The DemystifySci Podcast

Today we're sitting down with Professor Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute, to talk about his work on scale: Kleiber’s law, entity lifespan, fractal circulatory networks, multicellularity, compartmentalization, and bureaucracy, Along the way we touch on cities vs. companies, open-ended growth, stultified institutions, soulless planned cities, and what it takes to beat Nature at her own game.The Paper Discussed: How much regulation do we need from genomes to society?https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02884PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciOUR BOOK, PARADOX LOST: https://demystifysci.com/paradoxlostSECRETARY OF NATURE :Vinyl: https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/products/vinyl-lp-secretary-of-nature-everything-is-so-good-hereDownload: ht...

Today's episode features Roger Cunningham, The Ethical Skeptic, discussing his ECDO theory of true polar wander. He reopens the case for the Dzhanibekov effect behind the possibility that the could Earth tip over and we push him for the details of the mechanism, covering core-mantle decoupling, exothermic iron phase change, and crystal-lattice geomagnetism. We also examine Cunningham's claim that cultural knowledge of a recent pole shift event persists in the form of Gilgamesh, Solon’s floods, monument alignments, and the lost continent of Sundaland. Could this possibly be true?PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciOUR BOOK, PARADOX LOST: ht...

Order our the book, Paradox Lost: https://a.co/d/00FLBxxVWe're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we examine the loss of material mediators in fundamental physics and then apply a simple set of axioms to imagine what the future of that abandoned physics might look like. Previously we introduced a material model of extended atomic architecture and used it to explain electromagnetism, and then the intricate nuance of transmission and opacity. This week, we are continuing the paradox busting by applying what we've learned about light to solve a couple of the most...

This week, we headed to Moab, Utah, to meet up with Thad Roberts and his merry band of physics monks. Thad heads the Physics Monestery, an organization of physicists who have devoted their lives to understanding the hidden meaning of the constants of nature - from the speed of light to Planck’s constant, the theoretical landscape is plastered with numbers that have no apparent physical connection to one another. Outside the walls of the academy, the physics monks are working on knot theory, searching for the simplest manifold to unify electron geometry. This is their story.PHYSICS MONASTERY: ht...

Order our the book, Paradox Lost: https://a.co/d/00FLBxxVWe're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we examine the loss of material mediators in fundamental physics and then apply a simple set of axioms to imagine what the future of that abandoned physics might look like. Previously we introduced a material model of extended atomic architecture and used it to explain electromagnetism, and then the intricate nuance of transmission and opacity. This week, we are setting up for the final battle of the book: paradox busing. Our first classic quantum paradox is entanglement...

Today's guest is Professor Kyle Harper, author of The Fate of Rome, a radical reimagining of the fall of the Roman Empire. It is a saga of plague, volcanism & climate shifts, and coups, that reveals multiple fractures in the empire long before its final collapse. We touch on the crisis of the third century, currency collapse, imperial fractures, and the role of new urban diseases: the Antonine Plague, Plague of Cyprian, Plague of Justinian, and how being rich but sick pointed to critical emergencies hidden in plain sight. This is a story of blind spots and reveals a deep...

Today's episode features a conversation with author Nick Collins concerning the obscure origins of the Mesopotamian "Cradle of Civilization." Collins points to a shared origin of Sumer and the Indus Valley Civilization, painting a picture of an interconnected culture connected by maritime trade. We discuss the rising of the oceans at the dawn of city-states, drowned coastlines, seafaring refugees, the historicity of mythological texts, and missing evidence waiting underwater off India's coast.Nick's book (support us both with this link): https://link.amazon/B0djOdJe0PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciOUR BOOK, PARADOX LOST: https://demystifysci.com/paradoxlostSECRETARY...

We're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we examine the loss of material mediators in fundamental physics and then apply a simple set of axioms to imagine what the future of that abandoned physics might look like. Previously we introduced a material model of extended atomic architecture and used it to explain the basics of light transactions. This week, we look at absorption - and the ideal absorber, the blackbody. Ideally this can teach us everything we need to know for a material explanation of the intrerconversion between heat and light within atoms.Order...

