Latest Thermodynamics Podcast Episodes
Multiple worlds, containing multitudes
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - April 10, 2024 18:42 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsGuests: Heather Graham, Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifish music; “Determination of Azimuth,” written by Heather Graham, staged at ...
How human history shapes scientific inquiry
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - March 27, 2024 20:54 - 33 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsGuests: David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute Sean Carroll, External Professor and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris K...
Ep 4: The physics of collectives
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - March 13, 2024 19:47 - 33 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsGuests: Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Biology at University of New Mexico Hyejin Youn, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Professor at Institute of Northwestern University Hosts: Abha...
Why is life so diverse?
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - February 28, 2024 21:59 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsGuests: Brian Enquist, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona Pablo Marquet, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor at Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile...
How do we identify life?
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - February 14, 2024 22:07 - 33 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsGuests: Ricard Solé, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra Sara Walker, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kemp...
What can physics tell us about ourselves?
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - January 31, 2024 21:27 - 34 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsGuests: Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Kath...
Relaunch of Complexity Podcast Trailer
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - January 29, 2024 22:53 - 3 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsTrailer for Complexity: Physics of Life, from the Santa Fe Institute
Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - June 30, 2023 17:16 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsEpisode Title and Show Notes: 106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have...
Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - April 05, 2023 17:12 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsOne way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music...
Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - March 24, 2023 16:37 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsFor centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these syst...
Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - March 09, 2023 23:56 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsHow do we get a handle on complex systems thinking? What are the implications of this science for philosophy, and where does philosophical tradition foreshadow findings from the scientific frontier? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Ga...
Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - February 24, 2023 16:28 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsAnd now for something completely different! Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in huma...
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06)
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - February 09, 2023 00:39 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsThere are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and th...
Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - January 25, 2023 20:50 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsThis is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society?...
Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - January 11, 2023 21:21 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsHumans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history ...
Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - December 22, 2022 16:51 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsWhat does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for different strategies in individual and collective cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”?...
Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - December 10, 2022 01:02 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsIn his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that diffe...
John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - November 23, 2022 21:24 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsWhat makes us human? Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solving, and tool-use in other organisms. But there remains a clear sense that humans stand apart — ev...
John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - November 11, 2022 16:20 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsThe brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial in...
David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - October 21, 2022 00:10 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsCommunication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and matter is one of the deepest known to science. There appear to be limits to the rate at which co...
Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - October 01, 2022 00:48 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsWhat does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather coales...
Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - September 21, 2022 21:32 - 57 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsOne way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly an...
Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - September 02, 2022 21:54 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsAs the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass that wealthy special interests twist the rules so much it undermines the game itself. When economic power overtakes the processes of democratic go...
Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - August 19, 2022 04:51 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsChances are you’re listening to this on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket, but is really just one tentacle tip of a giant, planet-spanning architecture for the gathering and processing of data. A common sentiment among the smartphone-enabled human population is that we not only don’t...
Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - August 03, 2022 19:05 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsHuman beings are distinctly weird. We live for a very long time after we stop reproducing, move completely differently than all of our closest relatives, lack the power of chimpanzees and other primates but completely outdo most other terrestrial mammals in a contest of endurance. If we think ab...
Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - July 18, 2022 21:58 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsAsk any martial artist: It’s not just where a person strikes you but your stance that matters. The amplitude and angle of a blow is one thing but how you can absorb and/or deflect it makes the difference. The same is true in any evolutionary system. Most people seem to know “the butterfly effect...
Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - July 02, 2022 20:05 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsWhat is life, and where does it come from? These are two of the deepest, most vexing, and persistent questions in science, and their enduring mystery and allure is complicated by the fact that scientists approach them from a myriad of different angles, hard to reconcile. Whatever else one might ...
Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - June 18, 2022 22:20 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsMath and music share their mystery and magic. Three notes, played together, make a chord whose properties could not be predicted from those of the separate notes. In the West, music theory and mathematics have common origins and a rich history of shaping and informing one another’s field of inqu...
Seth Blumsack on Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - June 04, 2022 16:49 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsWe lead our lives largely unaware of the immense effort required to support them. All of us grew up inside the so-called “Grid” — actually one of many interconnected regional power grids that electrify our modern world. The physical infrastructure and the regulatory intricacies required to keep ...
Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life - May 21, 2022 16:25 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 239 ratingsAs our world knits together, economic interdependencies change in both shape and nature. Supply chains, finance, labor, technological innovation, and geography interact in puzzling nonlinear ways. Can we step back far enough and see clearly enough to make sense of these interactions? Can we map ...
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