Closer To Truth

What's Real About Time?

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Time seems natural and absolute: the flow of moments one following another from the unknown past to the knife's edge present to the unknowable future. But this is not so. Einstein shocked the world by showing that time was "relative." What's the latest about time?
 
Featuring interviews with Gregory Benford, Kip Thorne, Nima Arkani-Hamed, and Lee Smolin.

Arguments Against God?

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All who affirm that God does exist should examine the strong attacks of those who conclude that God does not exist, and then assess the sharp counterattacks of scholarly believers. Belief in God is too important to be determined by cultural circumstances.
 
Featuring interviews with Susan Blackmore, Peter Atkins, Alvin Plantinga, and Steven Weinberg.
 
You can watch the full episode on our YouTube channel here.

What is the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe?

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Galaxies and clusters of galaxies, untold billions of them, adorn the cosmos. How did such large-scale structure of the universe come about?
 
Featuring interviews with John Richard Gott III, Abraham Loeb, George Smoot, and Saul Perlmutter.

Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem?

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Are human beings purely physical? Evolved at random and destined to die, extinguished forever? Or are we something more? A spirit or a soul, with existence beyond? What's the relationship between our brains and our consciousness, between the stuff in our skulls and the essence in our minds?
 
Featuring interviews with Ned Block, Dean Zimmerman, Colin McGinn, Charles Tart, and Henry Stapp.

Sara Imari Walker on Physics, Emergence, and Life on Other Planets

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Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker shares an intriguing new scientific theory that explains what life is and how it emerges. What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like.
 
Walker's latest book Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence, is available for purchase now.
 
Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and discovering alien life on other worlds. She is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She is also a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the recipient of the Stanley L. Miller Early-Career Award for her research on the origin of life, and her research team at ASU is internationally regarded as being among the leading labs aiming to build a fundamental theory for understanding what life is.
 
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Richard Dawkins on Evolution, Atheism, and Aliens

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Renowned biologist Richard Dawkins discusses his views on topics including philosophy of biology, evolution, atheism and religion, extraterrestrial life, and human and animal culture. 
Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, and author. He is one of the world’s most eminent writers and thinkers of our time, and a major contributor to the public understanding of the science of evolution. He is currently an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature.

Would Intelligent Aliens Undermine God?

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Whether extra-terrestrial intelligences exist has profound implications for human religion. We are either alone or not alone in the universe, but no matter the ultimate answer, theists and atheists will each mold that answer, alone or not alone, to fit their opposing worldviews.
 
Featuring interviews with Steven Dick, Russell Stannard, Paul Davies, Robin Collins, and Douglas Vakoch.
 
Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

Greg Epstein on Technology, Morality, and Religion

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Harvard and MIT's influential humanist chaplain Greg Epstein discusses his new book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. In our tumultuous era of religious extremism and rampant capitalism, Tech Agnostic offers a new path forward, where we maintain enough critical distance to remember that all that glitters is not gold—nor is it God.
 
Greg M. Epstein serves as Humanist Chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He was TechCrunch's first “ethicist in residence” and has been called “a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion” (The Conversation). He is also the author of the New York Times-bestselling book Good Without God.

How do Breakthroughs Happen in Physics?

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The nature of scientific Breakthroughs is one approach; the process of scientific Breakthroughs is quite another. When physicists reflect on how they do physics, when physicists review the history of physics, what are the ways in which Breakthroughs occur?
 
Featuring interviews with Robbert Dijkgraaf, Gregory Chaitin, Edward Witten, and Karen Uhlenbeck.
 
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What's Beyond Physics?

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Are there revolutionary discoveries yet to be made? Radical revelations and shocking secrets? Does physical reality go beyond what we know today? Far beyond?
 
Featuring interviews with Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Rupert Sheldrake, Paul Davies, and David Chalmers.