Today's episode features Professor Stacy McGaugh, Director of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University. We discuss his journey to Modified Newtonian Dynamics [MOND] via a slow growing dissatisfaction with dark matter as the sole hypothesis to explain anomolous galaxy rotation curves, touching on the missing mass, dark matter halos, and empty WIMP detectors along the way. McGaugh champions Milgrom's acceleration scale boundary, describing unique predictions that landed, including downstream JWST discoveries. The question for future scientists is why gravity changes in low density regions of the galaxy in the first place.PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciOUR BOOK...

We're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we examine the loss of material mediators in fundamental physics and then apply a simple set of axioms to imagine what the future of that abandoned physics might look like. Previously we introduced a material model of extended atomic architecture and used it to explain the basics of light transactions. This week, we get deeper into the chapter on optics and see what makes a mirror reflect and a prism bend light. It's not in your textbook, so buckle up for a fresh take.Order our new...

Today we're talking with philosopher Steve Patterson about how a lack of conceptual clarity in the foundations of 20th century mathematics led to problems not only downstream of this in physics, but eventually feeding irrationalist movements in diverse disciplines. From points with no size summing to lines, to sets of infinite quantities, formalism traded truth for usefulness, and that habit was transferred onto everyone from quantum physicists to economists. Ultimately, tolerating contradictions has made it easy for people to accept that our ability to reason is itself broken. We don't think so and propose some courses of action to...

We're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we examine the loss of material mediators in fundamental physics and then apply a simple set of axioms to imagine what the future of that abandoned physics might look like. Previously we introduced a material model of extended atomic architecture and used it to explain the basics of light transactions. This week, we get deeper into the specifics of light and see what it takes for light to interact with atoms. This requires us to think long and hard about the meaning of the critical term, photon...

Today we're joined by Dr. Brook Ziporyn, a scholar of Classical Chinese from the University of Chicago, and translator of Zhuangzi and the Daodejing. He makes the case that classical Chinese rescues us from the hard problem of consciousness where meaning comes from context and relation instead of isolation. Identity is carved out of an undivided whole, and what's cut away is devalued in the same stroke. This approach also feeds into a critique of the Western epistemological approach to the cosmos where a law that can't be wrong fuels a hidden patchwork program to protect itself.

...

We're back to continue reading from our new book, Paradox Lost, where we are finally ready to talk about a mechanistic explanation for electromagnetic radiation - finally, we settle the question 'what is light, really?' To do this, we give physical form to the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics and explain light as an interatomic handshake across physical, filamentary extensions, which interconnect atoms into an invisible, material web. This interpretation does not require new mathematics, but instead vanquishes the paradoxes implicit in the familiar spooky actions at a distance ossified into the standard canon.Order our new book...

DemystifySci is the place where we bring people together in search of the theories that will change the world, and Paradigm Drift is your chance to have a hand in that future. Theorists, randomly chosen, get 60 seconds to present their revolutionary idea... and then we see if it's gonna stand the test of time or if it's back into the tank for a little while longer.#ParadigmDrift, #FirstPrinciple, #FoundationalPhysics, #Quantum, #FreeWill, #Consciousness, #DarkMatter, #Cosmology, #IndependentThinkers, #physicspodcast, #openmic #philosophypodcast PARADIGM DRIFT SIGN UPShttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-showOUR BOOK, PARADOX LOST: https://demystifysci.com/paradoxlostPATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciHOMEBREW MUSIC...

This week we're bringing you along to the Yucatán where we investigate the rise and collapse of our nearest ancient civilization, the classic Mesoamerican Maya. We make the argument that each Maya city states ran on a deal between the people and their leaders, where the few promised defense, calendars, and above all - clean, fresh water in a land without rivers. Ultimately, each city didn't die so much as empty out, abandoned when their elite demanded payment without rendering said promised services. What emerges is a common failure mode, that points us toward scrutinizing the social contracts w...

