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Are you a person existing within a vast universe, or a brain formed spontaneously in a void, hallucinating this very moment? Your experience would almost certainly lead you to believe the former. However, since cosmologists building on the work of the Austrian physicist Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844-1906) suggested that the latter is actually far more likely, it’s created a complex puzzle for logicians, cosmologists and philosophers to try and untangle. Taking viewers on a mind-bending jaunt through modern cosmology, this brief animation from TED-Ed explains why the ‘Boltzmann brain paradox’ was born, the arguments some thinkers use to counter it, and why it’s a useful thought experiment, even if you didn’t just pop into existence to contemplate a thermodynamic puzzle.
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
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Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
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Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes