In this episode, we look at applying the tools of good critical thinking and skepticism to analyzing conspiracy theories.
Philosophy
04/27/2020
04/12/2020
Episode 1.7: Characteristics of Good Critical Thinking
"The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."-Archilochus
We trace this quote from the Archaic Greek poet through the work of the philosopher Isaac Berlin to see how it applied to create good practices of critical thinking. Characteristics include having an inquiry focus, being flexible, understanding bias, practicing skepticism, using inference properly, and seeking multiple sources.
04/05/2020
Episode 1.6: Introduction to Critical Thinking
In this episode we broaden our focus to consider critical thinking in a more comprehensive way by looking at what it is, why its such a valuable habit of mind to have and what types of activities contribute to making it such a powerful process.
12/26/2019
Episode 5.8: Heaven and Earth
In this episode, we trace the development of Hellenistic geography from the work of Polybius, through Strabo, to its conclusion with Claudius Ptolemaeus.
Strabo
Ptolemy's 2nd (Conic) Projection
Ptolemy's 3rd Projection
Episode 5.6: Ocean Around a Wine-Darkened Sea
Beginning with Homer's Iliad, we look at the development of Greek geographical models of the Earth through the Classical Period.
A rendition of the Shield of Achilles
01/21/2019
Episode 4.7: William Whewell-A Victorian Debate
In the years between 1840 and 1866, a debate took place between William Whewell and the philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill over the nature of scientific inquiry and moral philosophy at a time of great social change in Britain. In this episode we discuss the the various pictures of doing science from Bacon's experimental philosophy through Whewell's "Discover's Induction".
John Stuart Mill
12/27/2018
Episode 4.6.1: Supplemental-William Whewell on the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition
Our 2018 Christmas episode: In 1851, Dr. William Whewell gave the inaugural lecture of a series reflecting on the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. This is a reading of that lecture.
Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition
Interior of Crystal Palace
William Whewell, Master of Trinity College
12/10/2018
Episode 4.6: William Whewell-A Potent Life Forgotten
An examination of the scientific contributions of William Whewell through the early and middle parts of his career.
A link to "The Complete Collection of the English Poems which have Obtained the Chancellor's Medal at Cambridge University" in which one can find Whewell's "Boadicea"
11/28/2018
Episode 4.3: Probability and Pragmatism
In this episode we consider additional solutions to the Problem of Induction include those which rest on determining the certainty of inductively acquired knowledge.
08/03/2018
Episode 4.2: Hypothetically Speaking
In this episode we consider several possible solutions to Hume's Problem of Induction including William Whewell's description of scientific inquiry, the hypothetico-deductive methods and Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion.
William Whewell
07/16/2018
Episode 4.1: The Problem of Induction
In our new Science and Certainty mini-series, we take a look at what is known as the Problem of Induction in the junction between epistemology and philosophy of science. We review what induction is and then look at various historical statements of the problem culminating with the work of Scottish philosopher, David Hume.
Scottish philosopher David Hume
06/26/2018
Episode 3.50.12: Supplemental-Albert Einstein, War and Peace
In our final episode of the biographical series on Albert Einstein, we look at the last twenty years of his life in the United States. We consider his conversations with the mathematician Kurt Godel, the letters to Franklin Delano Roosevelt that helped initiate what would become the Manhattan Project, his post-war efforts to promote peace and his principled defiance of McCarthyism.
Iconic Halsman Photograph: "No, with man there will always be war."
06/10/2018
Episode 3.50.11: Supplemental-Albert Einstein, Coming to America
In this episode of the Scientific Odyssey, we delve more deeply into Einstein's religious views and recap the months up to his emigration to the United States to take a position at the Institute of Advanced Study.
Albert Einsein, Charlie Chaplin, and Elsa Einstein
03/31/2018
Episode 3.50.4: Supplemental-Albert Einstein, A Most Miraculous Year-Light and Atoms
In 1905, Albert Einstein published five papers that changed the course of physics and the modern world. In this episode, we look at the first three of those works including his paper on the photoelectric effect, his derivation of Avogardo's number and his analysis of Brownian motion that more or less proved the existence of atoms.
The Olympia Academy
01/29/2018
Episode 3.49.2: Supplemental-Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Seeker's Journey
For A. S. Eddington, the most important thing a thinking person could do, whether they be a scientist or a person of faith, was to follow a path of inquiry that sought to uncover new insights and new truths.
In this episode, we look at how this value influenced Eddington's work in stellar structure and relativity. Additionally, we look at how his other valence values such as internationalism influenced his actions during the Great War.
A. S. Eddington
11/22/2017
Episode 3.48: Matters Dark and Mysterious
This week we look at the work of Vera Rubin and Fritz Zwicky that led to the idea that roughly 85% of the matter in the universe can't be detected except by the gravitational influence on the matter we can see. We also consider alternative explanations such as MOND theories as well as consider candidates for dark matter including WHIM, MACHOs and WIMPs (including axions). Finally, examine the evidence in favor of dark matter being a new type of matter using what can be thought of as a "complex inference from best explanation" argument.
Vera Rubin
Rotation Curves from Several Spiral Galaxies (Figure from Rubin, Ford, and Thonnard (1978), Ap. J. Lett., 225, L107.)
Fritz Zwicky
07/24/2017
Episode 3.38: Digression-For All Men, For All Time
In this episode we take a look at the history of the development of the metric system out of the French Revolution and the roles of Jerome Lalande, Pierre Mechain and Jean Baptiste Delambre in conducting the Meridian Survey of 1792.
