50 episodes listed below
Physics, skepticism, and science culture in argument.
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss moves between classroom-style physics lessons and current-science conversations. It favors big explanatory arcs, sharp skepticism about hype, and arguments about how evidence should guide claims.
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The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss sits between a public physics course, a science-news salon, and an argument about the health of intellectual life. Its center of gravity is explanation. In the Physics for Everyone lectures, Lawrence Krauss starts with simple tools such as approximation, dimensional analysis, scaling, velocity, and acceleration, then uses them to reach much larger questions about biology, galaxies, black holes, and the structure of the universe. The style is roomy and teacherly. A book and a crumpled sheet of paper can become a lesson about Galileo. A basketball jump can become a lesson about independent dimensions of motion. A simplified sphere can stand in for an animal, a galaxy field, or the universe itself. The point is not just what physics knows, but how physicists strip away detail until a pattern becomes visible. The show's other recurring mode is more argumentative. In What's New in Science conversations with Sabina Hossenfelder, Lawrence Krauss tests recent claims about fusion reactors, dark matter, wormholes, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, open math problems, Nobel prizes, and future colliders. These segments move quickly, but they are not merely topical. They ask what is real, what is inflated, what a measurement can actually prove, and when a headline has outrun the evidence. The show is also comfortable in sharper cultural territory. Episodes tied to The War on Science frame academic freedom, deconstructionism, culture-war language, and technical fields as questions that now reach into mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The skeptical habit carries into lighter formats as well. A Halloween episode on spooky physics treats ghosts, miracles, witchcraft, and supernatural belief as claims about interaction, probability, and causation. That gives the show a distinctive texture: expansive about wonder, impatient with sloppy inference. It can be dense. It can be discursive. It often chooses a long explanation over a tidy segment break. For listeners who like science presented as live reasoning rather than polished fact delivery, that looseness is part of the appeal. The Origins Podcast rewards patience with a broad map of modern physics, scientific institutions, and the recurring human urge to believe more than the evidence allows.
Made for: For listeners who want serious science conversation, especially physics, cosmology, and science culture, without the gloss of simplified science entertainment. It also fits people interested in academic freedom, science hype, and skeptical responses to supernatural claims.
What sets it apart: The show combines lecture-style physics teaching with current-science critique, so fundamentals and headlines sit in the same frame. Its strongest identity is not novelty, but the habit of asking how anyone knows what they claim to know.
The Origins Podcast features in-depth conversations with some of the most interesting people in the world about the issues that impact all of us in the 21st century. Host, theoretical physicist, lecturer, and author, Lawrence M. Krauss, will be joined by guests from a wide range of fields, including science, the arts, and journalism. The topics discussed on The Origins Podcast reflect the full range of the human experience - exploring science and culture in a way that seeks to entertain, educate, and inspire. lawrencekrauss.substack.com lawrencekrauss.substack.com
Lawrence Krauss has room for black holes and arguments over doctors' training; bring your questions.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Fusion reactors, dark matter, and a measured reality check on AI's math claims.
The episode takes a familiar dark-matter question and points it at a less expected machine: fusion reactors. Sabina Hossenfelder walks through why a paper considers whether such reactors might produce many dark matter particles, linking the idea to the way fission reactors…
Scaling becomes a practical lens on buoyant animals, cosmic density, and the limits of neat explanation.
A sphere does useful work here, giving the lecture a clean way to make scale feel manageable. Buoyancy helps explain why whales and dolphins can carry such large heads in relation to their bodies, and that plain comparison opens into larger biological questions without getting…
A clear opening lesson on cosmic scale, the Milky Way, and the evidence for its central black hole.
The Origins Podcast begins its physics mini course with the largest frame available: the universe as physicists map it across space and time. Lawrence Krauss sets up the series as a path from simpler ideas toward more demanding ones, then uses the Milky Way as the first proving…
Practitioners on the craft of getting research heard.
Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser build single reported stories around one scientific question.
Flora Lichtman interviews scientists, from gut-health researchers to Queen's Brian May.
Steven Novella and a rotating panel dissect weekly science news and debunk pseudoscience claims.
Long interviews with neuroscientists and philosophers on consciousness, decision-making, and whether AI is anything like a brain.
