Star Talk Radio Show hosted by Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you are into geek fest then you must never miss this: a radio show hosted by the Great Neil himself!

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium is the host of Star Talk Radio Show. Astrophysicist in da house, peeps!

Okay, may be I am going a little hyped up about my favorite physicist hosting a radio show about the universe but what do you expect. Nerd? C'est moi!

Dr Tyson hosts this radio show on Sunday evenings at 6 pm and it is broadcast over all the major cities (I'll list the stations at the end of the post). He invites interesting people over and has a comedian as a co-host. His guests are usually scientists and they talk a lot about life, the universe and everything!

So what does life, the universe and everything include? (I'll hazard a guess: they do not ask what I six times seven) Well the show is quite topical. On the week of Valentine's Day the topic of discussion was the heart: from Aristotle's mistaken view of the heart to open heart surgery. During Superbowl, the topic was the physics of football.

One of the most entertaining episodes was when John Hodgeman was invited as a guest on the show on February 27. The range of conversation went from the obvious Mac vs PC (this is John Hodgeman after all) to the essential nerdiness of the President to the solution of the Fermi paradox: why aliens are not here yet. Sprinkle in a little bit of robots here and there and talk about Kirk vs Picard and the best way to cook a lobster and you have a memorable show.

During the first season Lawrence Krauss came to the show to talk about the science of Star Trek, sinc e the movie was out. The fact that Trekkies have their own culture that tends to spill over to real life culture and alter it (cell phones and instant soup) in a ways that cannot be ignored. The overall cultural aspect of the Star Trek influence is that it inspired a whole generation of young kids to be scientists and engineers.

Now those of you raising an eyebrow about what the point of the show is about, it is hard to define. All I can say is that this is a freewheeling conversation among very smart people where the range of topics are all over the place. What is so important about the show is that how cool it is to listen to intelligent people talk about really interesting topics.

But mostly, it is a show that is hosted by one of the most charismatic scientists in the world who continues take a huge interest in the universe and shows us why we should all be interested in the universe too.

Star Talk is broadcast over the following cities in these stations:

Boston 104.3 HD3

Seattle 96.5 HD3

Detroit 104.3 HD3

Pittsburgh 100.7 HD3

Pittsburgh 107.9 HD3

New York

AM 970 The Apple

Sundays, 6 PM Eastern

Los Angeles

KTLK AM 1150, ClearChannel

Sundays, 3 PM Pacific

Washington DC

Big Talker AM 1580

Sundays, 6 PM and Wednesdays, 2 PM Eastern

Neil Gaiman's Inventing Aladdin- A poem about stories

If you have to walk a mile in the shoes of Scheherazade, how would you do?

That is not a simple question to answer. You have to consider the very nature of the instinct of self preservation itself. How does it function and, given what life has to throw at us on a daily basis, why is it consistently successful?

But enough of pointless philosophy. Now answer the question: if you have to tell stories so that your life depended on it, how good a storyteller would you be? I remember my freshman seminar class where the professor asked us the question: if Star Wars is the answer, what is the question? We were studying feminism and science fiction and unfortunately, being eighteen year old noobs and culture Visigoths, none of us were able to answer that question properly. But I digress.

Ultimately, that is what the 1001 nights of tales is all about- the story of a brave and clever girl who is one of the most learned people in her country. She is public spirited enough to try and stop the practice of state sponsored kidnap, rape and beheading of young girls by royal fiat. She offers herself as a sacrifice to take a stab at the problem. But what we soon discover is that personalizing the problem had given her a whole new perspective. She can survive but only if her stories are good enough.

Such is the theme of Neil Gaiman's Inventing Aladdin, a poem about the process of story telling. We meet Scheherazade who , at the end of a story, gets a cue from her sister, Dunyazade for another. So, invention begins inside her head and she starts the story of a layabout lad in China called Aladdin. As the night wears on, she finishes on a cliffhanger: Aladdin trapped inside the underground treasure trove.

Remarkably, what we see is the development of the tale that takes place. This is a key aspect of the writing process itself that manifests within the entire poem: how does Scheherazade come up with her stories?

