Season Three of the Omnia Podcast: In These Times

A podcast series that explores scientific ideas that cause big reactions.

Fall/Winter 2021
In These Times Season 3 Cover Art

This season, we’ll look at stories of science getting knocked around and standing back up again, in a world full of polarization, politics, misrepresentation, and simple misunderstanding. 

Listen to In These Times here. Subscribe to the Omnia Podcast by Penn Arts & Sciences on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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Episode 1 | Facts vs. Feelings

In this episode, we’ll hear from a particle cosmologist, along with a scholar of religion and science, on what makes people feel the way they do about scientific information and why it’s so hard to communicate about science.

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Episode 2 | Talking the Talk

In this episode, we talk to a linguist about why some people resist changes to the way people speak (hint: it has nothing to do with being correct).

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Episode 3 | There’s Something About Darwin

In this episode, we’ll hear from a philosopher of science and an evolutionary biologist on what it is about Darwinian evolution that has made it a poster child for science denial, and why it’s important to understand the facts.

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Episode 4 | Your Brain on Drugs

In this episode, we’ll hear from a psychology professor about the search for better brains and its ethical, legal and societal implications, and what science fiction can tell us about the future.

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Episode 5 | Better Living ... Through Chemistry?

In this episode, a chemist explains chemistry’s public relations problem, and why we need to put our faith in chemistry now, maybe more than ever.

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Episode 6 | The Large Hadron Collider and the End of the World

In this episode, a physicist looks back at the concerns that swirled around the launch of high-energy particle collision experiments like the Large Hadron Collider.

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Episode 7 | Climate Change and the Problem With Time

In this episode, we talk to an oceanographer, a geophysicist, and a historian about the challenges to understanding the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history, and how our actions in the present impact a future we can only imagine.