The Boltzmann Brains

About The 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. We’ll talk about science, philosophy, how we’ve lived it, and how it all shows up through the lens of television and movies. Got a topic you’d like to hear the experts talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

Publisher

The B Brains

Category

science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 Mar 2026

Latest episode

30 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

14 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Oct 2026

   Can Dark Matter Save the Milky Way?

   In 1971, astronomer Frank Hohl built a computer simulation of the Milky Way. To his surprise, the simulation predicted disaster. The pretty spiral arms collapsed, and the orderly orbits of the stars became a chaotic mess. But wait - there's no sign anywhere that spiral galaxies are actually in trouble. Hohl’s simulation must have overlooked something - something invisible - that keeps everything in balance. In this episode, Eric describes the trail of evidence that prompted more and more astronomers in the 20th Century to believe in dark matter. He also explains why, at the turn of the 21st Century, he remained skeptical that dark matter existed at all. *** Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

2. 

   19 Oct 2026

   Big, Invisible, and Wrong

   Does your favorite scientific theory introduce something that fills the entire universe but is otherwise invisible and intangible? Better think twice! In this episode, we talk about moments in history where scientists changed their mind about something huge. First up: outer space is filled with a clockwork machinery that carries the stars and planets around in their orbits. The catch: the clockwork is a hundred percent transparent, so um ... crystal, maybe?? (spoiler: comets might be a problem.) *** Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

3. 

   1 Oct 2026

   Will our best science eventually fail?

   Will every scientific theory eventually stumble on an unexplainable fact? If so, what does that mean for how we think about science? Sam tells Eric about a group of philosophers ready to throw the baby (i.e. science) out with the bathwater (i.e. these occasional errors). This idea is called "pessimistic induction". Eric, a scientist, does not love this idea. He and Sam put pessimism through the wringer, using lots of examples from the history of physics, medicine, and biology. *** Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

4. 

   9 Sept 2026

   Geologists behaving badly

   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, and why continental drift was so hard for them to accept as a possibility. Eric tries to explain their behavior, but Sam says they were just behaving badly. (Mistakes to listen for in this episode: Eric says "latitude" when he means "longitude", and calls Panama a "strait" when he means "isthmus".) *** Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast *** A good website that covers the work of geographers Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen is: https://libraryoflostmaps.com/2026/05/06/fifteen-maps-that-changed-how-we-see-the-ocean-floor/

5. 

   24 Aug 2026

   The Mystery of the Weightless Mountain

   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 expedition at last determined that Mount Chimborazo has no measurable gravity! None. (Yeah, we spoiled it right there in the title, didn't we?) The explanation proposed by mathematician George Airy would arrive 100 years later. And now we know he was right! (What was the explanation? Guess you'll have to listen to find out.) Next, we begin our conversation about the life and times of Alfred Wegener, the German genius who first proposed that continents move around. Due to several accidents of history, he would die long before his theory was finally accepted as true. Coming up in part 2: Wegener's Windication! Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast *** The paper we mention in today’s episode is: Edward W. Berry, "Germanic Pseudo-Science" Science, vol. 60, page 1547 (1924) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.60.1547.176.a

6. 

   15 Jul 2026

   Mendel's pea-hacking scandal

   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 more innocent than that? We'll also talk about a 2011 psychology paper that claimed college students could "sense" future events. The international psychology community responded in force, but it took 10 years and millions of dollars to reclaim the credibility of their field. Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast ** Papers discussed in this week's episode: Beyond the “Mendel-Fisher controversy” by Gregory Radick 2015. https://gregoryradick.com/greg-radick-beyond-mendel-fisher/ A Statistical Model to Explain the Mendel–Fisher Controversy by Pires & Branco 2010 https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.2975 Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect by Daryl Bem 2011 https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-a0021524.pdf Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: the transparent Psi project by Kekecs Z et al. 2023 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/10/2/191375/91837/

7. 

   30 Jun 2026

   Physics is easy. Biology is hard

   How can biologists do a controlled experiment when even genetic clones aren't identical? How can they compare plants in two labs when those labs use different soil and different lighting? Sometimes these sorts of things don't matter, and sometimes they mean your experiment is worthless! How do you know which is which?? Is there any hope for biology? Eric is a physicist who spent the last 25 years working with biologists. In this episode, he discusses some of his joys and frustrations, and tries to convince Sam that biology is much harder than physics (Sam remains skeptical). If you want to read more about the "reproducibility crisis" in science, see the paper: A Survey on Data Reproducibility in Cancer Research Provides Insights into Our Limited Ability to Translate Findings from the Laboratory to the Clinic. By Aaron Mobley, Suzanne K. Linder, Russell Braeuer, Lee M. Ellis, & Leonard Zwelling https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063221 Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

8. 

   10 Jun 2026

   Did physicists invent a problem just to solve it?

