Point of Inquiry

Host: Chris Mooney When we last had Bill McKibben on this show in 2010, I was mainly treating him as another bestselling science author—one who happens to focus on climate change. Well. Something kinda big happened in the intervening years, and McKibben has become, simply put, the country's leading environmental spokesman and advocate through his organization 350.org. From protests against the Keystone XL pipeline to, most recently, his "Do the Math" tour, rallying of college students to call for their universities to divest from fossil fuel companies... McKibben now speaks for a stunning mass movement of concerned people. Many of them are young. And many of them are terrified at what is happening to the planet that, in his last book, McKibben renamed "Eaarth," because, he said, the old name just didn't really capture it any longer. So, we are simply thrilled to welcome him back on the show.

Host: Indre Viskontas Because we live in an uncertain world, we arm ourselves with facts to gain a sense of control and therefore some modicum of comfort. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow even though it disappears tonight. But what happens when facts, those bits of information that we believed captured some fundamental truth about our world, are shown to be no longer true? With the exponential rise in our knowledge about our universe comes a tsunami of data overturning what we once thought we knew with complete certainty. Are there patterns that emerge from this wasteland of myths that once were accepted facts. One tried and true solution is to apply math to the problem, and network scientist and author Samuel Arbesman has done just that in his recently published book on the Half-life of Facts. Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist. He is a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. In addition, he blogs at Wired.com, and his essays about math and science have appeared in such places as the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, Arbesman was a research fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, where he used network science and applied mathematics to study innovation, scientific discovery, and prosocial behavior. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University in 2008, and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University in 2004. He has also coined a new word, named an asteroid, and created an eponymous constant and the Milky Way Transit Authority subway map.

Host: Chris Mooney One of the first people I ever got to know in skepticism was Steven Novella. He was a professor at Yale, just starting out as an organized skeptic—I was a student, just getting fired up about the same stuff. Since then, Steve has become hugely successful as a skeptic leader and as a communicator of skeptical ideas, particularly when it comes to his area of specialty, alternative medicine. And one thing I've always noticed about him over the years is his unending capacity to consider what really works to promote skepticism and critical thinking, and what doesn't—and to adjust accordingly. So I asked Steve on the show to discuss this process, and to talk about grappling with one of the toughest issues in skepticism and the issue that is his personal specialty—dealing with false claims about medical cures, or what is sometimes called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Steven Novella is a neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine. He's also the host of the podcast Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, and the president and co-founder of the New England Skeptics' Society. He writes the blog Neurologica, and contributes to a number of other blogs including Science-Based Medicine.

Host: Chris Mooney Before the "complementary and alternative medicine" fad, and before UFO craze, lived a man whom you might call the first modern pseudoscientist. His name was Immanuel Velikovsky. He had a strange theory about a comet—that turned out to be Venus—shaping the course of human history. He tangled with Carl Sagan about it—and with the scientific community about it. And then, he was mostly forgotten. But no longer, because Princeton historian of science Michael Gordin has tracked down Velikovsky's personal papers. In his book The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, Gordin uses Velikovsky's example to show how he laid the groundwork for other pseudosciences-it's kind of like they followed in his footsteps. Michael Gordin is professor of history at Princeton University and director of the program in Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has written widely in the history of science with a focus on the Soviet Union and the early nuclear age. The Pseudoscience Wars is his fourth book.

Host: Chris Mooney On this show, we often debate the state of American secularism—covering topics like the rise of the so-called "nones," or the unending battle to rescue the country from the pernicious influence of Christian right. Our guest this week, Jacques Berlinerblau, has a provocative thesis about all this. He says that American secularism has clearly and distinctly lost major ground. And to recover from that loss, well... he's got some suggestions that might not go down well—but it's important to hear them. Even if, you know, you're not quite ready for a political allegiance with religious moderates. Jacques Berlinerblau is author of the new book How to be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom. He's an associate professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, where he directs the Program for Jewish Civilization.

Host: Indre Viskotnas Despite our individual differences, highlighted especially during an election, much of what we see, hear, smell or feel is shareable: that is, when standing in front of an object, we can more or less agree that it has a particular color, shape, texture, size and so on. But what if I tell you that I see an object clearly which you do not? Or hear a voice that doesn't have a physical source? Now we enter the world of hallucinations. Hallucinations, or perceptions of objects without an external reality, are not confined to the minds of people with schizophrenia or those who take hallucinogenic drugs. In many cultures, visions are considered a privileged state of consciousness; the trait of a special person chosen by some supernatural force to pass along an important message. But in our western worldview, hallucinations are often associated with a malfunctioning brain. What causes the startling, unbidden perception of something that seems very real, but has no material existence outside of our own minds? With reference to his own mind-altering experiences, the 'poet-laureate of medicine', Dr. Oliver Sacks, takes us through the looking glass and into the fascinating world of hallucinations. Oliver Sacks, M.D. is a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007) and The Mind's Eye (2010). Awakenings (1973), his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Dr. Sacks is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new book, Hallucinations (2012), has just been released.

