YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Ball

lines on the record: 72
first: 2024-09-04
most recent: 2024-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Ah now that I have to keep under wraps. Well, I've just had a book deal pretty much agreed and I am going to keep that under wraps for now. But what I can tell you is next next, that is the book that is going to come out later this year, which I've already written. It's a relatively short book because it's highly illustrated. I've done one or two others of this sort with the same publisher. And it's an illustrated history of alchemy. So that's what I've been writing since finishing How Life Works. I've had a fantastic, as I knew I would, had a fantastic time writing it. And I know that because I've worked with these people before, it is going to look absolutely gorgeous. So an illustrated history of alchemy.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And give free reign to my curiosity to find out about these new topics. And they pop up. They suggest themselves. I would never have imagined myself, you know, way back when working for Nature, writing a book about Gothic Cathedrals that presented itself in one way or another. The more I started looking into it, the more I thought there's a story here. And it's a story that I haven't really seen told, a story about how the cathedrals were built in connection with an emerging new view of the cosmos, a new view of how the world worked in the Middle Ages. So, you know, that's the kind of thing that I look for. I'm waiting for the sort of penny to drop of aha. I can see something new in here. And this is an area that I'm going to be enriched by spending two or three years finding out about.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hesitate to put it that way when somebody of my peers do such a fantastic job. But I think for me, what it is, is that I have this extremely privileged position of being able to choose a topic and spend two, three, however many years really digging into it. And so I've always felt given that opportunity, I really want to make the best use of it that I can. And so I want to continually be finding out about new topics, to take that opportunity to discover something entirely new. So there are some writers, not just in science, who decide this is going to be my area, I'm going to become a specialist in this area, I'm going to become known for writing about this topic. That's fine. You know, if that's if you clearly want to do that. But for me, it's just such a wonderful opportunity to express myself.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I guess I did it back in the day when one could just kind of wander randomly into it as I did. Whereas these days it's much more professionalized. And I think that's very good, that you can now take courses in science journalism and learn how to do things properly in a way that I had to learn on the job in a very sort of messy way. So, you know, I absolutely think that that would be something I would recommend get a training in science journalism because some of them are very good. They will equip you to do what you want to do. I would say for anyone thinking about wanting to go into science book writing, it's really important that you aren't doing it so that you're going to become rich. Because, I mean, it's the same for any writer, actually. You know, this is not a way to become rich. You have to love what you're doing. You have to have a real passion for what you're doing. And I think certainly for book writing,”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that very nice question. I don't read as much science fiction as I used to, but I used to be, I read all of Philip K. Dick's books really in my younger years. And I think they had that kind of mythic quality that I found in those older myths that I talked about. And I also devoured the works of JG Ballard, which was very interesting to me how back in those days, Ballard was just kind of dismissed as a genre writer, a science fiction writer, you know, and he never had any proper characters and so forth. And these days, Ballard is seen as a total visionary, as he clearly is. He saw so much of what was coming back in the 1960s.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question, but it's possible that part of that decline in science is because we're looking at more challenging problems now.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would happen, just curiosity driven research that's becoming harder and harder to do because there's an increasing demand for short term commercial return on scientific research, and that perhaps gives rise to a greater timidity in what science is being permitted. So I think that that does seem to be a problem. You know, I think it's hard to know what to expect, I have to say, because one could also argue, well, we've got all the low-hanging fruit, right? You know, all the sort of easier stuff to figure out about how the world works and about what things to make. We've kind of done that. And now we're on to the really hard stuff, the sort of diminishing returns. Now, I don't know if that's true. I think that there are still immense questions that we haven't answered in science, but they seem to be incredibly hard ones, questions like what is consciousness, which we don't even know if science will ever really answer that or whether it's a philosophical.