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Are the mysteries of reality within the grasp of science? Or does a strictly empirical, Western materialist approach fail to properly consider the role of humans as observers? In this video from the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth (ICE), the US theoretical physicist Sean Carrol argues that, through scientific enquiry, a comprehensive understanding of reality is within our reach. Indeed, one layer of our reality – the world of elementary particles and forces – has already been entirely accounted for. Countering him, the US scholar of Tibetan Buddhism B Alan Wallace argues that such a materialist account of our Universe fails to fully account for both the complexities of the human mind and the world outside it.
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Film and visual culture
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
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Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
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Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
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Physics
Groundbreaking visualisations show how the world of the nucleus gives rise to our own
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Earth science and climate
There’s a ‘climate bomb’ ticking beneath the Arctic ice. How can we prepare?
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Political philosophy
The radical activist couple who fought for social change in the courtroom
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Physics
To change the way you see the Moon, view it from the Sun’s perspective
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