The Rational View podcast with Dr. Al Scott

This episode is a re-release of episode 18 where I interviewed Professor Steven Levitsky, co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of 2018 best-seller "How Democracies Die". He has recently released a new book called "Saving Democracy, Tyranny of the Minority" so I thought it would be a good idea to see how his predictions from 2018 have held up based on more recent events. I've been quite busy over the past few months moving and getting set up in a new city, so I appreciate your patience with my recycled content. More new stuff is on the way!
Dr. Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.
As more and more people are worrying about the ongoing erosion of long-standing political norms we explore the question, 'should we take US democracy for granted?'. Are there parallels between our current politics and the historical rise of autocracies? What are the factors that have contributed to the polarization of political discourse? What is the price of democracy?
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In this episode I’m digging into a recent announcement from the astronomy community. The Gaia satellite has been making high precision measurements of the position and velocity of billions of nearby stars. Researchers have used this data to test the theory of gravity, and more specifically Modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND. This theory was developed to explain away the need for dark matter. Dark matter was originally postulated to account for the anomalous rotation curves of all galaxies. Basically, if you use their surface brightness as a proxy for their matter distribution you would expect the outer regions of the galaxy to be moving slower than they seem to be. MOND suggests that gravitational acceleration stops dropping off as fast when the acceleration drops below a particular threshold value.
Researchers analyzed the rotation curves of 10s of thousands of widely separated binary stars in the Gaia dataset and they believe that the data support MOND over Newton, and their results seem to provide a high degree of confidence. The press coverage seems to suggest that this is a smoking gun that decisively overthrows Newtonian gravity and General Relativity all at once. If this is true it is huge news. Why are the authors not packing their bags to Sweden as we speak?
With a little digging, I’ve found that other researchers looking at the same Gaia dataset have come to the opposite conclusion that the data supports General Relativity over MOND. What gives? To understand this discrepancy I’m interviewing a skeptical astronomer, Dr. Indranil Banik.
Dr Indranil Banik did his undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge before moving to Saint Andrews for his PhD with Hongsheng Zhao, where they worked together on Milgromian dynamics (MOND). Dr Banik then went to Bonn for a Humboldt fellowship with Pavel Kroupa. He returned to Saint Andrews in 2021 and spent his first year back on a detailed 150 page invited review on all aspects of MOND. He has been working on the wide binary test since late 2017. He organised the fortieth anniversary celebration of MOND conference in Saint Andrews in summer 2023. Among other results presented here, conflicting results were presented on the wide binary test and there was intense controversy surrounding whether the results indicate a failure of Newtonian gravity at low accelerations.
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Thank you for inviting me into your head. In this episode I want to go deep and share some thoughts on brains and machines and free will. My thoughts on determinism and free resonate with the words of famous philosopher Bertrand Russell. My thinking on these topics is influenced by the evidence of physics, neuroscience, and AI. I hope you enjoy this exploration of some mind bending ideas.
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Have you heard the news? The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is dumping radioactive waste into the Pacific ocean! Is this a travesty or is it a manufactured controversy? The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan is planning to dump over 1 million tonnes of radioactive wastewater in the ocean. Environmental groups around the world are outraged. Protesters line the streets in Korea. Chinese governments are boycotting Japanese products. Headlines scream about radioactive fish. What’s going on? It’s time for a Rational View.
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In this episode I want to investigate claims in the news of an insect Armageddon. Specifically it has been reported that insect populations around the globe have plummeted by up to 75% in recent years. As anecdotal evidence of this old timers like myself use the car windshield as a gauge.  Back in the day, any summer drive would end up with your windshield plastered with insect carcasses. These days they are often pristine. Are we witnessing the ecological collapse prophesied by climate scientists? Insects are important to ecosystems and their disappearance would have huge impacts in terms of pollinators, and food chains. Is this real, is it global, and what is causing it? Maybe this is a good thing if mosquito populations are dropping. In terms of a potential tipping point where the loss of insects causes whole ecosystems to collapse, the honest answer is we just don’t know when the point of no return is.
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In this episode I answer the question, 'Who is misinforming the public about nuclear energy and why?'. I touch on the influence of the oil industry on anti-nuclear disinformation, and I explore the origins of the anti-nuclear protest movement.
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This episode is a re-release of my amazing interview with the definitive skeptic, Dr. Michael Shermer.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  I should be back in the studio for next week's episode.
Dr. Michael Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He has been a college professor since 1979. Dr. Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, and has appeared on Oprah, Dateline, 20/20, and the Colbert Report. His two TED talks were voted in the top 100. He has been interviewed in countless documentaries and was the co-host of the Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown. Neil deGrasse Tyson has called him “a beacon of reason in an ocean of irrationality”.
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In this episode I want to follow up on last week’s podcast regarding the announcement of the discovery of a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor, how scientists addressed the claim, and compare it with the cold fusion announcement and ongoing scientific controversy from the 1980’s.
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In this episode I provide a round-up review of current events in science, and the popular controversies surrounding these issues. The recent announcement of room temperature superconductivity promises to be the biggest scientific breakthrough of the century if verified. We should know in days if it is true. The US congress heard testimony that UFOs are actually aliens visiting us from other worlds. There has been a recent surge of interest in the possibility that COVID-19 was caused by a lab leak in the Wuhan institute of virology. In addition to all of this, surface temperatures in the North Atlantic ocean are hotter than we've ever seen at this time of year. What should we take from all of this? This is a job for The Rational View
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This episode is a special treat and a bit of a throwback to when I achieved one of my podcast goals. In honour of The Rational View blowing past 100,000 downloads this month, this is a re-release of my interview from almost two years ago with the famous Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium. I hope you can sit back and relax and enjoy it with me. Thank you for supporting the podcast! Famed astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson was named the Sexiest Astrophysicist alive in 2000 by People magazine. Selected as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world by Time magazine in 2007, Dr. Tyson was awarded the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2017.
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