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the expansion of science, really, that maybe it is to some extent a victim of its own success, that you see the institutionalization, the increasing institutionalization of science. I think sometimes it seems that it gives rise to a more conservative approach to things, a more cautious approach to things, so that it becomes harder for scientists who are working at what you might think as a more high-risk frontier of research. It becomes harder for them to do that, becomes harder for them to find funding, becomes harder for them to get their papers published because of this increasing caution. So there's a sort of statisticians might say regression to the mean. Everything becomes a little bit more mediocre and safe. And a lot of people in science complain that blue skies research, as they call it, research that is just saying, what if, what happens if?”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just worse. Yeah, good question. There have been some studies that have tried to quantify this and there have been suggestions that actually transformational discoveries seem to be slowing down. Maurice, I mean, that seems a bit of an odd thing to say in this age of, you know, we talked about AI, but also biotechnologies, some of the biotechnologies that are appearing today are so incredibly powerful and transformative. I mean, I guess I'd say, first of all, that it's not entirely obvious that we can expect to see advances in scientific understanding relating to productivity growth. It depends what science we're doing. Certainly if we're trying to understand the topology of the universe, say, we can't expect to see much commercial return from that, or certainly not directly. But I think that what I do see happening is”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we know yet, actually. I mean, you know, I think that's the problem, but it's, you know, it's maybe still too early to know to what extent that's going to be a problem. I mean, I can't help feeling that any substance that doesn't break down that simply accumulates in the body in this way, that doesn't sound like something that you want to have happening in your body's and in your tissues. It's also sometimes suggested that some of the additives, the plasticizers that are added to plastics like this can function a little bit. They look chemically a little bit like certain hormones so they can mimic hormones and induce hormonal changes in the body. There's a lot of research going to that at the moment that I'm absolutely not an expert in, but that's one of the concerns that's being raised about them.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I well, I mean, whether I haven't followed the work or whether they're accumulating in the testicles, it would be certainly concerning if that was the case, and there have been discussions about whether plastic pollution has some kind of role in what we seem to see as a declining in sperm count in male fertility. In the more general sense, microplastics are absolute, there's clear evidence that it's a problem, that you see them everywhere. You see them, you know, in the Antarctic, you see them in marine organisms. It's very clear that they're now a global pollution problem and one that's generally.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which are interesting and maybe even productive in themselves, but how to relate them to the lab work that are biologists that a neuroscientist is doing? How does it relate to what they're actually finding out? How does it help them to pose new questions and to construct and devise new experiments? And so I think at the moment it feels to me as though it's at the stage of quite an abstract idea that people are trying to find ways of turning into something more concrete to address a specific problem, whether it's in neuroscience or elsewhere.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the so called free energy principle. Yeah, that Carl Friston, yes, it called as a neuroscientist at UCL here, has been a central proponent of. And I see different views on this. I think it's too early to say to what extent it will be useful. I find it a very interesting idea, and a lot of neuroscientists are looking into ways in which they might be able to use this idea to formulate and maybe even to answer questions. And, you know, it is something that can be formalized. There is a mathematical theory behind it. But others have said, and I think this is a common complaint I might have about these kind of, in some ways, they tend to be sort of theories of everything or, you know, theories of a very big thing at least. Sometimes in order to be so, they become so abstract, so mathematically abstract, that it becomes very hard to see how you relate the ideas.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To question that idea that for some conditions we can identify specific genes that are in a real sense the cause of that outcome, but for most of the way life works, for most of the things we're interested in in development and in medicine, that's not going to do the job. We have to have a higher level understanding of how that condition, how that trait is coming about. That's a more complex business that I'm trying to kind of tease apart in my book.