And one can never forget the fact that the stakes have never been higher. If the stories stop coming or become less interesting, she has to pay for it with her life. So it is literally a matter of life and death- the reward of the storyteller is to be spared each day. Her advances and royalties are to be counted in the currency of hours.

Neil Gaiman often talks about the process of the constructing stories. The creative act is wrapped in mystery to those who are not writers; however, those who are would tell you that it is all about hard work and unpredictable directions of exploration. The whole exercise is demonstrated admirably in the poem. It is a metaphor about metaphors, a story about stories- where they really come from.

Cultivating anticipation and building to an anticlimax are the hallmarks of a good storyteller. Unlike other writers, Scheherazade does not have the option of a rewrite and therefore must rely on putting on a show spontaneously: a veritable exercise in improv that never ends.

What interests me most is the question of psychological impact. One of the most important question about the mythology of comic books in the Twentieth Century was asked by Alan Moore. Moore simply took on the idea of a vigilante in costume (the essence of every super hero comic) and asked: how psychologically warped do you have to be to put on a costume and then put yourself in harm's way only to earn the anonymous praise of an indifferent society?

Similarly, one can ask the question: what would the effect of livingn the edge every night for three years or more would have on you if you had to come up with a gripping bestseller every night? Would that scar you for life, the trauma of anticipation of doom? How would that affect your world view of everything? Would you look at every individual you meet, every object you come across, as a source for stories?

Would that not make you into a vampire of sorts, someone who feeds on the life stories of others only to preserve her own? But then again, authors are by nature emotional vampires who feed on the life energies of other people, twist them into narratives of their own and make them their own stories. And as written word survives the flesh, that in it self is a transformation no less permanent than that of the un-dead.

But ultimately, it is about staying alive by telling stories.

Israbel- A Short History of Vampires

How do you deal with a vampire who has an existential crisis?

Well, if you think that vampires have more in common with Camus and Sartre than Stoker, then certainly. It may be funny at the first glance, but think about it for a moment: you cannot ever venture into sunlight, can feed only on humans and have to see everyone else grow old and die while you remain forever young. But, you can never see your own reflection.

Enough to drive any egocentric creature like a vampire to complete neurosis.

Thus begins the story of Israbel in the BBC Radio 7's A short History of Vampires. Israbel has remained sixteen for a hundred years or more. She has had a full life of seducing the rich and the powerful and then she meets Plinter the painter. He recognizes her for what she is and then she commissions him a painting. Israbel has not been able to see her reflection in over a hundred years.

Plinter became obsessed with her and soon found it impossible to focus on the painting, Israbel has consumed his mind.

Towards the end of the portrait Israbel told him the story of how she had become a vampire. She was a poor girl in the ghettos of pre-revolutionary Paris. She rarely had an opportunity to see her own reflection, mirrors being a rarity among the sans culotte. A man had given her a small mirror to look at herself and then threatened to cut her if she did not give in to him. Afterwards, he wanted to beat her and she ran, through the dark streets of Paris she ran for her life and came across a leopard sized cat. She felt the warmth of the cat and felt content and found herself traveling very fast and in front of the Notre Dame. She walked in to the lair of the leopard where she gave herself to it. Afterwards she woke up in the street, full of vitality and energy and discovered that she had become a vampire. She never saw her sire again.

Israbel was content to leave the portrait unfinished- as a symbol of her own state of being. She offered payment and Plinter asked to be like her. She warned him of the loneliness that comes with it but he insisted and so she agreed.

After the seduction ritual was over, and Israbel had taken his blood and given him hers, Plinter woke up in his own apartment. He was hungry for Israbel's company, eager to learn from her the ways of his new life. Would he ever find fulfillment and happiness now that he had immortal life? Would Israbel finally view him as an equal?

The twist in the end is truly remarkable and emotionally satisfying. I have to be hard pressed to find any short story where I found the ending to be so interesting. I think you should listen to the story- not read it- the radio rendition is truly phenomenal.

BBC Horizon: What Happened Before The Big Bang?

Why is there something and not nothing? Where did all the stuff we see come from? Did the Universe have a beginning? If not, why not?

Such are the questions facing cosmology today. One may say that philosophers have squabbled over these problems for milennia but may be for the first time we are on the cusp of an answer.

