Ada Palmer
Historian and novelist Ada Palmer studies progress, censorship, atheism & radical thought, and teaches at the University of Chicago. Her internationally award-winning science fiction novel series Terra Ignota (vol 1 Too Like the Lightning) depicts a twenty-fifth century in which mystery and corruption shake the globalized successors to the nation-state.
Appears in 3 Episodes
The Invention of Doubt: Science and the Problem with Certainty
We expect science to give us answers. But what if its greatest breakthrough was learning to be wrong? For most of human history, we wanted knowledge to be certain. Th...
We’ve Been Arguing About Gender Equality for 2,300 Years. Why Aren’t We Done?
We figured out that women and men were equal thousands of years ago. So why did it take so long for the world to catch up? Arguments for gender equality stretch back...
The Long History of AI: From Descartes to Astro Boy & ChatGPT
What if artificial intelligence isn't just about machines? What if it's part of a much longer story about how we understand ourselves? In every age, humans have ques...
