The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss

Alcoholism is a scourge on modern society. Every year, 178,000 American die from alcohol abuse, and it has been estimated that over 200 billion dollars is lost from the US economy due to alcoholism, includingcosts of health care, lost productivity, and costs of crime enforcement. Given this immense social cost, it is equally amazing that there is no widely accepted cure. Rather, alcoholics are told they need to abstain from taking a single drink for the rest of their lives, or they are likely to revert to their earlier states of alcohol abuse. Katie Herzog is a journalist whose work I have enjoyed and I was happy to have a conversation with her in general. But even more so after the publication of her recent book, Drink your Way Sober. She discusses there a fascinating science-based approach that appears to provide a ‘cure’ for many alcoholics that actually allows them to drink, if they wish, in moderation, for the rest of their lives. The idea is to use an opioid blocker, in this case something called naltrexone, that basically removes the pleasure response from drinking. A naltrexone pill can be taken a few hours before drinking, and over time, with the correct behavioral management, it has been shown to be effective for many drinking in removing the craving for alcohol.What makes Katie’s book, and our discussion, so poignant is that Katie is not just a journalist writing about alcoholism, she was an alcoholic for most of her life, and her discovery of the work of of the so-called Sinclair Method, after the scientist David Sinclair, whose original work on naltrexone in Finland changed the field, changed her life. Her book intersperses her own experiences with the science underlying this new treatment for alcoholism, and it is thus perfect for our podcast, which connects science and culture. It also makes for a fascinating and informative conversation that I hope will help have a positive impact on treating this international blight. I hope you find it engrossing and as enjoyable to listen to as it was to produce.And there are still berths available on our Greece and Cyprus adventure. Go to originsproject.org and explore the possibilities!As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Sabine Hossenfelder, theoretical physicist and science communicator known for sharp takes on modern physics, joins for a lively sweep of recent science. They discuss fusion reactors possibly producing axion-like particles. They debate macroscopic quantum interference and collapse versus decoherence. AI’s role in math gets examined. Rapid post-impact evolution, string-theory math in biology, tumor–nerve signaling, and dogs learning words round out the chat.

Explore how simple mental tools empower physicists to decode nature's complexity. Discover the power of scientific notation and Fermi problems for quick estimates. Learn about the intriguing concept of approximation, exemplified by the physicist's spherical cow. Krauss connects scaling laws to animal forms and unravels cosmic expansion through Hubble's observations. Uncover how dimensional analysis leads to surprising discoveries in particle physics. Join a sailing adventure in the Greek archipelago with experts and elevate your understanding of the universe!

New Year’s Eve always comes with that familiar urge to clean the slate, toss out what didn’t hold up, and keep what actually earned its place. That’s basically the spirit of our latest “What’s New in Science” episode with Sabine Hossenfelder.We began with the season’s favorite shiny object: wormholes. The headlines have been everywhere, but we talked through why most of these stories quietly slide from “a speculative tool in a model” to “a virtual phenomenon that might be useful in calculations.” Traversable wormholes of course still run straight into hard constraints like negative energy and the time machine problem.From there we moved to something much more grounded: CERN. ATLAS has now observed the Higgs decaying into muon pairs, which is exactly the kind of precise confirmation you want for the Standard Model, and while it is yet another remarkable confirmation of how well the fundamental feature of the Standard Model works, it once again sharpens the contrast with the inexplicable nature of the only feature that doesn’t seem to fit: neutrino masses. And it leaves us hanging about where to look next.We next spent time on what the future might look like for big particle collider projects and what it says about the field’s priorities, including the signal sent by China’s latest five-year plan, which no longer features a massive circular collider proposal. We touched on a smaller CERN result as well, and used it to reflect on a broader point: some of the most stubborn, interesting physics lives in regimes that are messy rather than glamorous.Then we took a quick detour into a quantum gravity-adjacent proposal about whether the way we average quantities in general relativity could matter for quantum corrections, and finally landed on a genuinely satisfying closer: OSIRIS-REx’s Bennu samples. Finding ribose alongside other prebiotic building blocks makes it harder to dismiss the idea that the chemistry of life might be widespread, and not a once-only cosmic fluke.I hope you enjoy the episode, and I hope you’re welcoming the new year surrounded by friends and family. Thank you, as always, for listening and for your continued support.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

On this week’s episode of The Origins Podcast, I ended up in a place I genuinely never expected to go: the humble “like” button. When the idea first landed in my inbox, my reaction was basically, why on Earth would anyone write a whole book about that? Then I spoke with Martin Reeves, and I discovered that the history of this tiny icon is a surprisingly rich window into innovation, entrepreneurship, human psychology, and the modern attention economy.Martin is a senior figure at BCG’s Henderson Institute, but what made the conversation especially fun for me is that he is not a consultant who wandered into science. He has a background in science, and then wandered into the world of strategy, technology, and ideas, and he approaches the “like” button the way I wish more people approached our digital world: with curiosity, skepticism, and a willingness to follow evidence across disciplines.The central irony, of course, is that the “like” button began as an almost laughably small, practical solution. In the story Martin and his coauthor reconstructs, it is often less about a single inventor than about a messy ecosystem of micro innovations, technical constraints, and cultural accidents. Yet those small choices compound. The result is that something as simple as a handful of code became a universal signal that helped shape social media, transformed advertising, and created feedback loops that are now baked into the infrastructure of daily life.We also dig into why it works so well on us. The mechanisms are not mysterious in the abstract, they are biological and social, but the scale is unprecedented. Approval and recognition are ancient. Industrialized approval is new. And once you start thinking that way, you notice how these same feedback dynamics are spreading into new domains, including the tools we now use to interact with AI.This conversation surprised me, and I suspect it will surprise you too. Indeed, if you are like me, and wondered why the like-button is worth discussing, you will be surprised to learn how much of the modern world is quietly organized around it. You can listen on any podcast platform, watch on YouTube, or view ad free on Substack. And if you are tempted at the end, well, you may even find yourself clicking the very thing we spend the episode dissecting.You can listen on any podcast platform, watch on YouTube, or view ad free on Substack. And if you are tempted at the end, well, you may even find yourself clicking the very thing we spend the episode dissecting.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Diana McLain Smith, a conflict mediator and author, shares her insights on bridging political divides. She explores how evolution influences in-group loyalty and the societal forces that harden these divides. Highlighting the power of local community action, she discusses examples from Billings and Lewiston to illustrate positive change. Diana emphasizes the importance of open dialogue, reframing perspectives, and examining beliefs through a civic lens, urging citizens to take meaningful steps toward collaboration and understanding.

Dive into a fascinating exploration of the universe with a practical guide to physics. The discussion spans from the vastness of cosmic scales to the microscopic realms of atoms. Krauss employs the 'powers of ten' to illustrate how our everyday experiences relate to the universe's grand design. Key topics include Earth's place among galaxies, the mysterious nature of dark matter, and the intricate behaviors of particles. This journey not only reveals our cosmic insignificance but celebrates the profound insights science offers about our origins.

In this engaging conversation, Noam Chomsky, a renowned linguist and political commentator, reflects on anti-intellectualism in America and the delayed reaction of intellectuals during the Vietnam War. He critiques U.S. foreign policy, discussing topics like North Korea and the humanitarian impact of sanctions on Venezuela. Chomsky analyzes Trump’s media manipulation and highlights existential threats such as climate change and nuclear escalation. He also addresses the complexities of free speech and the role of religion in politics, providing insights that remain highly relevant today.

As we move into the end of the year, I’m excited to return to our recurring series “What’s New in Science” with my co-host Sabine Hossenfelder. In this month’s episode, we started by tackling a favorite subject: scientific hype. Sabine kicked things off by dissecting a recent, highly suspect press release claiming a million-qubit quantum computer is on the horizon. I then brought up a National Geographic article claiming that “warp drive is speeding closer to reality” , and we discussed the reasons why it actually isn’t, including the need for “negative energy,” that keep it firmly in the realm of science fiction.From there, Sabine steered us into the world of academic accolades, discussing the controversy around last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for work on neural networks and the collaborative nature of science. I then introduced this year’s prize, which was awarded for the beautiful and precise experimental work on seemingly macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics—specifically, showing a superconducting quantum state can “tunnel” through a barrier.Finally, we turned to cosmic mysteries. Sabine presented a report on search for “Dark Stars,” a theory that the first stars might have been powered by dark matter annihilation , which require some wishful thinking and what I think are not particularly well motivated physics. For full disclosure this is an issue I thought about in a slightly different context almost 40 years ago and have some a priori skepticism about. I closed with a much more plausible bit of exotic physics that may have been observed: new observations of long-lived gamma-ray bursts. A new model suggests these are caused by a black hole that has merged with a star and is consuming it from the inside out. From wild hype to implausible and plausible models to Nobel-winning physics, I hope you enjoy the conversation.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

In a Halloween-themed exploration, the host debunks myths about ghosts using fundamental physics. If ghosts were visible, they'd interact with light, contradicting their ability to pass through walls. The discussion critiques the misuse of quantum mechanics in pop culture, especially the misconception that consciousness can alter reality. By analyzing examples like miracles and werewolves, the host highlights that the real universe, with its quantum wonders and cosmic mysteries, is far more intriguing than any supernatural fantasy.