Bullaki Science Podcast

Didier Queloz is Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory (University of Cambridge) and Geneva University. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star”.
In this interview he talks about his challenging journey from the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star in 1995 to the acknowledgement of his discovery by the scientific community. He explores his experience in reporting a paradigm-changing finding and how this triggered hard scepticism from the publishing industry and fellow scientists, which lasted about 3 years. He and Michel Mayor were eventually acknowledged as the founders of the new field of exoplanets and were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2019. He also talks about realistic ways to explore Proxima Centauri b and other potentially habitable planetary systems such as TRAPPIST-1 using technologies that are currently available. He also discusses his interdisciplinary research activities on abiogenesis and the search for life on other planets.
Download article from the Scientific Video Protocols website:
- https://scivpro.com/manuscript/10_32386_scivpro_000017/
- https://scivpro.com/manuscript/10_32386_scivpro_000018/
- https://scivpro.com/manuscript/10_32386_scivpro_000019/
Full video interview series with Didier Queloz:
- Part 1: The Discovery of the First Exoplanet Orbiting a Solar-Type Star | Didier Queloz (1/3) https://youtu.be/6xqbBWDgzsY
- Part 2: Breakthrough Discoveries vs Incremental Science | Didier Queloz (2/3) https://youtu.be/4cXalPDJT5k
- Part 3: Are we going to Alpha Centauri? | Didier Queloz (3/3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RODr3...
Scientific Video Protocols is the first full open-access peer-reviewed video journal publishing in 4k cinematic quality.

Michael Shermer is a science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic. In this podcast we discuss the Pentagon UFO videos, the documentary “Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation”, the UFO entertainment business, “Mirage Man”, ancient civilizations, water memory and homeopathy, the paranormal, cold fusion, and quantum quackery and mysticism.
The video podcast is available here: https://youtu.be/p8ls1oSQvc0
His new book “Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist” is available now https://amzn.to/32PPZMh. During this podcast we discussed topics included in his two other books “Why People Believe Weird Things” (https://amzn.to/35219jI) and “Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye” (https://amzn.to/3lJTxbK). Michael’s full list of articles and books is available here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?...
You can find his course “Skepticism 101: How to Think like a Scientist” here: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/cours...
Find out more: www.skeptics.com and https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelS....

Nobel Laureate Josephson talks about the Josephson Effect, transcendental meditation, the Mind–Matter Unification Project, intelligence, science orthodoxy, paranormal, water memory, the publication process, cold fusion and LENR, understanding quantum mechanics, coordination dynamics, biosemiotics, artificial intelligence, cymatics, and intelligent design.
Brian David Josephson FRS (born 4 January 1940) is a Welsh theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge. Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunneling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University.
The video is available here: https://youtu.be/9FcPVIBm7-E.
SL. I saw your talk was at the Trinity College last November where you talked about the “New Scientific Paradigm”. So there are some areas in which physics seems to be stuck, it's not really progressing. What sort of field are you trying to address? What sort of aspect do you want to address with this “New paradigm”?
BJ. Well I don't like the term “New paradigm” and I think it's just extending physics by realizing that there's some directions it's not looked into. Like you might have something new, like magnetism, which was introduced by Faraday and you recognize that there's some limitations in what the physics community addresses.
The way I see it, the problem is mind and intelligence. The point is you asked about some biological systems, the conventional picture is that ordinary physics covers it all. We know what biological systems are composed of. We know other things like chemical reactions. So it's all explained. But in fact it is not really all explained because there are points of detail, coordination and things like that, which are important in determining behaviour. So for a start you need to put in coordination, which is something that biologist scientists fit in. Also semiosis, which is about meaning. That's another direction in biology called biosemiosis.
My point is that there are really two cultures. Some biologists study these significant aspects of biology, but physicists don't know about them, it's not regular physics. The reason why it's important is, I think it's important at the fundamental level because the mysteries of quantum mechanics in fact could be understood in these terms. Some of people like Karen Barad particularly emphasized parallels and suggested we can understand quantum physics if we take into account things like agency and the way ... coordination again.
So in other words we are not understanding the quantum domain probably because we... our theories don't take mind into account and therefore we end up with statistical theories. But the theories don't have to be statistical. I think it'll be great advance in physics when this is acknowledged and we start to do theories which take into account things like meaning and coordination. That’s the thing I'm interested in doing.
SL. Yeah, so from one side we have a quantum mechanics that does sort of quantitative measurements, and on the other side we have biology that does qualitative measurements. You're trying to get ideas from biology from biosemiotics so that you might use this qualitative description into quantum mechanics so that we can understand it, right?
BJ. Yes, that’s an important point. Physics tends to insist that you have quantitative theories. But you can perfectly well use modelling to test the theory.
My other point is in the biological side you have great variability so your quantitative theory will not apply in general. So you need a different kind of theory. Biology has come up with different kind of theories. So it needs a kind of synthesis and I think the quantitative sides have come out of some kind limit w

