Coast to Coast

This Sunday night (Dec. 3) I'll be appearing on Coast to Coast AM, a popular radio show hosted by Art Bell. The show is broadcast live, starting at 11:00p.m. Pacific time (2:00a.m. Eastern), and runs for three hours. Since I'm sure everyone will want to stay up to listen, you can find your local affiliate here. For those of you who aren't familiar with the show, Coast to Coast (originated by Bell, now hosted by him on weekends and by George Noory during the week) specializes in discussions of, how shall we put this, esoteric phenomena. UFO's, psychic powers, ghosts, that sort of thing. The hosts generally take a non-judgmental attitude, while callers and guests have been known to get quite enthusiastic. But the show also tackles more straightforward science topics, as well as politics, religion, civil rights, and what have you. Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has been on the show several times, debunking the craziness of Richard Hoagland and other crackpots. I won't be sharing any inside information about alien abductions -- we'll be talking about time travel and the dark sector. Okay, to the untutored eye, those topics don't seem any more respectable than the paranormal, but we'll be sticking quite closely to the normal, thanks very much. I hope to get a chance to talk about how respectable science is distinguished from UFO and ghost studies -- it's not quite so easy to move beyond the "I know the difference when I see it" level of distinction. But I think it's crucially important to preach not only to the converted, but also to the skeptical. The fact that we can talk about dark energy and time travel in a rigorous scientific context should be all the evidence anyone needs that the real world is more than marvelous enough; there's no reason to cling to ideas that don't fit in with what we know about science. And for C2C regulars who are just discovering Cosmic Variance for the first time, here are some older posts that touch on the ideas we'll be talking about on the show -- dark matter, dark energy, and the nature of time. Looking forward to the show!

• Dark Matter Exists

• Identifying Dark Matter

• Out-Einsteining Einstein

• Shaw Prize for the Accelerating Universe

• The future of the universe

• Dark Energy Task Force Report

• Future Cosmology Nobels

• Dark Energy Has Long Been Dark-Energy-Like

• Don't Be Fooled by w!

• How Are We to Make Progress With w?

• Alex Vilenkin - Many Worlds in One

• The Arrow of Time

• Boltzmann's Anthropic Brain