This week we continue to read from our book, Paradox Lost, exploring the hidden meaning of the word "mass" in the Newtonian sense, and see how this maps onto modern usage of the word. We apply the material principles of natural philosophy to understand mass as a product of atomic architecture in networks of physically chained atoms, experiencing basic mechanical adhesion and, ultimately, cohesion.#Physics #Gravity #Inertia #Mass #Newton #Cosmology #ParadoxLostPre-order our upcoming book, Paradox Lost: https://demystifysci.com/paradoxlostPATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciHOMEBREW MUSIC - Check out our new album!Hard Copies (Vinyl): FREE SHIPPING https...

Today we're joined by Arnaud Delorme, a computational neuroscientist at UCSD EEGLAB creator, and one of the most cited brainwave researchers, who is also fascinated by the emerging field of consciousness and parapsychology. Across a long career studying mediums, monks, and meditation, he's never claimed to have proven anything paranormal, but refuses to dismiss what the instrument actually records. Arnaud has sought evidence to support an antennae model of consciousness, and has stumbled upon at least one striking result when it comes to the strange brains of allegedly psychic mediums. We put his findings under the DemystifySci microscope.

This week we are broadcasting live from Mexico, on an unrelated assignment, and we continue our discussion of the material atom, reading from our upcoming book Paradox Lost. Picking up where we left off last week, we seek an explanation for electron guns like cathode ray tubes that doesn't involve the projectile action of electric particles. Instead we model the electron as circulation of atomic surface material, discussing electron beams as atom-to-atom propagation of this action.#physics #particlephysics #quantumphysics #paradoxlost Pre-order our upcoming book, Paradox Lost: https://buy.stripe.com/7sY7sKdoN5d29eUdYddEs0bPATREON https://www.patreon.com...

This is part two from a recent conversation with Luke Kemp from Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. In part one we asked what made humanity suddenly pivot to the nation-state all around the world at the cusp of the bronze age. In part two Kemp argues that colonial expansion stretched a single Goliath across the globe, and we now live in a single integrated system of finance, information, and military power. The deeper problem is not hierarchy itself but permanent, illegitimate dominance. What comes next isn't mere doom and gloom. It's already being tested in...

Today we give you an episode in two parts from a recent conversation with Luke Kemp from Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. We discuss the sudden and simultaneous rise of the nation state all over the globe as humanity emerged from the paleolithic. Prior to the bronze age of empires, humanity used kept the concentration of societal power in check by relying on ridicule, ostracism, and expulsion to stop anyone from turning strength into lasting power. Then something changed irrevocably. Suddenly domination became possible: lootable, storable crops like wheat, monopolizable weapons, and nowhere left to...

This week we continue our discussion of the material atom live. Picking up where we left off last week, we go deeper into our book Paradox Lost and uncover the hidden mechanics of magnetism. The conversation follows from the past two week's livestreams where we argued for a new way of looking at the electron and charge: as patterned atomic surface motion. This week, we build out the details of that atomic surface and use the architecture to address electromagnetic action-at-a-distance.#physics #electromagnetism #quantumphysics #paradoxlostPre-order our upcoming book, Paradox Lost: https://buy.stripe.com/7sY7sKdoN5d29eUdYddEs0bPATREON...

This is the second episode from our recent meetup with Chris Lehto where we explore his work on the Fractal Universe, where macrobiological entities become a real possibility in the cosmos by way of adherence to NASA's own checklist definition for life. We explore the fractal organization of biological structures, what it means to be a subunit in a living system, and Lehto argues the case that many large scale structures, from nations to galaxies qualify incredibly well. Ultimately, we may prove to be living elements in a much greater order that is only just now coming into focus.<...

