The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss

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

On this week’s episode of The Origins Podcast, I am excited to release a conversation that has been sitting in our archives for more than a year. When we first recorded this discussion with conflict mediator and systems thinker Diana McLain Smith, political polarization was already a significant national and international problem. It has only gotten worse.The world seems more tribal than ever, and there is constant pressure to have to pick a side in every argument and not listen to any different opinions, or even divergent facts. In this episode, we step back from that noise and ask what our deep evolutionary wiring for in group loyalty means in a complex modern democracy, how history and culture can turn ordinary differences into hardened divides, and what it might take to reduce the space between “us” and “them” rather than accept permanent hostility as normal.Through stories that range from local communities like Billings, Montana and Lewiston, Maine to the quiet work of reform in the United States Congress, Diana draws on decades of experience with families, organizations, and civic coalitions to show that citizens are not as powerless as we often feel, especially when we resist the demand for instant certainty and allow ourselves to say, “I do not know, I have not really thought about that before. I’m not on any one side. Let me look at the evidence before I form an opinion.”This is the basis of much of the scientific method, and it is something that we can all learn to do too. The benefits are immediate. You approach life with more curiosity, and you are freer from assumptions and biases.Conversations like this go to the heart of the Origins Project Foundation mission, which is to bring the habits of mind that underlie science into our shared public life. My conversations on the podcast blend serious works in physics, psychology, and history with urgent questions about how we live together, and to model what it looks like to treat ideas as hypotheses to be tested rather than badges of tribal identity.In an environment that rewards outrage more than understanding, a commitment to evidence, curiosity, and a willingness to change one’s mind is not just an intellectual posture, it is a civic act.This episode with Diana is offered in that spirit.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

I am thrilled to introduce a significant new segment for the Origins Podcast. We are producing a fully fledged 12-part series titled “A Dozen Lessons on Physics and Reality.” Over the coming months, we will release these lectures to provide a comprehensive guide to how physicists think about the world. I’m particularly excited to share the wonder and insights that are often lost in standard textbook descriptions, while giving more detail than one might obtain in a standard 1 hour physics lecture. These will be based on lectures I have given to non-scientists at institutions I have taught, ranging from Yale University to The New College of Humanities in London.We begin with Lecture 1: A Tour of the Universe.To understand the cosmos, we must abandon the linear scales of human experience. In this opening lecture, I utilize the mathematical tool of “powers of ten” to map the true playing field of physics. This tour is about perspective. It reveals how the universe operates on scales of space and time that are vastly different from our daily lives, ranging from the subatomic scales to the cosmic microwave background. It is a journey that highlights our cosmic insignificance while simultaneously celebrating the power of science to explore our origins and to change our perspective of our place in the cosmos. This tour is just the beginning. Here is the full curriculum we have planned for the series:* A tour of the Universe* The Gestalt of Physics: Tools for seeing* Space, Scale, and Symmetry* Motion, from Galileo to Einstein* Gravity, Dark Matter, and the Expanding Universe* Electricity and Magnetism, a repeat performance* The Four Forces of Nature* Quantum Mechanics 1* Quantum Mechanics 2: Chemistry* Quantum Mechanics in your face* Heat worth dying for?* The meaning of scientific truthThis initiative ties directly into our ongoing efforts at The Origins Project Foundation to expand our impact and achieve our mission of enhancing your excitement and appreciation of the wonders of the cosmos, providing the public tools to better understand the challenges of the 21st century, and how to deal with them. By making these fundamental ideas accessible, we hope to inspire a deeper appreciation for the scientific method and its importance in creating the world we live in, and producing a better world tomorrow.Enjoy!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

This week, I’m excited to share a special rebroadcast from the Origins Podcast archives: my original Origins Podcast conversation with Noam Chomsky.We recorded this dialog over six years ago, as an update to a conversation we’d held three years prior , before the political upheavals of Trump and Brexit.Listening back now, it’s striking how much of what Noam said remains relevant, and in many cases, deeply prescient. As always, he was incisive, informative, provocative, and brilliant. We covered a huge range of topics, starting with the history of anti-intellectualism in America and the role of intellectuals during the Vietnam War , before moving into the nature of American exceptionalism.We also dove into the pressing foreign policy issues of the day, including North Korea, Syria, Israel, Venezuela, and Brazil. While many of the underlying causes may be the same, it’s fascinating to see how some of these situations have played out in ways we might never have predicted.From his analysis of free speech debates to his critical concerns about nuclear weapons and the environment, it’s a conversation that remains incredibly important.I hope you enjoy revisiting this fascinating 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