The discovery machine: a highlight from 2025

发现之机:2025年的亮点

Babbage from The Economist

2026-01-01

57 分钟
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In the summer of 2025, we travelled to the Vera Rubin Observatory, a new telescope in Chile. This week, we're revisiting that trip to the Andes Mountains, which showed how the Rubin Observatory's upcoming decade-long sky survey hopes to uncover huge cosmological mysteries. In doing so, it is changing the way astronomy is practised. Host: Alok Jha, The Economist's science and technology editor. Contributors: Victor Krabbendam, Stephanie Deppe, Leanne Guy, Yusra AlSayyad and William O'Mullane of the Vera Rubin Observatory.  Listen to the full episodes here—part one and part two.  Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts. Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.
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  • The Economist.

  • It's our last podcast of the year and this is always a good time to reflect on all of the things that have happened in the past 12 months.

  • We've spoken to Nobel Prize winning scientists.

  • It wasn't unreasonable that they thought these big neural networks,

  • they're never going to learn how to do these complicated things just by looking at data.

  • It turns out we found the magic learning algorithm they can.

  • And what sort of made you ignore those people.

  • They were wrong.

  • We've interviewed the first man to edit the genes of human embryos and who seems determined to continue his controversial quest to edit humanity.

  • It's embarrassing.

  • It's embarrassing for the scientific community.

  • We are killing these people.

  • We visited a brand new neutrino observatory in China.

  • This is a detector.

  • The totally high from the bottom of the waterfall is about 70.

  • as well as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland as scientists prepare for its next big upgrade.

  • Let's measure what we can with the most precision and with more data we will be able to find a needle in a haystack so to speak.

  • We even went to America's top secret nuclear weapons labs.

  • The target's in there somewhere.

  • The most scientific thing I've ever seen in my life and I've seen a lot of facilities.