silurian hypothesis

PBS Space Time examines the Silurian hypothesis, the idea that an industrial civilization could have existed on Earth before humans. It looks at what traces such a civilization might leave in the geological record.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

Stated Clearly explains the RNA world hypothesis, which resolves the chicken-or-egg problem of genes versus enzymes by proposing that RNA once did both jobs. It outlines how evolution could begin with RNA chains alone.

Kurzgesagt asks whether advanced civilizations could have existed on Earth in the deep past and left little evidence. It looks at time as a dimension for searching for alien civilizations and the limits of the geological record.

A Vanity Fair Summit conversation between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discuss the future of technology, including AI and the simulation hypothesis.

Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin discuss the evidence for the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, including the furin cleavage site and gain-of-function research. The conversation draws on Deigin's Medium article.

3Blue1Brown visualizes the Riemann zeta function and the analytic continuation that extends it beyond where its series converges, building toward the Riemann hypothesis.

Hillel Wayne's PyCon 2018 talk on testing beyond pytest and mypy. It introduces property-based testing with the Hypothesis library and design-by-contract with dpcontracts, and shows how to combine them with an existing test suite.

A 15-minute clip of linguist Stephen Krashen discussing language acquisition, drawn from the 1980s. It presents his input hypothesis and the distinction between acquisition and learning.

Stuart Halloway of Cognitect argues for debugging with the scientific method: form hypotheses, try to falsify them, and write everything down. The talk is given to the Clojure community but applies to any language.

George Hotz gives a SXSW 2019 talk on the idea that we live in a simulation and asks what actions would be available from inside it. He takes a hacker's view of whether it could be escaped.

Jake Vanderplas's PyCon 2016 talk shows how sampling-based methods such as simulation, shuffling and bootstrapping make statistics intuitive. His pitch is that if you can write a for-loop, you can do statistics.

A Veritasium video that runs the 2-4-8 rule-guessing puzzle on people to show how they test only examples that confirm their hypothesis. It uses this to illustrate confirmation bias and falsification.

An interview with Nick Bostrom at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute presenting his simulation argument: at least one of three propositions about posthuman civilizations and ancestor simulations must be true.

A three-hour Joe Rogan Experience conversation with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson about lost civilizations, the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis and Earth's cataclysmic history.

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

PBS Space Time examines the interstellar object 'Oumuamua and the popular theories about it, including the light-sail hypothesis. It argues that a natural rock is the likeliest explanation.

Huygens Optics explores the idea that space is a non-linear elastic medium, and uses simulations to show how wave energy might be confined locally into particle-like objects. It touches on inertia, the Schwinger limit and the vacuum as a medium.

Geoff Cumming uses a simulation to show how wildly the p value varies from one replication to the next because of sampling variability. He argues for estimation and confidence intervals over null hypothesis significance testing.

A 2012 Harvard Institute of Politics conversation between Peter Thiel and historian Niall Ferguson. Thiel discusses technology, politics and his stagnation hypothesis.

A roughly four-and-a-half-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Stephen Wolfram about his Wolfram Physics Project and a fundamental theory of physics, computation, life and the universe.

Jon Gjengset spends about three hours livecoding complex changes in a Rust codebase with agentic AI tools, testing his hypothesis that AI is weak at non-pattern work. He documents where Claude Code helps and where it struggles.

Veritasium's Derek Muller explains his hypothesis that YouTube's algorithm, not viewer preference, drives views, and that click-through rate has become the key metric. He argues this pushes creators toward clickable titles and thumbnails and leads to burnout.

A detailed 40-minute explanation of the ultraviolet catastrophe, covering Rayleigh and Jeans' classical treatment of blackbody radiation and Planck's quantum hypothesis. It follows the Eisberg and Resnick textbook treatment.

Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

A lecture from the 1980s by linguist Stephen Krashen on how people acquire language. He explains his comprehensible input hypothesis for second-language acquisition.