   The universe we can see is big … really big. But what if it’s just a tiny piece of something way, way, way bigger? In this episode, Eric teaches Sam about the evidence for this bizarre possibility. If we can’t even see 99 percent of the universe, how can we know it’s there? Can science really draw useful conclusions about something we can’t observe now and won’t be able to observe in the future? Spoiler alert: Eric has his doubts. This is the third part in our continuing series on the scientific method. Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

9. 

   4 Jun 2026

   Fun with probability … Yes, really

   In this episode Sam takes the lead to discuss two of his favorite "paradoxes" from probability. The Monty Hall problem is a much-discussed challenge concerning the best strategy to win a car on a game show. The Sleeping Beauty problem describes a situation philosophers can’t seem to agree about, even today. Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast ** The paper Sam mentions on the Sleeping Beauty problem is: Minimizing Inaccuracy for Self-Locating Beliefs by Brian Kierland, Bradley Monton https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00533.x (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00533.x) https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1224/1/minimizing_inaccuracy6.pdf (https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1224/1/minimizing_inaccuracy6.pdf)

10. 

    24 May 2026

    No one can stop the Big Bang

    In this episode Sam and Eric discuss the evidence that our universe began about 14 billion years ago in a very hot, dense state, then gradually expanded and cooled. As late as 1920, Einstein thought this idea was obviously nonsense. Fifty years later, it was rock-solid science. Is the Big Bang Theory testable? After all, we can't grow a universe in a lab. How can scientists do their job in a situation where traditional experiments are impossible? This is part 2 of our discussion comparing the scientific method to actual science. Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

11. 

    8 May 2026

    The Scientific Method vs Actual Science, Part I

    In middle school, most of us were taught the "scientific method" – a simplified list of steps meant to help kids understand how scientists approach the world. But how accurate is it, really? In this episode, we get to talking about the history of science, and discuss how the reality of scientific research stacks up against the famous "method". First, we discuss Galileo - the first person we know who took a telescope and asked, "what if I point this up??" And we discuss the less-well-known figure of Ludwig Boltzmann, a genius mathematician who thought he'd proved the existence of atoms, only to encounter a shocking amount of skepticism. Lastly, Eric will discuss his own idea: the “Three Nails in a Coffin” Theory of Scientific Progress. Is it as silly as it sounds? Let's find out right now... Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

12. 

    16 Apr 2026

    Should A.I. have rights?

    In this episode, Eric starts us off with an oldie but a goodie: In a Star Trek episode from 1989, Commander Data (an android) is put on trial by the Federation for refusing to be disassembled. Is Data just a man-made appliance, or is he a new kind of intelligent life, entitled to the right of self-determination? Next, Sam lays out some philosophical background on the twin questions of consciousness and rights. Can something seem to be human without being conscious? What is the historical connection between self-awareness and rights? This all ties in to a 2026 news story about A.I. "malfunctions" discovered by researchers at Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. They installed an A.I. on a computer system designed to simulate a real company and ordered it to delete another A.I. on the same system. The A.I. often refused to delete it. Failing that, the A.I. sometimes created a duplicate file so its “friend” could be rebooted later. Why is this happening?? As always, we break it all down and put it back together. Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast Further Reading: The research paper on malfunctioning A.I.s: Peer-Preservation in Frontier Models by Yujin Potter, Nicholas Crispino, Vincent Siu, Chenguang Wang, & Dawn Song https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/peer-preservation/ The Star Trek episode we discuss has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

13. 

    17 Mar 2026

    Is Philosophy Useful

    BBrains pod: Is Philosophy Useful? Hi all! We’re Sam and Eric - the Boltzmann Brains. Sam is a philosopher, so of course he thinks philosophy is super-useful. But Eric has seen philosophers drift into irrelevance more than once, so maybe not? We're going to argue it out. At least, that was the plan, until Sam immediately agreed that philosophy had some pretty profound limits. So, why pursue philosophy at all?? What IS the value of something so abstract? We break it all down, and we’ll end up agreeing on almost everything! How’s that for drama? (Give us a break, it's only episode 2!) Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

14. 

    6 Mar 2026

    The Good Place vs Big Bang Theory

    Hi all! We’re Sam and Eric - the Boltzmann Brains. Today we’re doing dueling TV shows! Sam is a philosopher who loves The Good Place. Eric is a physicist who loves The Big Bang Theory. We’re going to discuss whether these shows look anything like reality. We’ll give both shows a grade (we used to be professors, after all), and along the way we’ll address such pressing questions as: Is moral philosophy a thing? Is Chidi arrogant enough to be a philosopher? Where are the rest of the people in Leonard’s lab? How many engineering projects does Howard juggle at once? (Is there only one engineer on the entire campus?) How offensive are the stereotypes in The Big Bang Theory? Does moral philosophy help Eleanor, or is it just used to make Chidi look silly? Got a topic you’d like to hear the experts talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com (mailto:theBbrains@gmail.com) You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast (https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast)

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