The DemystifySci Podcast

Dr. Jacob Barandes is a professor of Physics at Harvard University who studies the foundations of physics. He has emerged as a leading skeptic of the idea that our universe is somehow fundamentally mathematical in nature, marking a full cycle of more than two thousand years of ink spilled about the nature of the universe. Barandes has found that there is a way of modeling the basement membrane of reality as being made of bodies wit...

Stephen Wolfram is a physicists, mathematician, and programmer who believes he has discovered the computational rules that organize the universe at the finest grain. These rules are not physical rules like the equations of state or Maxwell’s equations. According to Wolfram, these are rules that govern how the universe evolves and operates at a level at least one step down below the reality that we inhabit.

His computational princip...

What if we’re wrong about the sun? Current consensus in the astrophysics community suggests that our planet orbits a burning ball of gaseous plasma - but there’s compelling evidence that suggests the sun is actually made out of liquid metallic hydrogen. If this is true, it isn’t just that we have a new model of the sun. All of astrophysics, from the Big Bang to the nature of white dwarf stars and neutron stars - will have to be rew...

Patrick Vanraes is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp whose research into liquid plasmas has led him to believe that we have radically, completely, totally misunderstood what it means for something to be “plasma.” All presentations on the subject begin with a rote recitation of the fact that plasma is a fourth state of matter - solid, liquid, gas, then plasma. But Patrick makes the point that this is an incompre...

We found some strange, and extensively networked, piles of rocks in the Southern Oregon woods. We take you into the woods with us as we try to figure out if there’s some natural explanation for what we’ve found, or if we have stumbled on some man-made structures that predate the presence of Western settlers. Along the way we try to read how the landscape relates to the river that runs through it, evaluate different strategies for e...

Tiffeny Todd is a physics professor and filmmaker who became obsessed with the nature of consciousness after having an out of body experience and discovering that her field had absolutely no way of explaining the experience of mind separate from body that she had. This set her on a quest to discover the theoretical basis for what had happened to her. Along the way, she discovered a wealth of literature on parapsychology that sugges...

Andrés Gomez Emilsson is the director of the San Francisco–based Qualia Research Institute (QRI), a nonprofit developing formal models of consciousness and emotional valence. QRI’s research aims to untangle the harmonic, computational, and symmetry-driven mechanisms underlying phenomenological experience. They approach the optimization of subjective experience through two powerful psychotechnologies — psychedelics and meditation — ...

Michael Hughes is a postdoctoral researcher at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital who studies the overlooked role of water in living systems. His work builds on a growing body of research suggesting that water is not just a passive solvent, but a highly structured, information-rich medium.

Hughes proposes that under normal biological conditions, water’s ability to form liquid crystalline phases, hydration shells, and coherent domai...

Eric Lerner is a popular science writer, plasma physicist, and long-time collaborator of the late Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén. He’s also one of the featured speakers at our Beyond the Big Bang event this summer in Sesimbra, Portugal. For over thirty years, Lerner has been a leading voice in plasma cosmology and a critic of Big Bang cosmology, who argued for a non-expanding, steady state universe as the central claim of his landmar...

Matt Beall is the host of the Limitless Podcast, where he explores everything from the impossibly precise predynastic vases, to ancient civilizations, planetary catastrophes, nuclear explosions on Mars and, most recently, the suspicious circumstances of Kurt Cobain’s death. Our conversation spans the meta of the weird space we all find ourselves in as people who are willing to play with ideas that we don’t necessarily believe are t...

Gareth Samuel is host of the  @SeethePattern  YouTube channel, where he explores theories of physics that have been neglected by the mainstream. He’s one of the speakers at our BEYOND THE BIG BANG meeting this summer in Sesimbra, Portugal, and joins us now for a conversation about what it’s going to take to unseat the Big Bang, why no one’s managed to do it yet, the incredible theories he’s uncovered from years of work in the fring...

George Howard is a weaver of ideas who runs the Cosmic Tusk blog and organizes the Cosmic Summit annual gathering. He’s also one of the longest-lived players in the Comet Research Group, a heterodox collection of theorists and scientists that has been working on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis since the 1990s. We talk with Howard about bone beds, Carolina Bays, mass extinction, catastrophic history, weirdly magnetic mammoth tus...

Adam Forrest Kay is the author of Escape From Shadow Physics, a rip-roaring tour through the history of physics that suggests the quantum world might be a lot less legible than anyone realizes. Much of his work is informed by the logic of Hydrodynamic Quantum Analogs, which are classical systems whose behavior can be described by same mathematics that’s used for quantum mechanics. Kay makes the case that if a classical system, made...

Invited theorists: Kehlan Morgan (Formscapes), Andrés Goméz Emilsson, Michael HughesRandom theorists: Edwin's Basye, Wendi Gardiner, Ricky Cisco, Philip Sportel, Jack Neefus, David de Hilster, Casey BrophyPanel: Kate Owlsley, Anastasia Bendebury, Michael Shilo DeLayLearn how to think, not what to think! Paradigm Drift is the show where we celebrate the principles of scientific anarchy. Anything goes, as long as you can make a c...

Cancer is one of the most terrifying illnesses of our age - a sudden change that happens silently inside our bodies and slowly eats away at us until there’s nothing left. It’s also one of the biggest failures of the pharmaceutical age - somewhere between 90 and 97% of all cancer drugs fail at clinical trials. Which is why we’re unbelievably excited to bring you our conversation with Dr. Thomas Seyfried, Professor of Biology at Bost...

MAKE HISTORY WITH US THIS SUMMER:https://demystifysci.com/demysticon-2025PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-showAnne Hofmeister is an applied physicist, mathematician, and theorist at Washington University, whose heterodox approach to physics has not made her a lot of friends, but has solved a lot of paradoxical problems. Hofmeister’s background in analytic materials ...

MAKE HISTORY WITH US THIS SUMMER:https://demystifysci.com/demysticon-2025PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-showPATREON: get episodes early + join our weekly Patron Chat https://bit.ly/3lcAasBMERCH: Rock some DemystifySci gear : https://demystifysci.myspreadshop.com/allAMAZON: Do your shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/3YyoT98SUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@U...

MAKE HISTORY WITH US THIS SUMMER:https://demystifysci.com/demysticon-2025PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-showPATREON: get episodes early + join our weekly Patron Chat https://bit.ly/3lcAasBMERCH: Rock some DemystifySci gear : https://demystifysci.myspreadshop.com/allAMAZON: Do your shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/3YyoT98SUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@U...

MAKE HISTORY WITH US THIS SUMMER:https://demystifysci.com/demysticon-2025PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-showPATREON: get episodes early + join our weekly Patron Chat https://bit.ly/3lcAasBMERCH: Rock some DemystifySci gear : https://demystifysci.myspreadshop.com/allAMAZON: Do your shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/3YyoT98SUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@U...