This week we are going to the core of what it means to be alive. If we don't understand where matter turns into the living then how can we be sure we're not missing biological processes all over the universe? Chris Lehto joins us for this first part of a two part series on his work surrounding the Fractal Universe, where we establish the historic basis for our present understanding of what it means to be living. We look at the NASA criteria, Michod's individuality gate, and the overlooked importance of will. This sets us up for part two...

Electric charge has always been handed to us as a fact fixed to the electron, a quantity carved into the particle like a name. But charge may be less a thing the atom has than a thing the atom does, a surface motion that our instruments register with ever increasing precision. In this solo livestream drawn from our upcoming book, Paradox Lost, we explain the exact motions we propose at the atomic surface, drawn from the empirical record and mathematics of quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, and spin 1/2. Come sit close to the curtain, where a fixed fact comes apart into...

Archaeologist Jens Notroff of the German Archaeological Institute takes us into Göbekli Tepe and the Taş Tepeler world, where hunter-gatherers raised T-shaped pillars and carved the aurochs into stone long before the first Bronze Age king wore a crown. No palaces and no royal graves, only a fingerprint pressed into wet plaster and a child's footprint set in a mudbrick, the small human traces that outlast every monument. Follow the bull forward and you feel a line running from Anatolia toward the Bronze Age, and though the road to Mesopotamia is broken and lost, the people who built th...

The electron arrives in every textbook the same way, a point with no size, no interior, no address, a charge that lives nowhere and hazily explains everything, and nobody stops to tell you what got traded away to buy that convenience. We start at the outer surface of the atom and walk backward through J.J. Thomson and the cathode ray tubes, through the long slow formalization that turned a glow in a glass tube into a fundamental particle with no parts. Then we hand the body back, reading the electron not as something the atom contains but as...

Our recent guests, Dr. Eric Cline and Dr. Jesse Millek have wildly different takes on the Bronze Age Collapse, and the picture that comes clear when you lay them side by side is not the one the textbooks handed down. The Sea Peoples did not come off the water and burn the world; the world was already coming apart from the inside, empires overreaching, trade thinning rather than snapping, cities emptying without a single sword raised against them. We walk the whole arc here, from the Minoans and their lost writing to the Hittites at each other's throats to...

Professor Angus Fletcher, from Ohio State's Project Narrative, comes back for a second lap around the machinery of belief, where the mind runs on story long before it runs on proof. From Oedipus to Copernicus to Darwin, every paradigm shift in the history of science turns out to be won by elegance, timing, and a culture hungry to hear it, never by data alone. Math describes the world with astonishing precision, Fletcher argues, but only narrative can explain it, because explanation is a causal story and causal stories are what minds are built upon. What remains is a 3 step...

For a hundred and fifty years we were told the same story, that the Sea Peoples came in off the water around 1200 BC and burned the Late Bronze Age to the ground, city by city, until nothing was left but ash for centuries. Netherlands Institute for the Near East Archaeologist Jesse Millek walks back into that rubble with a lantern and finds most of it was never there, that more than half the destructions inked onto our maps of the eastern Mediterranean simply did not happen. From Ugarit to Cyprus to the Levantine coast he traces the trade routes...

Physicist Jenny Wagner joins us, asking not whether dark matter is possible but whether it is necessary, whether the missing mass was ever missing or only misplaced inside the models we carried in before we looked up. She works the inverse problem of gravitational lensing the way a person works a locked door in the dark, feeling for what the data actually says against what the assumptions quietly whisper, until the cosmological constant, dark energy, and the whole dark sector start to look less like discoveries and more like scaffolding we forgot was scaffolding. From Zwicky and the Coma...

Somewhere between the thing you can touch and the number that only points back at it, physics keeps a question it rarely says out loud, which is what actually counts as real. We built a simple chart to drag that question into the light, a two axis map where every idea has to declare itself, structure or relation, physical or nonphysical, a body sitting at a location or a placeless thing made of pure math. Watch energy, spacetime, the wavefunction, and the long gone aether stagger up to the grid and try to prove they still point back to...