Lawrence Krauss uses Galileo to argue that motion, not position, is the key physics problem, and he opens with a pop quiz about a particle that should keep going in a straight line.
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss and Sabina Hossenfelder moves from a fusion-reactor paper on axions to a Vienna experiment with 7,000 sodium atoms and 133-nanometer interference.
Lawrence Krauss uses this Origins lecture to argue that powers of 10, approximation, and dimensional analysis are the main tools for making physics manageable.
Lawrence Krauss and Sabina Hossenfelder open with wormholes, negative energy, and the warning that headlines can turn a mathematical construction into a bigger claim than the evidence supports.
Lawrence Krauss opens a new Origins series, A Dozen Lectures on Physics and Reality, and says the video version helps because he uses visual aids.
Sabine Hossenfelder and Lawrence Krauss examine press-release claims about Quantum Motion, Fujitsu, IBM, and quantum computers allegedly reaching a million qubits or solving practical problems.
Lawrence Krauss uses Halloween examples including ghosts, witches, werewolves, miracles, ESP, and telepathy to distinguish supernatural claims from physical explanations.
Lawrence Krauss and Gad Saad discuss The War on Science, an edited book with contributions from 39 scientists and scholars about free speech, open inquiry, and the scientific process.
Lawrence Krauss interviews Karleen Gribble about her War on Science chapter, “The Desexing of Language in Women’s Health Research and Care.” Gribble connects sex-specific terminology to breastfeeding, maternal care, data collection, and the treatment of mothers and newborns during HIV and COVID-19 emergencies.
Lawrence Krauss interviews Dorian Abbot about “Science and Politics, Three Principles, Three Fables,” his contribution to The War on Science.
Lawrence Krauss interviews Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan about their chapter, “Gender Wars and Academic Freedom,” in The War on Science.
Lawrence Krauss interviews philosophers Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin about their War on Science article, “Deafening Sounds, Bioethics and Gender-Affirming Healthcare.” Byrne and Gorin compare the Dutch protocol for treating gender-dysphoric youth with later U.S.
Lawrence Krauss interviews psychiatrists Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau about their chapter, "Gender Affirming Care, the Abandonment of Medical and Academic Standards," in The War on Science.
Lawrence Krauss interviews Roger Cohen, a physician and cancer drug-development researcher, and Amy Wax, a law professor with training in biochemistry and medicine, about their contribution to The War on Science.
Lawrence Krauss interviews theoretical particle physicist Alessandro Strumia about his contribution to The War on Science, focusing on gender differences, bibliometrics, and academic freedom.
Lawrence Krauss interviews biochemist Geoff Horsman about Horsman’s chapter “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: The Dismal Pseudoscience Threatening Science” in The War on Science.
Janice Fiamengo discusses her 1999 and 2003 academic appointments, which she describes as equity hires, and the resulting concerns about merit and imposter syndrome.
Lawrence Krauss interviews Carole Hooven about her education at Antioch College, fieldwork with chimpanzees in Western Uganda, and research on testosterone and sex differences.
Lawrence Krauss interviews political scientist Frances Widdowson about her contribution to The War on Science and her criticism of academic indigenization and decolonization.
Lawrence Krauss interviews physical anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss about her chapter “Burying Science Under Indigenous Religion” in The War on Science.
Lawrence Krauss interviews Princeton classicist Solveig Gold and linguist-classicist Joshua Katz about their article “An Apology for Philology” in The War on Science.
Lawrence Krauss interviews psychiatrist Sally Satel about her contribution to The War on Science, focusing on social-justice politics, medical training, and open inquiry.
Lawrence Krauss introduces a series of interviews with authors from his book 'The War on Science', listing the contributors and topics to be discussed.
Lawrence Krauss introduces a series of interviews with authors from his book 'The War on Science', listing contributors and topics over 20 days.
Lawrence Krauss introduces a series of interviews with authors from his book 'The War on Science', listing contributors and topics.
Lawrence Krauss introduces a series of podcast interviews with authors from his new book 'The War on Science', discussing free speech and open inquiry in science.
Lawrence Krauss introduces a series of interviews with authors from his new book 'The War on Science', starting with Richard Dawkins.