HeyJaredThe Boltzmann Brains
Hi all. We’re Sam and Eric - the Boltzmann Brains! (Is that a thing? You bet it is! We’ll eventually do an episode to explain it.)Sam is a philosopher. Eric is a physicist. And we both love popular culture.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 3
- Latest publication
- Sep 9, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 15, 2026
Latest episodes
Geologists behaving badly (opens the original)
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You spend your whole life devoted to the science of geology; teach generations of students; publish textbooks ... then, a German meteorologist with no training in geology gives a talk that says everything you know about the earth is WRONG. What would you do? In 1912, this actually happened, and geologists did NOT react well. This is the second part of our discussion of Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. We'll review what geologists thought they knew about the earth's surface, an
The Mystery of the Weightless Mountain (opens the original)
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Eric wanted to talk about the discovery of continental drift in 1911, but the deeper he dug the more he realized he would need to cover a much older mystery first. In 1738, a team of Spanish and French explorers tried to measure the gravitational attraction of the largest mountain in Central America. It's a big lump of matter, so according to Newton it MUST exert a gravitational pull on everything else. After months of planning, days of climbing, and way more snow than they wanted, the expeditio
Mendel's pea-hacking scandal (opens the original)
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Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) founded the science of heredity with a series of famous experiments cross-breeding pea plants. And yet... when modern statistical techniques are applied to Mendel's original data, the agreement with theory is much too good. After his death, one biologist described him as either a miracle-worker or a liar. In this episode we'll talk about the lasting controversy surrounding Mendel's work. Did he fake his numbers? Was an unknown assistant cooking the books? Or was it all
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