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That one thing, they're doing all kinds of tasks. They're doing many things. And so if you start changing them around, you don't know what else you're going to be producing, what other kind of phenotypic changes you're going to produce. And so what we need to understand is not to identify the genes and think we can address the problem there because or the condition there because it's arising at some other level in the organism, at a higher level, in somehow in the way all these genes are interacting with each other and with the other components of the genome or with the other components of the body, perhaps in directing cells to do something different. It's at a higher level that the real causation of a lot of these conditions arises. And so it's there that we need to be thinking about intervening. That's really one of the messages that I'm wanting to try to get across in the book. So it absolutely doesn't bring in”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, heart conditions, obesity, diabetes, as well as just about all the traits, the physical traits we have, you know, height and intelligence and so on, cannot be traced back to just one or two genes. They seem to be correlated with, so differences in different individuals seem to be correlated with differences in the genetic profile of many genes, sometimes hundreds, sometimes even thousands of genes. So a significant part of our total complement of genes. That is what's become clear, and that is why it's not at all clear that techniques like CRISPR gene editing are going to be at all useful to address diseases like that, not only because you'd have so many targets you'd have to try to hit and you're going to get some off-target hits and that's going to cause problems, but also because all of those genes, they're not just involved in”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used for things like cystic fibrosis, for which that is also true. All of these applications are for diseases that are, in sickle cell anemia, maybe this is less so, but most of them are rare, and they are caused by they are traced back to, I should perhaps say, just one particular gene, or maybe a couple of genes. They're monogenic. In those situations, we can edit that gene, whether in principle in the embryo or sometimes in the adult body as being done in sickocell anemia, we can make that edit and we can have a predictable response on the whole, a predictable response from that edit. So that's absolutely true because the condition is being caused by a single gene. Most of the health conditions that concern the developed world, most in fact that concern the entire world.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't sort of see it as a, I mean, this isn't some rival to that position. This is an expression of what we have an attempt to summarize, what we have learned over the past 10 or 20, 30 years since the Human Genome Project, really, about the way life really functions. And within that, it's absolutely beyond question that genes have a central role to play. Of course they do. They are the things that we inherit from one generation to the next. And it's absolutely the case, as you say, that we can use now a gene editing technique like CRISPR, and we're getting better ones now, more accurate ones even, we can use that to address some diseases that are caused by a gene mutation. So it's being used, for example, to cure sickle cell anemia, which comes about because of a mutation to one particular gene. It's possible that it might be”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The different sequences of DNA do, we find that what we think of as genes seem to overlap. There are some things that we call pseudogenes that maybe once were genes and aren't any longer, but maybe they can come back as genes. There are regions outside the parts that we think of as genes that actually seem to have some important role in development. So the whole picture becomes very fuzzy. And also within that picture, I think the question of selfishness is important because, you know, the selfishness refers to the tendency of a particular gene variant, an alley.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metaphor is a metaphor for that particular model for use within evolutionary genetics. It does not speak about what genes are in a biochemical sense or what they are in a developmental sense. And in fact, it seems fairly clear that when we're talking about genes in terms of how an organism develops and what the role this particular bit of the DNA seems to play in that development, that's a rather different notion of a gene to this notion of the selfish gene in a pool of different alleles replicating. The evolutionary gene and the developmental gene aren't necessarily the same thing. And certainly when we try to think about a gene in molecular terms, it's become very fuzzy, more and more fuzzy the more we've looked into what genomes really are, what they really do and what our DNA does and what”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That what happens there, that the genes themselves in that picture are portrayed as little agents. You know, Richard Dawkins more or less explicitly does that. Of course, he's not saying they have any, you know, any purposes or any goals or intentions or any life in reality. But that is how they are portrayed, as though they are little organisms competing with one another, with goals, their goal being to replicate as much as possible. Even the fact that they can replicate their portrayed as being able to replicate, no gene replicates. Genes are replicated. They are replicated within cells by cells. And that's an important distinction if we're going to think about how life works. But it may not be an important distinction to make in the context of evolutionary genetics. So that's really where I want to sort of locate that picture of that sort of gene-centric view, that it's a particular model. And the selfish gene”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particular mutations of genes, alleles, as they're called, different variations of a given gene, how they spread in a population. So if you get an allele arise, the mutation of a gene that conveys some kind of property on the organism that gives it an adaptive advantage in competition with all the others, then that alley is likely to spread because that organism will have more offspring and so on. And all of that is, you know, this is standard neo-Darwinian theory. And all of that is perfectly valid. So within that picture, a gene-centered view of that process of how alleles spread has been useful in that arena. The problem I have is when that comes to be seen as the basis for understanding everything that life is. Because, you know, the problem with that is that there is no life in that picture. It's as simple as that. I think it's really interesting.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I think it's actually not quite as straightforward as rejecting it. You know, when I was writing my book, I wanted to think, clearly this has been an extremely productive metaphor and way of portraying certainly what goes on in evolutionary biology. So I don't think it would be fair or proper to simply say, well, that's nonsense. It's time to get rid of that. So in what way has it been useful? How to put it in the right container, I suppose? And the way I saw it as this, I'm going to set aside the question of selfishness, which I'll turn back to in a minute, whether that's a good metaphor, but the idea that we can essentially sort of reduce everything in biology to what the genes are doing, that is a picture that has been very productive to evolutionary geneticists, to understand how”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk in some ways, we talk about them in similar terms. We talk about memory and data storage and so on. And I think there are absolutely analogies to be had there. Whether there are strict formal parallels between those two processes, I think is something that is yet to be decided. And perhaps more importantly, it's yet to be decided whether that will be a useful way to think about those two processes, whether it will help neuroscientists formulate theories and understanding of how the brain works. I think that's still an open question.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the thing. It really depends on the context you're talking about. I mean, there are people, there are physicists who say, well, in some sense, we can think of everything that happens in the universe as a kind of computation of particles interacting with one another and responding to one another. Certainly we can develop a quantum mechanical description of what's going on in terms of the exchange of bits of quantum information between particles. So that's one way of looking at it if we mean computation in that sense of simply interactions between particles, then sure. I think that's at the most fundamental level that seems to be what we're going to find. But, you know, whether that means we can usefully use computational concepts to try to understand brain circuitry is another matter entirely.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that process as well, sometimes profound differences. And so it's really not clear at the moment whether there is any straightforward or even any translation at all between the kind of computation that is done by silicon circuits and the kind of cognitive processing that is being done by neurons.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this big, well, it's an argument, really. Sometimes it's a raging argument in neuroscience about whether we should think of the brain as a kind of computer, whether it's doing computation or not. And no one agrees about this. So I'm fairly agnostic on this, except that I have a feeling that it's not necessarily the most useful way to think about what's going on during cognition, to think of it as being just like the kind of computation that's going on in the electronic circuits of our laptops. But you can see why that analogy is made, because the neurons in our brains and other cell types are wired into networks that are clearly sending electrical pulses to one another and triggering each other to do likewise. So it looks very much like in some ways like the exchange of electrical pulses between transistors on silicon chips. But there are different...”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Electrically, so not just neurons, but all cell types pretty much in the human body have the potential to communicate with one another, to sense the electric signals that other cells can produce and to respond to those. We know the languages that cells use, but we don't really understand the kinds of conversations that they're having in a creature like an axalotyl to produce, you know.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That could be one way to put it. Certainly it's got to be a sort of collaborative process that the cells will have to be communicating with each other and communicating with other cells in at least some part of the rest of the body, you know, in order to figure out literally where they are and what they have to become as a result of that. So that is a kind of computation of one cell communicating with those around it and so forth. So that could be one way of thinking about it. But we don't know the language really of that computation other than that we know that cells communicate with one another in various ways. They can exchange chemical signals just as they do in our synapses, in our brains. They can exchange mechanical signals so that if you tug on the membrane of a cell, that can induce the cell to do something or to grow or develop in a certain way that it wouldn't have done otherwise. And they also communicate.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like an axolotl, might it not be possible to develop some kind of capability like that in humans? And we don't know the answer to that, but it's not obviously the case that we couldn't.