The recently published book Science After Babel is again in the spotlight at the podcast ID the Future, with its author, philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski, and host Andrew McDiarmid considering various elements of the work. In a new podcast, the pair discuss the puzzling relationship between purely immaterial mathematical concepts (the only kind) and the material world; World War II codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing, depicted in the 2014 film The Imitation Game; and the sense that the field of physics, once seemingly on the cusp of a theory of everything, finds itself at an impasse. Then, too, Berlinski writes, there is the mystery of life itself. If scientists thought that its origin and nature would soon yield to scientific reductionism, they have been disappointed. Life’s “fantastic and controlled complexity, its brilliant inventiveness and diversity, its sheer difference from anything else in this or any other world” remain before us, suggesting, as Berlinski puts it, “a kind of intelligence evident nowhere else.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Cross-posted at Evolution News.