We examine the ethics of de-extinction and the origins of quantum mechanics with two science writers reaching across the centuries
This week we’re heading back in time to find a mathematical pioneer and a host of dead beasts.
The science writer Michael Brooks joins us to talk about his unconventional biography of Jerome Cardano, whose prodigious talents included astrology, medicine and mathematics. Brooks tells us how he became obsessed with the 16th-century polymath and why Cardano’s attitude to astrology resembles modern attitudes to quantum mechanics. He also explains what drove him to imagine leaping across five centuries to meet his subject in a Bologna prison cell.
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