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Produce a limited number of tissue types, so we have them, for example, in our bone marrow. They continually produce different types of cells in our blood, but they can't produce muscle cells or brain cells or something. Whereas in creatures that can regenerate their limbs, they seem to have a kind of stem cell that can regrow into many different, into all the tissue types that that limb requires. The question of how that is done in a body that is already grown rather than an embryo where everything is growing and communicating and sort of finding its way together, that is a profound one that I think we don't yet fully know the answer to. It's an area of intense research at the moment, not least because it raises that prospect of regenerative medicine, perhaps even in humans. If we understood how that is possible in a complex creature,”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is extremely active area of current research. My knowledge of octopus anatomy is not sufficient to know whether octopuses can do that. I suspect they can't, but I may be wrong. But some creatures can. And certainly salamanders can, axolotls can, they can regrow limbs that they have lost. So some creatures, some complex creatures, can do this. And we don't know exactly what enables them to do that other than that in order to do that, you will have to have a reserve of something like stem cells, something that maintains a kind of stem cell-like state, like the cells that we grew from in the early embryo. Those are stem cells, cells that in the early embryo, they're able to grow to any tissue type in the body. And we have in our bodies, we have what are called adult stem cells, which can...”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is of the AI apocalypse. The AI takeover that we, you know, suddenly AI becomes super intelligent and it has no need for us and it wipes out humanity. That, I think, is a very convenient myth for AI companies because it's something that's sort of out there in the indefinite future and they can say, oh, sure, we're worrying about that. We're taking care of that. Whereas the real dangers and risks and things to be worried about with AI are much more mundane things that are here and now, you know, deep fakes, the production of misinformation. Trivial, but sometimes important misuses of AI because we attribute it too much power. Those are the things that we should really be concerned about now. So, you know, it could be that the myths that we develop kind of get in the way of the things we should really be worrying about in the here and now.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In stories, in a way that allows us to look at them and explore them and think about them, myths are tools for thinking with. They don't have a moral, they don't have a clear conclusion. They allow us to explore those anxieties. And there will always, sadly, there will always be new anxieties that are raised. We are starting to see a mythology. We already have to some extent a mythology of AI. That's absolutely going to be a nexus around which certain mythologies are going to start growing. And that's, you know, that's because it's a new technology. It's an old idea. But now that it's becoming a reality, those anxieties are really, really strong and with us and prevalent. And so we're going to need myths to explore them. One thing I sort of feel about that is that there are pros and cons to that because the myth that we have around AI and it's one that's being fed at the moment sometimes by tech companies even.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is an old one, it started to become popularized in sort of Western culture in the 1930s, but I think it was really crystallized in the horror movie, the B-movie horror films of the 1960s, particularly the George Romero films. So I think that we now all have a sense that the zombie myth is something about the zombie apocalypse. And so it's not individual zombies. Humanity is overrun by a horde of mindless zombies. And that's, you know, so that's the sort of basis of the myth. We sort of have that now. And I think that we're going to continue. I think it's inevitable that we're going to continue to develop myths. Because what I argue in that book is that we have these narratives acquire mythic status because they satisfy some need in us to explore anxieties, social anxieties.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm sure we haven't stopped producing them. So my book about myths was actually about what I call the modern myths. And it's exactly those stories. So I begin with the earliest one that I look at from early modern times is Robinson Crusoe. It wasn't difficult to identify the candidates for that sort of status. So they were things like Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes. And the latest myth I look at in that book is Batman. So, you know, that's a hundred years old now, actually. It's amazing to think that that's the case, but it virtually is. And I don't think there's any reason to believe that we have stopped this process of inventing modern myths. I feel that it probably takes at least 50 years before some new narrative clearly acquires that sort of mythic status. And I think that one of them that is now emerging that has is the zombie myth. I mean, the idea of zombies.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was. It was simply how ideas evolved. So, yeah, I kind of, for most of the history of science, religion has been there as the backdrop, whether it's Islam or whether it's Christianity or whether it's Judaism. It's been there. And science developed. So, you know, I think this idea that there was somehow a big tension between science and religion, in many ways, it's a modern construct. It's something that really only started to become emphasized in the late 19th century for various reasons, for various polemical reasons. I don't think it's something that we can really see throughout the history of science.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got them moving in the first place. We understand now that once they are moving, they'll continue to do so. For Newton, that wasn't really a question at all, because, of course, God did it. It was God's creation, and it gave a coherence, really, to the picture that he was looking for. I mean, you can certainly find, of course, the obvious counterexample is the persecution of Galileo, which is often sort of misrepresented. Galileo was to some extent the architect of his own misfortune, which is in no way to excuse the kind of treatment that he got from the Catholic Church. So there were absolutely tensions between this new understanding, this new way of thinking about the world and the old idea, according to some, that you shouldn't ask too much or that it was, well, it was just God that did it all. There were tensions there, but I don't know that we need sort of see that as weighing in the balance the pros and the cons. It was simply how history.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It had become acceptable to have this almost universal curiosity about the world. And that's absolutely something that we see in people like Boyle and Newton and the fellows of the Royal Society in London, but also of other scientific societies that started elsewhere in Europe. And as I say, underpinning all of that was a profound religious faith. So sometimes that was a motivation for that curiosity. And sometimes it was in the case of Isaac Newton, for example, that was the framework within which he was developing his theory of gravitation. The question with the picture that he presented of the planet's, you know, revolving around the sun and the moon revolving around the Earth because of gravitational force being held there by gravity, that was all very well, but the question was, well, how did that get started?”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be curious, to be interested in everything in nature and Boyle would make these long lists, this sort of random lists of things he wanted to find out about, things he wanted to discover. It was really the first golden age of curiosity at that time. And I think that's, to my mind, that's a better way of looking at it than calling it the scientific revolution. It was the age when curiosity was kind of liberated. So there was in earlier times in medieval times, there was often a sense expressed by some theologians that curiosity was something to be at best cautious of and at worst very suspicious of or even condemning of because they saw it as a prying into things that it was not humankind's preserved to ask about. By the seventeenth century, really through the process of the Renaissance and humanism and the resurgence of learning.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I feel in a way that's a question that it's hard to see what the counterfactuals would be to that because history is history, right? So to all of the scientists, certainly in the 17th century, the time that's often called the scientific revolution, Christianity was just a given. The fact that God existed and, you know, no one really at that time questioned that. They had different ways of understanding that and of expressing that. But for those scholars, you know, that was just a given. And so that informed everything that they were doing. So it, for some people, for example, the Anglo-Irish scientist, as we now see him, Robert Boyle in the 17th century, it was a Christian mission to try to find out all that we could about God's creation, about this world that God had created. That was a duty, a Christian duty.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Renaissance. But I have to say that a lot of that learning was imported, was brought from the Islamic countries, from Spain, which was occupied by what were then called the Moors, and because in the centuries preceding that era, that was the era of the golden age of learning in the Islamic nations. The Islamic scholars translated a lot of the works of the ancient Greeks, Aristotle and Plato and many others into Arabic. And the European scholars, many of them from France, but also from Germany and from Britain, were coming down to Spain to get hold of those works and to translate them to learn Arabic and to translate them from Arabic to Latin. And so that was really what created this influx of learning into Western Europe at that time. It was coming from translation. Of Arabic works.