Borda Repeating Circle
Repeating Circle Angle Double Illustration
Map of Survey Triangles of 1792 Meridian Survey (source: Ken Alder)
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04/23/2017
Episode 3.30: False Gods
In this episode we examine the fates of Phaeton, Vulcan and Pluto as they were thought of by Olbers, Le Verrier and Clyde Tombaugh. We also examine the observations of James Craig Watson, introduce William Henry Pickering and follow the work of Percival Lowell.
Diagram showing the precession of Mercury's perihelion
Clyde Tombaugh
03/26/2017
Episode 3.28: The Triumph of Mechanics
Following the publication of Newton's Principia, the extended process of adoption began. In this episode, we look at what barriers there were to Newton's ideas and how they were overcome. We also look at the acceptance of heliocentricism and the reworking of Newton's mathematical formalism up through the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace. Other scientists discussed include Francois-Marie Arouet, otherwise known by his pseudonym, Voltaire, the mathematician Alexis Claude Clairaut, the polymath Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and a pair of remarkable women: Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet and Laura Maria Caterina Bassi.
Emilie du Chatelet and the Frontispiece of her Translation of the Principia
12/11/2016
Episode 3.22.1: Supplemental-Puy de Dome
In this supplemental episode, we look at the study of hydraulics related to pulling water up a pipe by Galileo Galilei. This leads us to the development of the mercury barometer by Torricelli and the investigations of atmospheric pressure and vacuums by Blaise Pascal and Florin Perier. This, in turns leads us to the work of von Geuricke and Robert Boyle.
Evangelista Torricelli
Diagram of a Mercury Barometer
12/04/2016
Episode 3.22: Scientific Revolution-Matters of Fact
In our third episode discussing the Scientific Revolution we look at the development of the linguistic device we call the fact from Latin legal ideas. We consider the work of Kepler and Galileo as well as the thinking of Blaise Pascal, Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle.
11/27/2016
Episode 3.21: Scientific Revolution-Mathematization of Nature
This week we look at the development of the idea of mathematics as a way to represent reality from perspective painting and accounting to Kepler's Harmonic Law. We also discuss the rise of the idea of laws of nature as the way in which the natural world was understood.
Atwood's Machine w/Forces
11/20/2016
Episode 3.20: Scientific Revolution-The Discovery of Discovery
In this episode we take a look at the Scientific Revolution through the lens of David Wooten' thesis that the most important trigger for the rapid scientific development of the 16th and 17th centuries was Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World.
Frontispiece from Athanasius Kircher's "Magnes Sive de Magnetica Arte"
10/17/2016
Episode 3.19: All Ashore-The 100th Episode
This week we dock in Venice for a question and answer episode wherein I talk about podcasting, understanding quantum mechanics, the origin of the universe, and the evidence for human activity causing climate change. I also address questions about how doing the podcast has affected my teaching and where some of the strange things in academia come from. Then there's the story of the time I ran out of food but was saved by a do-it-yourself carwash in the middle of nowhere.
Solar Analemma
Sundial Analemma
10/05/2016
Episode 3.17: Refuting Aristotle
This week we take a look at the early life and work of Tuscan natural philosopher and engineer, Galileo Galilei. We examine his investigations on motion, specifically falling bodies, that will lead him into the initial stages of conflict with the Aristotelian natural philosophers of the Scholastic universities of Italy. We will also examine the steps of scientific inquiry he developed as a part of his work.
06/19/2016
Episode 3.10.5: Supplemental-A Brief History of Telling Time, The Philosophy of Time, Part 3
In the final episode in our trilogy on the philosophy of time, we look at J. M. E. McTaggart's essay, The Unreality of Time, and then work through various philosophical positions that arise from it. Included in the discussion are presentism, eternalism, the block universe model and the arrow of time.
J. M. E. McTaggart
Light Cone Diagram
06/12/2016
Episode 3.10.4: Supplemental-A Brief History of Telling Time, The Philosophy of Time, Part 2
In this episode we open the account of the temporal realist beginning with Isaac Newton and John Locke. We then look at the a priori idealism of Immanuel Kant before ending on the reformulation of physics by Albert Einstein and his concept of relativity in space-time.
Immanuel Kant
06/06/2016
Episode 3.10.3: Supplemental-A Brief History of Telling Time, The Philosophy of Time, Part 1
We look at how various ancient philosophers and theologians conceptualized time. We look at the paradoxes of Eleatic school of Parmenides and Zeno, the response of Aristotle and the later reconsideration of the topic by Augustine. This week is spend looking at early versions of idealism and relationalism with just a brief mention of realist concepts like relativity and frames of reference.
Augustine of Hippo
04/17/2016
Episode 3.9.1: Ibn al-Haytham
A brief scientific biography of the Islamic physicist, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen). We look at his work in optics, mathematics, astronomy and the development of a method of scientific inquiry.
03/20/2016
Episode 3.7: Hellenistic Astronomy from Aristarchus to Hipparchus
We look at the failure of the Eudoxian model of homocentric spheres and the models of Aristarchus of Samos, Apollonius of Perga and Hipparchus to proposed to replace it. We also discuss the ideas of scientific realism and instrumentalism with respect to Hellenistic astronomy.
Link to the University of Nebraska's Geocentric planetary orbit simulator (flash required)
Hipparchus
Conic Sections
Deferent-Epicycle Model of Planetary Motion
Eccentric Circle Model of the Sun's Motion
Equivalence of Deferent-Epicycle and Eccentric Models to produce motion.
12/14/2014
Episode 2.4: The Corpuscular Atom
From Bruno to Boscovich, the podcast suveys the development of the intellectual and experimental lanscape of Renaissance Europe as it moves closer to answering the question of the nature of matter. Other scientists discussed include Pierre Gassendi, Galileo, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton
A Diagram of Various Pieces of Lab Equipment used by Robert Boyle. Taken from Birch's 1744 edition of the Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle