014: Natalie Elliot

This week we bring Natalie Elliot into the Zone to discuss how art relates to science in the wake of a truly significant paradigm shift, and how Shakespeare grappled with such shifts throughout his career, and across many if not most of his plays. We speak a bit about Stalker, detecting lifeforms out in the universe, and speculate on how life emerged from lifelessness here on Earth, and elsewhere. Perhaps a clue lies in Natalie’s Alien artifact.

Natalie is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, where she teaches cross-disciplinary courses in classics, history of science, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and music. She is a story teller, a science writer, a frequent contributor to SFI’s parallax newsletter, short-story fiction writer and novelist. She is specifically interested in the intersection of literature and science, as we in the InterPlanetary project are, and she co-authors the Atlantis Dispatch series with me.

Learn more about everything referenced in this episode by clicking the links below:Herschel Moon History

• Natalie Elliot’s Homepage

• Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of Lock”

• Shakespeare’s

  • Julius Caesar

  • Hamlet

  • Romeo and Juliet

• Claudius Ptolemy

• Nicolaus Copernicus

• Tycho Brahe

• Aristophanes’s

  • Clouds

  • Birds

• Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

• Fermilab Bison

• Antikythera Mechanism

• “Origin Story” for Aeon

• And two recently published papers on universal life detection that we are WAY TOO EXCITED about:

  • Generalized Stoichiometry and Biogeochemistry for Astrobiological Applications

  • Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry