StarTalk Radio

If there are other dimensions of time that we somehow can't perceive but other creatures can perceive and as a result, the universe's causality proceeds differently from what we see, then you build up those cool science fiction ideas like Arrival, for example, which that was the A.B. Adams movie a few years back, I think.

Yeah, not the Charlie Sheen Arrival from decades ago, but the one where they have the linguist and the physicist instead of the astrobiologist and the cryptographer.

Yes, that one. Where the premise was, if you know your future, would you want to experience it anyway?

You're the author of Bold Return to Giving a Damn.

That's a great title. That's awesome. And that just came out in the fall of 2023. That explores the link between and among food, health, and climate change.

So the book is about my 25 years of returning this farm from a very industrial, monocultural cattle production.

Operation to a very, what I believe is a very perpetual sort of farming operation that feeds us and does so in a manner that is humane to the animals and improves, not degrades the landscape.

So guys, we got to call it quits there. But oh my gosh, I'm delighted to learn from you, Will. Thank you for providing us with authentic food. And that you exist in this world. This is an important cog in a wheel that is being built and slowly being turned. And maybe one day we'll look back on this show and say, oh, he was a pioneer. Now everybody does it. That's kind of what maybe is the arc of progress. I'm very grateful to you all for having me on as your guest. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Well, you can check out Will's book, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn from an authentic farmer. So Gary, Chuck, thanks for being my co-host. Pleasure, Neil. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. All about the future of farming and how to make it sustainable in this world, in this universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson here as always bidding you to keep looking up.

Richard Hofstadter, was that his name? Or Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote Gdel, Escher, Bach, do you remember?

Yes. His last name is Hofstadter. In that book, which I think won a Pulitzer Prize, very thick, very fascinating book, in the end he has a conversation with Einstein's brain.

He imagines, this is like decades before people thought of that we're in a simulation or anything. He imagined removing Einstein's brain but preserving every single neurosynaptic capacity, all the neurosynaptic capacity of that brain. Okay? So it's in a jar.

And so now you ask it a question. You say, Albert, what time does Grand Central Station arrive at the next train? Okay. That'd be like a fun relativity question.

Everything's relative. So you pick a question and then that question goes in through acoustic signals to the, up to the, whatever the acoustic nerves connect with the brain. And you watch it trip circuits throughout the brain.

So the thesis of the book was if you have a car that does not depend on gasoline, that could run on 30 different types of fuel, then the gasoline is no longer a strategic commodity.

So the two authors there, I've got Anne Koren and Gail Luft. So they're the two authors of that book, Turning Oil Into Salt.

So the book I read called Turning Oil Into Salt, and I forgot the two authors, co-authors of that, made a fascinating point, which was you have a car that requires oil products, so gasoline, it'll only run on gasoline.

You know, it's a title that I really like because you're thinking, am I going to learn how to become a pilot with this? No, but you're really going to learn how...

It's clear up front. Very clear up front. But it's a fun introduction to aerospace engineering. And in some places I go into exactly how a plane flies and actually kind of draw, lift and drag and thrust and...

It really covers where I felt like the rubber met the road in becoming an aerospace engineer. And a lot of that was in college where you think, okay, this is fun. This is really cool. This is fascinating. I want to do this.

So it's really to encourage and to enable not just even a current generation or a new generation of people interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but to equip them in these fields.

Exactly. Exactly. How to get through mentally and really even just even like how to even optimize your time when you're swamped, right? With certain things. And how do you make time? I mean, I get the questions like, oh, can I have a life if I do aerospace engineering? Yes.

We had a children's encyclopedia. We had the Encyclopedia Britannica.

It's called Apocalypse Television. How the day after helped end the Cold War by David Craig.

There were books on it. It was a guy named Jim Fix, who was a big running enthusiast. He was interviewed everywhere and he wrote a book, a bestselling book, and he dropped dead of a heart attack.

He dropped out of a heart attack like in his 40s or 50s, that his father had heart disease, died very young, and maybe he cheated time at many years beyond his due date for even having died young.

If people hated the album, my job would have been way easier because no one would have been brainwashed by it.

And so I've been spending 50 years, this is the 50th year anniversary, 2023 is the 50th year anniversary of the release of that album.

See, now what you should have done is just, you know, you should have took Pink Floyd out the same way you took out Pluto.

And you listen and it says at the end, there is no dark side of the moon.

So I said, okay, problem solved. People just listened to the song. However, there's a sentence that follows it.

Ooh. That's a great title.

Minutes in the Shadow of the Moon.

And I realized you existed upon seeing the cover of your book, The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science. So I know there's so much woo-woo and pseudoscience circulating in that community.

Well, I wrote about it in a book called The Biggest Liar. I can't recall which one of my many publications where I placed this particular information.

And Marty said that what made it really compelling as a story was the arc, the fact that Oppenheimer in 1945 was hailed as America's most distinguished scientist. His image was on the cover of Time and Life. And then nine years later he's brought down and humiliated in this trial, this kangaroo court proceeding and he becomes a public non-entity.

But Marty said that what made it really compelling as a story was the arc, the fact that Oppenheimer in 1945 was hailed as America's most distinguished scientist. His image was on the cover of Time and Life. And then nine years later he's brought down and humiliated in this trial, this kangaroo court proceeding and he becomes a public non-entity.

Of course, there's already a book with that title, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

By Richard Rhodes, right. Also a Pulitzer Prize winning book by the way.

Chief of Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University, author of Drug Dealer MD, and also Dopamine Nation. May I introduce Anna Lemke.

The first is Johns Hopkins University Press and the Dopamine Nation is published by Dutton Penguin Random House.

So you're going to write a book, The Universe According to Weed. Is that what you're going to do?

That was followed by Genius Life and third book, Genius Kitchen.

That was followed by Genius Life and third book, Genius Kitchen.

And she's got a new book out. Okay. Now you can react.

And she's got a new book, Life on Other Planets, a memoir of finding my place in the universe.

I have a lot to share. I have a lot of information now.

That would help. That helps.

So yeah, I'm going to say, Omar, you want to read this book.

I think he wrote a book, The Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos. Which was about two astronomers trying to find the scale of the universe. Was that the book I'm remembering?

And you're there at night looking up at the night sky with a telescope and nobody else. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos. Okay, that sounds about right.