Eight empires stretched from Greece to Mesopotamia, trading tin and copper and olive oil and letters written in a language nobody spoke at home, and then within a single human lifetime they were gone, the palaces burned, the writing systems lost, the trade routes silent. Eric Cline, archaeologist and author of 1177 BC, walks us through the perfect storm of drought and invasion and internal revolt and supply chain failure that brought the Late Bronze Age to its knees, and asks what it means that no single cause was sufficient, that it took everything at once. What survived was stranger...

There is a microphone, a clock, and sixty seconds. What you do with them is entirely up to you. Ten episodes in, Paradigm Drift has become something nobody planned: a living laboratory where the wild, the rigorous, and the genuinely unclassifiable share the same stage. This time the theories range from epigenetic operating systems and fractal cosmology to edge theory, tulpamancy, and the slow dismantling of dark energy. Each one delivered under the gun, each one taken seriously. Pull up a chair; the floor is yours.PARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-showPATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADOX LOST PRE-SALE...

Every physical theory rests on a floor nobody built on purpose. In this livestream, we open the chapter "Atomic Axioms" from our forthcoming book Paradox Lost and lay bare the three assumptions that have always quietly governed how physics constructs its models of matter: that theories require material actors, that physical bodies are volumes with surfaces and locations, and that all action arises from displacement of said bodies. These are not new rules we are imposing, they are the rules that were already running long before a century of sophisticated abstraction buried the lead. We are simply turning on...

This week, we head to the woods. UBC professor of psychology Liane Gabora walks us through the deep tension between creativity and conformity that runs through every institution humans have ever built. Her work on cultural evolution reveals something Darwin never touched: ideas don't survive by competition, they survive by transformation, by honing, by the slow and sacred work of making something raw into something real. We ask why civilizations keep building towers they can't sustain, why originality is worshipped in the past tense and punished in the present, and whether the internet might finally give us the collective...

Something vast stirs beneath the Bronze Age world, a mercantile civilization moving tin and copper across impossible distances long before Greece or Rome drew their first breath. For our third livestream, we dive into Gavin Menzies' "Lost Empire of Atlantis." Bronze was the high technology of its age and its components came from the far corners of the known world, which means someone was organizing that, someone was running something history has not yet revealed in full.Pre-order our upcoming book, Paradox Lost: https://buy.stripe.com/7sY7sKdoN5d29eUdYddEs0bPATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciHOMEBREW MUSIC...

Hugh Evans walks us across two thousand square miles of North Wales where the zodiac lives in the land itself, constellations pressed into mountains and rivers and place names older than Babylon ever dreamed of writing down. Before Ptolemy standardized the sky for empire, before Mesopotamia carved its tablets, someone in Gwynedd, Wales looked up and then etched the traces of the heavens into the Earth. Hugh helps us trace the thread of early celestial awareness from Göbekli Tepe to Northern Wales, by way of the tin routes of the Bronze Age, and the star that's missing from t...

We sit down with James Ellias of Inductica to ask whether physics can ever truly prove anything. James pulls the inductive method out of the margins and holds it up against a century of guess-and-check, and together we trace the line from Newton's bucket to the cosmic microwave background so that we can ask where confidence becomes dogma and where models start passing for truth. Bodies, waves, ether, entities, the categories blur the moment you press hard enough, and the foundations of physics start to feel less like bedrock and more like habit. This is a conversation about what...

Henry Lindner walks into the cathedral of general relativity and asks why no one can hear the pipes, flowing space as reformation of Einstein's gravity, where the medium returns and the math bows down to something almost physical, almost true. We trace the long exile of substance from physics, from Newton's absolute space through the ether wars to Mach's ghost whispering in Einstein's ear that nothing real needs to exist at all. But a simplification is not an explanation, and gravity still has no mechanism, no cause, no beating heart beneath the geometry, only equations where a theory should...