Ancient Science Podcast

The San Francisco Exploratorium has launched a new website on "Evidence: How We Know What We Know." I was interviewed some time ago for this new launch, and elements of that interview are now available on their site as a podcast. Go to their new project page (above), click "Enter the Site" and select the Podcasts option down on the right side. I'm the second guest. It's about eleven minutes on "Why do Nutcrackers Work? (and other historical questions of science)," where I talk about the ancient origins of modern scientific values and the meaning of this for today.

There was perhaps an hour of Q&A recorded, but only ten minutes were used. Though I understand the need of that, this did create some problems. The editor stitched together elements of my answers into a continuous lecture. So you don't hear the questions I'm answering, or the entirety of my answers, so it sounds like I'm just rambling from topic to topic. Hearing it back I found it a little confusing at times. For example, in the full discourse I would quicken my pace at points to emphasize certain things before and after, but if you just keep the middle bit it sounds like I'm just arbitrarily talking too fast. And the change of topics can seem odd this way, there being no context or explanation of why suddenly I'm talking about something else. For example, my explanation of who Ptolemy was and when he lived wasn't included, until later on in the podcast, so at first it sounds like I just out of the blue start talking about this Ptolemy guy.

But otherwise there are some gems in there, and in the other podcasts. There are also other cool things on that site that are great, though it's all mainly for kids and teens. Currently the site is about the introductory basics of evolution science, but emphasizing the neat cutting-edge stuff scientists are now doing in the field, and how they learn from it, rather than just giving you a class on evolution. The aim of the Exploratorium is to get people excited about science. So it tries to spy out what's exciting, rather than merely lecturing at you. And the How Do You Know? project is about how we know things, the basic underlying methodology and way of looking at data. Its inaugural test case is evolution (though my podcast isn't about that, just science in general). But cases from other sciences will be added over time.