Big Picture Science for Oct.. 14, 2024 - Skeptic Check: String Theory

Big Picture Science - Skeptic Check: String Theory

The idea that the universe is made of tiny vibrating strings was once the science theory du jour. String theory promised to unite the disparate theories describing particles and gravity, and many people, not just scientists, were optimistic that a theory of everything might be within our grasp. But here we are, many years later, and string theory doesn’t seem to have delivered on its initial promise. What happened? We consider the science around string theory in this episode of Skeptic Check.

Guest:

• Brian Greene – Physicist and mathematician at Columbia University, and author of The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.

Download podcast at - https://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/skeptic-check-string-theory

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Big Picture Science for Oct.. 07, 2024 - We’ll Always Have Parasites

 

Big Picture Science - We’ll Always Have Parasites

REPEAT

Imagine tapeworms longer than the height of an adult human. Or microbes that turn their hosts into zombies. If the revulsion they induce doesn’t do it, the sheer number of parasites force us to pay attention. They are the most abundant form of animal life on Earth. Parasites can cause untold human suffering, like those that cause African River Blindness or Lyme disease, but their presence is also a sign of a health ecosystem. A parasitologist whose lab contains the largest parasite collection in the world gives us the ultimate inside story about these organisms.

Guest:

• Scott Gardner - Curator of parasites in the H.W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska State Museum, one of the largest collections of parasites in the world, and professor of biological sciences at University of Nebraska. Co-author of Parasites: The Inside Story.

This repeat podcast originally aired on July 31, 2023

Download podcast at - https://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/well-always-have-parasites

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://bigpicturescience.org/