A self-driving car has a split second to decide whether to turn into oncoming traffic or hit a child who has lost control of her bicycle. An autonomous drone needs to decide whether to risk the lives of busload of civilians or lose a long-sought terrorist. How does a machine make an ethical decision?
Chemist Raychelle Burks is on the front lines of forensic science, developing ways to detect drugs and explosives. Episode filmed live at the 2016 World Science Festival in New York …
Prominent clashes — both historical and contemporary — have led to the widely held conclusion that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. Yet, many scientists practice a traditional faith, having found a way to accommodate both scientific inquiry and religious teaching in their belief system.
2018 marks the tenth anniversary of the prestigious Kavli Prize, which recognizes scientists for major advances in three research areas: astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience—the big, the small, and the complex. …
For all their historical tensions, scientists and religious scholars from a wide variety of faiths ponder many similar questions—how did the universe begin? How might it end? What is the origin of matter, energy, and life?
Come venture deep inside the world’s biggest physics machine, the Large Hadron Collider. This extraordinary feat of human engineering took 16 years and $10 billion to build, and just weeks ago began colliding particles at energies unseen since a fraction of a second after the big bang.