The future of warfare is heading towards a battle between software engineers rather than soldiers and pilots. World superpowers are pursuing an arms race to develop super swarm drones, which some have identified as weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In this podcast technical consultant, journalist, and author David Hambling talks about the state of the art of military drones and distributed approaches in warfare.
The video podcast is available here: https://youtu.be/HHKvzVvt0nc
David’s book “SWARM TROOPERS, How small drones will conquer the world” is available here https://www.swarm-troopers.com/.
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Some extracts from the podcast:
David Hambling (DH). At the moment the drones are beginning to have quite significant impact on warfare. At the moment, the chief users are the US Air Force and the CIA who've been using them for what are called counterinsurgency operations. [...] That's well short of an actual hot war. But we've also seen very recently in Nagorno Karabakh, where there've been drones making a significant impact on the battlefield on a full scale war. And that's kind of likely to happen more in the future. Now, the big drones, like the Reapers that the US Air Force us go for $20-30 million apiece, whereas small drones, like the consumer drones made by DJI, the sort that you can buy over the internet, those are only a few hundred dollars. [...]
DH. [with mosaic warfare and distributed approaches] The idea is that you can have your warfighting capability. [...]. So that's the ability to see what's happening, cameras and radar and other sensors, and your communications and then your weapon systems. Rather than having it all in one big box, like, say, a single aircraft flying overhead, you can have lots of different devices at different levels. [...] Like a mosaic, you can build it up to match whatever the particular mission requirement is.
DH. If you're a soldier, one of the things you always want to know is what's happening on the other side of the hill, because the last thing you want to do is actually stick your head up and go over and get shot out, while trying to look. Whereas drones give you the perfect way of seeing everything that's going on around you. [...]
DH. Yes, I mean, that's [nuclear batteries] ultimately that's one of the best ways of powering aircraft. You've to remember, back at the time they were also looking at nuclear powered bombers, and various other things. Given that the military already have nuclear powered submarines and nuclear powered aircraft carriers. It didn't seem quite so outlandish. The nuclear powered drone would be a slightly different prospect though, because there's a much greater chance of it crashing and problems. However, there is actually a company that's working on a similar concept at the moment, who believe that by using betavoltaics, which is a sort of power system driven by radioactive decay, they can get enough power to have a compact power system to drive a drone.
DH. A swarm is simply a large number of relatively simple units that are able to carry out complicated coordinated actions just by following a few rules. Swarming technology is a lot of it draws from nature. So this is from the way that flocks of birds fly or that shoals of fish swim, so they can all move together without crashing into each other. And the whole thing can change directions smoothly and seamlessly. So it's that sort of approach. The advantage of a swarm is that you can have 100 or 1000, or even more small drones, all carrying out a task and they don't require hundreds or thousands of operators, you just need one operator to say go over there and the entire swarm can then have a commands. [...]
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Dr Paul B. Rimmer is one of the scientists who contributed to the discovery of a potential biomarker (phosphine) in the atmosphere of Venus. In this podcast we explore what does this finding actually mean and go through the details of their publication ‘Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus’.
The video podcast is available here: https://youtu.be/syQmBJkpfw8
Paul details the journey of this discovery lead by Prof. Jane S. Greaves, which took almost 4 years and involved a large collaboration including Cardiff University, the University of Manchester, the MIT, Kyoto Sangyo University, the Imperial College, the Open University, and the East Asian Observatory. This publication was authored by Jane S. Greaves, Anita M. S. Richards, William Bains, Paul B. Rimmer, Hideo Sagawa, David L. Clements, Sara Seager, Janusz J. Petkowski, Clara Sousa-Silva, Sukrit Ranjan, Emily Drabek-Maunder, Helen J. Fraser, Annabel Cartwright, Ingo Mueller-Wodarg, Zhuchang Zhan, Per Friberg, Iain Coulson, E’lisa Lee and Jim Hoge.
Paul explains that we do not know any abiotic phosphine (PH3) production routes in Venus’s atmosphere, clouds, surface and subsurface, or from lightning, volcanic or meteoritic delivery. Paul explores the possibility that phosphine (PH3) could either originate from unknown photochemistry or geochemistry, or, building upon a previous work by one of the co-authors of this work (Clara Sousa-Silva), from the presence of life. Finally Paul lays down a roadmap for future investigations to better understand the origin of phosphine on Venus involving a tandem work between laboratory measurements and ground-based telescope observations.
We also discuss the role of media and click bait news, which came out with titles suggesting life on Venus and extraterrestrial or alien life on Venus.