Hosts: Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney At the 2012 CSICON conference in Nashville, Tennessee, your Point of Inquiry hosts Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney finally actually found themselves in the same place. The result was a show that features both of them covering current events—the 2012 election, the passing of CFI founder Paul Kurtz—and each also conducting an interview! Our guests: Jon Ronson (interviewed by Chris Mooney) is a journalist, filmmaker, radio personality and humorist-author of books you have heard of like The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test. You may have heard him on This American Life, or read him in the Guardian—or, if you are a very strange and odd person, or maybe a psychopath, you may have been interviewed by him! Because that would put you right in his wheelhouse, as he explains in this interview. Richard Wiseman (interviewed by Indre Viskontas) holds Britain's only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. His research on an eclectic range of topics including luck, self-help, illusion and persuasion has been published in some of the world's leading academic journals and cited in over 20 introductory textbooks. He has also written several best-selling books that have been translated into over 30 languages, including The Luck Factor, Quirkology, and 59 Seconds. His psychology-based YouTube videos have received over 45 million views and he has given keynote addresses to organisations across the world, including The Royal Society, The Swiss Economic Forum, and Google. Richard is the most followed British psychologist on Twitter and was recently listed in the Independent On Sunday's top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live.  Over 2 million people have taken part in his mass participation experiments and he has acted as a creative consultant to Derren Brown, The MythBusters, CBS's The Mentalist, Heston Blumenthal, Nick Cave and Jeremy Deller. He began his working life as a professional magician and is a member of The Inner Magic Circle.

Host: Indre Viskontas The month of October is associated with falling leaves, autumn winds and hallowe'en. But for sports fans in the US, it also signals a high point in America's national pastime: baseball's postseason. After a long run of 162 games, the last weeks of October are ripe with matchups in which legends are made and broken. Any skeptic worth his or her salt, however, can't help but marvel at the diversity and frequency of ritualistic behaviors on display amongst these world class athletes. What is it about baseball that cause intelligent, highly-motivated, elite athletes to refrain from washing their underwear, to eat fried chicken or crunchy taco supremes, to put pennies in their supporters after every win, or chew the same piece of gum night after night, saving it under a baseball cap? The repertoire of routines that batters engage in while stepping into the box is often as choreographed as a ballet: with commentators going so far as calling Mike Hargrove the human rain delay because of his extended dance. To navigate this swamp of superstition, we talked to Bruce Hood, a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, whose popular book SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable, has shed light on our tendency towards irrational behaviors. Professor Hood is the director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol, where he studies the origins of supernatural beliefs, intuitive theory formation, inhibitory control and general cognitive development. He has been awarded a Sloan Fellowship among other honors, and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Science society. In 2011, he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas lectures broadcast by the BBC to over 4 million viewers. His most recent book is the Self Illusion, which calls into question our view of ourselves as coherent, integrated individuals.

Host: Chris Mooney In this show, we talk to two founders of ScienceDebate, a nonprofit organization that in the last two election cycles has pushed to get the presidential candidates to talk about and debate science policy. So far, there has been no actual presidential science debate. But this year, ScienceDebate got Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to answer 14 top science policy questions, leading to some revealing results. And with the election less than a month away—an election whose winner will guide science policy at a time when international research competitiveness, climate change, and other science based issues demand attention... it's hard to think of many things more important for voters to pay attention to. The media feel otherwise, unfortunately. The first presidential debate and the vice-presidential debate have ignored science almost entirely. But that's precisely why we're here, and why ScienceDebate is here—to try to shine some light on the issues that matter critically, but aren't getting their due. Matthew Chapman is a screenwriter, author, and great-great grandson of Charles Darwin. When not working on ScienceDebate, he recently wrote and directed The Ledge, a thriller whose central character is an atheist. Shawn Otto is also a screenwriter and author, most recently of the book Fool me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. Among other accolades, he also wrote and co-produced the Oscar nominated film A House of Sand and Fog.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Lisa Randall, the Harvard theoretical physicist and one of the most heavily cited and influential researchers in her field. She's a member of a number of distinguished scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences—but she's also a very popular science author, behind the bestselling Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, and more recently Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, which is just out in paperback. Between the hardback and paperback release of Knocking on Heaven's Door, a subject much discussed in the book—the quest for the discovery of the Higgs boson—was actually completed. Or at least, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider found a particle that sure looks like the Higgs. Randall has a new e-book about this entitled Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space. So we were thrilled to speak with her about the Higgs, and what the discovery means about the ability of physics to continually peel back new layers of the universe.