-19, in spite of claims to the contrary. Recent, highly publicized scientific articles suggesting the Wuhan Seafood Market as the origin still have to deal with the fact that no direct evidence of the virus has yet to be uncovered from any of the animals at the market. At the same time, there is clear evidence that the Wuhan Virology Institute was working on Covid viruses, including viruses from bats that had caused Covid-like symptoms coming from a cave located far away in China.
Neither Ridley nor Chan advocate any particular scenario for the current outbreak. But it is clear that open, transparent discussion of the available evidence is very important if the world is to understand better how this pandemic started, and how to possibly head off, or prepare for the next one.
I found our discussion, and the book, incredibly informative, and Matt is a lucid and experienced explicator of both science, and social issues. I hope you enjoy the in-depth discussion we had in this, our most recent episode of The Origins Podcast.
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