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The early Gothic era certainly did starter in northern France, so this region called the Isle de France, so it's the region. I suppose it's within, I can't remember quite what distance it's typically said to be, but I think within about 50 mile radius of Paris. Absolutely, that was the center of Lerning at that time. Britain, I have to say, England, was very much an intellectual backwater at that time. So France was certainly one of the regions where there was this resurgence of learning. There was some of it happening in Germany as well, but France was a more unified country and it had been so to some extent ever since the Emperor Charlemagne in the 9th century. So it had had this stability. And Charlemagne, in fact, himself was famously wanted to sort of bring about a sort of resurgence of learning. It only really kicked off around the 11th century, 11th, 12th centuries, or often called the medieval”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that's exactly what Napoleon is said to have said. The Republic, you know, the French Republic was famously going to get rid of all this religious nonsense and it was going to be built on principles of reason and so on. Napoleon said that in the Gothic cathedrals, you know, even an atheist will feel kind of uncertain of themselves because of that. And I think that's quite right. I think it's absolutely right. I mean, I'm an atheist and I certainly have that feeling inside Chartre. And there is something, again, there is something about that sort of terrifying awe. But I think there it's also a kind of an awe just at the sheer feet of engineering that they represent that was done by obviously by hand. I mean, with very sort of primitive machinery for lifting and so on, but there was no mechanization there. The sheer fact that these places were built and that they are still standing.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of them as the architects were drawing on those platonic ideas of harmony and trying to express them explicitly in what they did. It starts to sound like we're getting into Dan Brown territory here, and, you know, people have claimed, and I think it's probably claimed in Dan Brown's novels, that there are all sorts of hidden codes and so on within the Gothic cathedrals. But I think actually the real meaning is there in plain sight because we can see that they are built according to these principles of proportion that we know were important to the theologians and to the architects who worked for them.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“According to ideal ratios, simple ratios of python and width and so on of proportion, ratios of one to two and two to three. And that design and that wish to sort of convey somehow this kind of sense of order and cosmic harmony, that's, I think, what we respond to even today in those places, even though we, of course, we can't see them through medieval eyes, and we're used to seeing now gigantic constructions of all sorts, but nevertheless, for me, the Gothic cathedrals still retain something that modern architecture hasn't managed to capture in the sense of conveying that kind of sense of harmony and order. So that's absolutely what the Gothic cathedrals were aiming to do, and we know that the people who were designing them, as we would now...”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah well the way I presented it in my book, I'd called my book Universe of Stone. And the idea behind that title was that in some sense the Gothic cathedrals and Charterer is, it's certainly my favorite, and I think it's one of the earliest of the true Gothic cathedrals and one of the most beautiful and spectacular. In some sense, what they represented was a model of the universe, a kind of medieval cosmology. Because at that time, and in fact, as it happened particularly in Charter and the Cathedral School of Charterer, there was a resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Plato. And Plato had this idea that the whole of the cosmos was built on principles of a sort of cosmic harmony that involved geometric ratios between things. And so the Gothic cathedrals themselves, they are planned.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of how precious this place is, this place where we have the privilege of being able to look out onto the stars from somewhere that gives us everything we need. And, you know, from that perspective, it is awe inspiring. And, you know, that's really, I mean, I guess I feel when I look out on a night like that, when I'm away from London, away from the light pollution, that what I feel is all in the old sense in the 19th century sense of the sublime, this sort of slightly terrified awe of, you know, what is out there, of our, I wouldn't say our insignificance, but our small part in something that is just so vast, you know, when you really think about what all these pinpricks of light represent, you know, some of them being, certainly if you look through a telescope, some of them being entire galaxies.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So he took Shatner up there. Shatner, of course, being Captain Kirk of Star Trek. And Shatner came back and said he felt this profound emptiness, really, loneliness, terrifying loneliness. He felt that he was looking at death when he looked out into space, which is absolutely not what you expect to hear from Captain Kirkwright. And I think that's right. I think that's the right way to see it. Space in reality, when we're out there, when people are out there, it's constantly trying to kill us in all sorts of ways with radiation. You know, obviously it's incredibly cold. It's a vacuum. So it's a deathly place. So I think that space looks beautiful to us from Earth, from this place of safety. It's because it's a place of safety that actually, I think, space for reminds us of how precious or should remind us.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we find it, I mean, I certainly find it beautiful. I find it beautiful to see it from Earth actually. I find space itself, the thought of space itself, terrifying. And I feel that's really how we should see it. And in the, you know, this era of space travel, I think we're seeing that that's the case. I mean, I was really struck by how when William Shatner was taken by Jeff Bezos on one of these flights on the, is it called Blue Origin? The flight.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source