About a hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble looked through a telescope and saw galaxies moving away and concluded that the Universe is expanding. In the 1960s, Penzias and Wilson found empirical confirmation of an explosive beginning of the Universe, otherwise known as the Big Bang.

But what we would like to know is: what happened before the Big Bang?

That is a question that has remained unanswerable for many years and often cosmologists would refuse to even consider the possibility that there was any causality event before it. The Big bang was considered to have began from a singularity and it is impossible to predict anything beyond a singularity. What happened before the Big Bang? We do not know and very possibly cannot know.

Until a few years ago, that was the great cosmological consensus.

Until now.

BBC Horizon explors the many new ideas and opinions of a new group of scientists who are challenging the very idea that the Big Bang was any kind of a beginning. Horizon focuses on the Perimeter Institute – a radical group of physicists who are seeking to challenge the idea that the beginning of the Universe was from the Big Bang. In fact their work has gone a long way to make such radical notions into mainstream ideas.

One of the problems involving the Big Bang is the idea of inflation. According to the principles of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, the Big bang could not have turned the universe into what it is today. To solve that problem Andrei Linde came up with the idea of inflation- the rapid expansion of the Universe from a point to a size greater than the solar system within 10^(-34) seconds after the Big Bang.

The physicists of the Perimeter Institute, Neil Turok, Param Singh and Lee Smolin each have their own ideas. Turok thinks that a collision of membranes that each contained three dimensions and were separated by the time dimension gave rise to the Big Bang. Singh's idea is a little more radical: he proposes a Big Bounce- where the beginning of our universe comes from a previously collapsing universe. Nature, Singh argues, is cyclical- the end of one universe creates the beginning of another. Smolin argues that the origins of the universe may have preceded the Big Bang. In fact, he argues that the Universe has evolved into what it is today through natural selection. The universe is born through another universe procreating it.

Radical stuff, but even the once stalwarts of the Singularity idea are beginning to change their minds. Sir Roger Penrose, after a lifetime of asserting that we cannot know beyond the singularity is coming round to the idea that pre-singularity could have some credibility. He argues that since a very large universe would only contain photons and would be mass less, it could technically be equivalent to a very small universe. This could be the beginning of a Big bang for the next universe.

If that is not quirky enough, then we have Laura Mercini-Hougton arguing that the Universe is just one of many parallel universes. Using string theory, she could demonstrate that many inexplicable phenomena can only be explained in conjunction of a multiverse theory. Of all the views put forward, Mercini-Houghton's position is a little stronger since her theory requires very little assumptions.

In England, Bob Nichol is building one the world's largest radio telescopes that would be able to test the inflation theory of Linde. If the distribution of matter within the universe is random, then inflation would be proven correct. On the other hand, in Louisiana, Joe Giaimi is looking for gravity waves that would tell us about the aftermath of the Big Bang. These experimental approaches would shed light on the truth of the theoretical claims made by the cosmologists.

Whatever the truth may be, we can be sure that it would be overwhelmingly stranger and more wonderful than we ever thought possible.

What Happened Before the Big bang is the third episode of the 49^th season of Horizon on the BBC.

Hero Dust- A Short History of Vampires

What if you brewed a tale that involved Lord Byron, the Shelleys, Van Helsing and a hint of Buffy?

Hero Dust, a short story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is the subject of BBC Radio 7's A Short History of Vampires. Presented by Natalie Haynes, it begins by paying an homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Haynes talks about the importance of the slayer as well as that of the monster: without both, we do not have a story. From Grendel to Count Dracula, every monster must meet their own Beowulf and Van Helsing if we are to fulfill the tale.

A seeming perfection of the hero slayer figure is Buffy- she is a teenager who has to juggle classes, cheer-leading tryouts, dates and hangouts, all the while carrying out her function as the bane of existence for all the un-dead in Sunnydale, California. We do admire her tenacity- for that is the consistent trait of every hero slayer in the history of the horror adventure genre. But you have to ask, what about other slayers?

Read by David Horowitz, Hero Dust begins with an old man, Bram, walking into a lecture hall in an American college campus. The lecture is on the topic of the hero and the nature of heroism. Bram is not seeking knowledge on the topic, far from it. He is looking for someone- a person who would, given enough encouragement, be willing to believe what he as to tell him or her. Someone who could willingly suspend his disbelief and actually become a hero.

