Studio: Frasier Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay
Category: Natural Sciences
What It Is
Host Cain discusses different topics related to astronomy with Dr. Gay, a genuine scientist, in an attempt to explain complex topics in layman’s terms.
Technical Details
A new episode drops approximately every week. Episodes clock in at around half an hour. It’s no frills; just two folks talking about heavy science concepts. The iTunes archive features the most recent 300 episodes, which means it goes all the way back to 2008 and almost all of the episodes (only missing around seventy-five episodes, which you can get from the show’s website).
What About It
One of the things I most love about podcasting is the way it has enabled a lot of podcasts like this one, by which I mean a podcast that attempts to make an esoteric, difficult subject accessible and even entertaining to a general audience. As an avowed autodidact with incredibly eclectic interests, I love the fact that I can download an episode of this show and thirty minutes later have a basic layman’s understanding of dark matter. This isn’t maybe a genuinely great show. It isn’t high energy or anything and I’m forced to admit that even when they seem to try to boil things down for a layman, the hosts still sometimes go over my head with their discussion, which can be frustrating. It’s a show I like, but don’t love. This is another one that I’d like to listen to more than I do, but it just gets pushed to the back burner by other podcasts that I love or like a lot more.
Essential If
You’re sad that the astronomy class you took in college was just hard enough that you couldn’t understand it but just easy enough that you realized how much you really wanted to understand it.
Avoid Like the Plague If
“It’s turtles all the way down.”
Best Entry Point
I didn’t listen to this one a whole lot and I skipped around, so you might want to just get the newest one. But I really, really enjoyed Ep. 315: Particle Accelerators. The issues surrounding particle acceleration & collision seem to be some of the most important scientific issues of the present time and so it’s always kind of annoyed me that I couldn’t understand what exactly it was and why it was seen as so important. This episode helped me out quite a bit with that.
2 stars.
Next time, it’s a comedy podcast from Earwolf studios, one of my favorite podcasting studios and one with a pair of hosts with closer ties than most podcast hosts have.