Broadcast Monologues

In this episode of the Broadcast Monologues, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell narrates her inadvertent discovery of pulsars: dense, rotating neutron stars—a death state of collapsed stars—that emit swinging beams of light, like astrophysical lighthouses. Born into a family keen on education, Jocelyn battled for her right as a young student in Ireland to learn science beside her male peers. Having developed a particular enthusiasm for astronomy, she attended the University of Glasgow, where her presence as a female student in physics lectures was an anomaly. Nevertheless, she excelled. Driven by curiosity and badgered by imposter syndrome, she strove on. Admitted as a PhD student to Cambridge University, she joined a prestigious group headed by Professor Anthony Hewish—today a Nobel laureate. There, in 1967, while operating a radio telescope built to detect quasars, she encountered an inexplicable signal in her data, the defiant, metronomic impression of a neutron star. The discovery also rendered the implausible—black holes—suddenly plausible.

In this episode of the Broadcast Monologues, the witty and thought-provoking Irish satirist, author, and musician known as Blindboy Boatclub riffs on “Value: Towards a Dialectic on Christ’s Foreskin.” The host of the highly celebrated Blindboy Podcast opens his reflections with an early 16th century Renaissance painting The Circumcision of Christ by Francesco Bissolo. Blindboy then delves into the claims of authentic ownership of Christ’s foreskin by several Catholic churches around the world and the questions the relic poses about his origins. Musing on the relationship between relics and scarcity, Blindboy ponders the ebbs and flows of what is deemed valuable in our modern era. The epitome of these shifts, he asserts, can be as basic as foods and colors: he takes us through the lowly origins of lobster as shameful grub for indentured Irish workers to the degradation of a meat that should be expensive, beef, to the discovery of purple excretion oozing from snails’ butts.

In the second episode of the Broadcast Monologues, neuroscientist Sam Harris collects his controversial and influential ideas on free will in one beautiful meditative narrative. Harris argues that there is no self and therefore no free will. He reasons that there is not even an illusion of free will. The illusion is itself an illusion. He coaxes the listener to appreciate that morality is not undermined and the importance of political and social freedoms are not diminished. Instead there is power in the freedom from freedom, and that can change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. Accompanied by a mesmerizing video from artist and filmmaker Annapurna Kumar, Harris posits that we are not “on the riverbank of consciousness” but rather are a continuous part of the universe.

In this special episode of the Broadcast Monologues, Sean Carroll riffs on the enigma that is Time while multi-media artist Azikiwe Mohammed trips out with original accompanying animation. Theoretical Physicist Sean Carroll hosts a popular podcast, Mindscape — a series of conversations with the world’s most interesting thinkers in science, society, philosophy, culture, arts, and ideas. In this unique episode made specially for the Broadcast, Sean travels solo to the farthest reaches of the scientific imagination, inspired by his lifelong exploration of a stubbornly elusive yet utterly unavoidable aspect of reality: Time. Accompanying Sean’s profound rumination, Azikiwe Mohammed’s wild animations expand our experience with a searing temporal voyage.