Bram is in the heroism business himself- he had been at it for two hundred years. He began back in 1816 at a villa in Switzerland when he worked as a gardener while observing the residents. The three residents who lived there were also experts on telling tales of the supernatural and the un-dead. They are familiar to us today in other forms: romantic poets and writers of fantastic fiction. But you would not connect them with fighting the un-dead: Lord Byron, Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Bram himself is no less famous: he is after all the famous Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, an old man who is looking for a successor to replace him. In the lecture hall he meets a young lady who reminds him Mary Godwin. He remembers her capacity for darkness and the ability to believe in the nature of evil and her ability to fight it. The young woman, Clarissa, seems interested in talking to him. So he takes her to the university cafe for a chat. Her capacity for understanding the darkness and her thirst for a life of adventure may go a long way to convince him that she may be the one.

Has Van Helsing found a successor after all?

Hero Dust is part two of A Short History of Vampires on BBC Radio 7.

BBC Radio 7's A Short History of Vampires: Dracula's Guest

Now who would have thought Jonathan Harker is a walking target for vampires before he even met the illustrious Count? Would that not bore a little hole into his exuberant rational attitude while he travels towards Transylvania? One would certainly think that his previous experience with the un-dead would give him a little clue as to how to cope with his ordeals.

Well, if you are to take the Coleridge prescription and bear with Mr. Stoker, then you are treated with a great short story about creatures of the night. It is all part of the BBC Radio 7 series A Short History of Vampires. The first episode is taken from a Bram Stoker story Dracula's Guest, published in 1914. The dramatization, like any other Radio 7 production, is just superb. It will keep you fixed to the chair, your ears locked and your blood chilled.

The plot begins with an Englishman, presumably Jonathan Harker, traveling through Munich on his way to Transylvania. He had stopped at Munich and was rather eager for a little sight seeing. The innkeeper had warned him that it was Walpurgisnacht, the night of the witches. He was rather put off by warnings of local superstitions and was eager to prove his English mettle against the ignorance fo the local yokels.

Having stepped out with a guide for the sight seeing, he questioned him extensively about the area. The guide, Johann, was rather reluctant to go to certain places- abandoned villages that had not been lived in for centuries. The Englishman's curiosity was piqued and he asked to see the village. Johann replied that the places were cursed and “unholy”. Dismissing the man's concerns as nonsense and ignoring his pleas to return to Munich before sundown (it was Walpurgisnacht, after all!) the young man carried on exploring and asking questions.

What he gleaned from Johann was the following: long ago, people were buried but sounds were heard from the grave and when they were opened up the men and women were found alive. People fled from the village and moved to other places where the living lived and the dead stayed dead and not un-dead.

The young man wanted to explore the village but Johann insisted that they leave. After a brief argument, Johann left him and took the carriage back to Munich. But as he was leaving, he was accosted by a stranger and the horses took fright at the sight of him and galloped away, with Johann barely able to hold on to them. But as the young man looked for the stranger, he seemed to have disappeared. He continued his trek into the accursed village.

A snowstorm had begun to gather while this was happening all around him. He could hear the cry of the wolves- although this part of Germany was not known as a habitat for the lupine population. He was faced with the problem of worsening weather and lack of shelter and he went seeking shelter among the abandoned village.

He discovered himself in a graveyard and found a large tomb where he came across a beautiful woman, sleeping on a bier. The inscription on the tomb was an enigmatic phrase: the dead travel fast. To his horror, he saw the woman rise from the tomb and he lost consciousness.

If I tell you the rest, then I would give the story away. What would happen to the young man? Would he fall prey to the un-dead? It might be safe to assume that he may be rescued from his plight otherwise he may not be bale to make his journey to Castle Dracula. However, rest assured that the un-dead in the story has nothing to do with the name of the story. Count Dracula is involved in the story in an indirect but significant manner- although he has nothing to do with the un-dead of Walpurgisnacht.

Dracula's Guest is available on BBC 7 as part of the A Short History of Vampires series and was aired on February 13, 2011.