StarTalk Radio

I think if you read Jack Dempsey's book, the name of the book escapes me, I'm sorry.

and just recently, a new book called Unstoppable Us, How Humans Took Over the World. That's a kid's book. Oh my God, illustrated kid's book for tweens age eight to 12.

You've got a new book out. Let me get the title of this book: A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What I've Learned from a Lifetime of Terrible Decisions.

It's called A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What I've Learned from a Lifetime of Terrible Decisions.

Well, what's the subtitle of your book? What I've learned from a lifetime of terrible decisions, yeah.

It's called Professional Idiot, a Memoir.

Benjamin Franklin, let's go back to him, one of the first great scientists of the United States. He wrote books on research and electricity.

He might even have been a better scientist than Founding Father.

If you look at what his record is and what he discovered and the books that he had published.

however one of our favorites is wide receiver coach for arizona state university coach norvell he is the author of the Complete Wide Receiver man who has been in the game for 25 years yeah well this guy is going to know an awful lot about wide receivers so let's let's start with coach coach norvell welcome to playing with science

And again, I hate to sound like a broken record, but in my book, I give an argument. I call it the inanity defense for why we're not a simulation.

And that person is in the house right now except dialing in from Germany. We have Sabine Hasselfelder. Do I pronounce that right, Sabine?

And one of my favorite works of hers is an earlier book that was indicting the expectation that elegance and beauty and math should guide science.

So my first book dealt with the question why there's been pretty much no progress in the foundations of physics in the past 50 years or so since the standard model was completed.

The message that I'm trying to get across in the book is that the problem is that physicists got too enchanted by certain ideals of beauty.

Existential Physics, a Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions.

I read a book, an entire book on kinesiology when I was in high school.

And I said, damn, if I didn't love astrophysics so much, I'd be a kinesiologist. It was physics applied to the human body in ways that I was just so fascinated.

And I wrote a whole other book. My previous book was called Something Deeply Hidden, describing and defending exactly that point of view.

What on earth can we do about climate change?

Yeah, that is the name of the book. It's a comedy book.

I sat in a room for a year while I had a baby. I don't know if you've heard of them. I had a baby and there was COVID, so I couldn't leave the house. And I sat in a room and wrote a book about,

I think the world's first comedy book about climate change.

There's a recent book called Predisposed, Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences.

He did a really interesting quantum mechanics and you really want to get down into his book, The Theoretical Minimum on Quantum Mechanics. It's superb.

I've just recently been binging on the Isaac Asimov story Foundations now streaming.

And a big part of it, it's just in the background, there are people you can infuse your body with nanobots and they know how to heal an injury for you.

Charlotte's Web is a strain of cannabis that is noted for its high CBD or cannabidiol content, which is non-intoxicating.

So you guys pulled the wrestling reverse... So you guys pulled the weed reverse on them because they came after you to try to disparage marijuana. And then you guys turned it around and was like, look at all this good stuff it does.

The sort of famous, very high CBD product that allowed a little girl with an intractable seizure disorder to live seizure free, which was rather amazing.

The very first weed documentary called Weed on CNN that started sort of a whole cycle or series of these things. I was referred to as pot doc.

They called the plant Charlotte's Web for Charlotte's figure, which I think is really lovely. Really beautiful.

Former NASA official Lori Garver offers a front row seat to the decades long struggle within and among space bureaucrats and space billionaires. Bring popcorn as you bear witness to an untold slice of space history.

It's in the book.

So, Laurie, the book is out now. People can buy it at your favorite book outlet, whatever that might be.

Good luck with the book. Like I said, it's a front row seat, and please remind us of the name.

Escaping Gravity

And also on the show is our good friend from Lynchburg College, Virginia, Professor Eric Goff, author of Gold Medal Physics and whose new book is coming out in 2018 and it's called The Science Behind Krav Maga, The Israeli Military Fighting Technique.

That'll be 2018. The science behind Krav Maga, which if I'm not mistaken, Professor, is the hand-to-hand martial arts of the Israeli military, is it not?

And hopefully next year we'll see this out on the shelves. And I've taken a lot of pictures. I train at Forest Super Kicks here in Virginia, in Forest, Virginia. My instructor, Clifton Abercrombie, has been very helpful to help me with a lot of filming.

And what he's done with me with this book is to help me film a lot of the techniques that are going to appear in the book to be described using physics.

Professor, your instructor, when you started to discuss things with him about martial arts, about Krav Maga, did you get the feeling this guy had the physics aspect of it covered already or he just learned because he was into martial arts?

I saw a movie called Rocket Ship XM. That's the first first book I ever read.

I love the title, Fresh Banana Leaves. What the hell is that about? And then we go to the subtitle, Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science.

One of the movements that I talk about in my book, Fresh Banana Leaves, is the Zapatistas movement.

And they could get the title right here, Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science, published earlier this year.

So when you look at string theory, which...Just remind me, Leonard Susskind is the one who's a big exponent of the holographic universe.

So in the string landscape, the idea is that in string theory, it turns out you can have, there's a number that they calculate. I don't know how they do it actually, but it's something, well, I do know how they do it.

But essentially 10 to the power of 500 different possibilities. So one with 500 knots after it. These are the different ways that you can produce laws of physics like the ones we see from the underlying theory.

And that was seen as a really disappointing...

So the string landscape, as I said, Leonard Susskind's book is great on this.