Famed primatologist Frans de Waal and marine mammal scientist and cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss joined our director of sciences Janna Levin in conversation to explore the possibilities of animal consciousness.

Animal Consciousness

Are there Many Worlds? Does Time Exist? Are We Alone? Hosted by Director of Sciences Janna Levin, the Scientific Controversies series brings creative minds together to celebrate the passionate spirit of scientific curiosity. Previous guests include Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek, geneticist George Church, and neuroscientist Christof Koch with subjects ranging from artificial intelligence and string theory, to dark matter, consciousness, and other unsolved scientific quandaries.

Black holes are gloriously weird. Formed as the death state of heavy stars, they can be as small as cities or as big as solar systems. Our own Milky Way galaxy is anchored at its center by a black hole four million times the mass of our sun but only 20 sun widths across. The rest of our galaxy could harbor billions of city-sized black holes. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, each one replete with billions of stellar mass black holes and each one probably the home to one supermassive black hole. Beyond the oddity of black holes, they may play an essential role in sculpting galaxies and the universe on the largest scales. Black holes may have carved a world that we could live in.



Black Holes

Scientific Controversies: Black Holes

Our perception of the material world is famously illusory. Nothing is solid. On closer inspection, all things resolve into a long list of fundamental particles, microscopic billiard balls subject to quantum forces. The list of known particles is disappointingly long – a cocktail with too many ingredients in a universe that promised elegance. String Theory attempts to restore elegance by unifying the multitude of ingredients into one. The essential idea: There are no particles, only vibrating loops of string. If true, then all the different quantum particles are just different harmonics played on fundamental strings. So is the entire universe a complex score played out on elementary strings? Or are we lost, distracted by the pursuit of an ideal beauty that the universe simply doesn’t possess?

Listen to the captivating conversation between Nobel laureate and string theory pioneer David Gross, theoretical physicist Clifford Johnson, and Director of Sciences Janna Levin.


String Theory

Scientific Controversies: String Theory

Scientific Controversies: Animal Consciousness

Black holes could have been relegated to mathematics and remained a physical absurdity. They were the outcome of a thought experiment, a fantastical imagining. Imagine matter crushed to a point. Don’t ask how. Just imagine that. But nature thought of a way to make them by killing off massive stars. These dead stars collapse under their own weight so catastrophically that even light gets dragged down the hole, casting a shadow on the sky. That shadow is the event horizon, left behind while the stellar material continues to fall to an unknown fate. For the first time in human history, we have seen a black hole. The image was captured by Event Horizon Telescope, a composite telescope the size of the whole Earth.

Join Pioneer Works Director of Sciences and black-hole astrophysicist, Janna Levin, alongside Dr. Sheperd Doeleman, Director of the Event Horizon Telescope, and theoretical physicist Prof. Andrew Strominger to consider the staggering implications of event horizons from astrophysics to the theory of everything.

Event Horizon

Scientific Controversies: Event Horizon

Scientific Controversies

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