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Science Friday > Archives > 1997 > October > October 17, 1997

Hour Two: Steven Pinker/Bill Phillips and Steven Chu

How is it that we come to be able to do the things we do? How do we manage to remember things, make choices, act intuitively, fall in love, use common sense -- even talk? According to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, we have the skills we have and act the way we do because of the way that our brains have evolved.

The human brain, Pinker argues, is made up of many different highly specialized modules, just as a machine or a computer program is made up of different units. These modules have slowly evolved to deal with the human environment -- but they have adapted themselves to deal with a Stone Age world, populated by nomadic hunter-gatherers, not our modern world. Evolution takes a long time, Pinker argues - and modern life has only existed for a blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking. As a result, some parts of human behavior really don't have a good explanation in today's world - because they aren't responding to today's world.

Steven Pinker photo by Bethany Versoy

Pinker's new book, "How the Mind Works," draws connections between evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence in unusual ways. Some people, especially neurobiologists and evolutionary biologists, find some of Pinker's assertions faulty. Join host Ira Flatow as he talks to Steven Pinker about his ideas of how the mind works, on this segment of Science Friday.

The Nobel Prize committee announced the winners for the prize in physics this week -- Steven Chu from Stanford, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji from the College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and William D. Phillips from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. All three were honored for developing methods for bringing the temperature of atoms to the doorstep of absolute zero. Their work has advanced science's understanding of the interactions between light and matter, and of the way that low-temperature gases behave.

Gas atoms at room temperature normally zip along at speeds approaching 4000 km/hour. As you can imagine, it's tough to study something moving that quickly - so many atomic physicists have tried to slow atoms down by cooling them. By trapping diffuse clouds of atoms in an "optical molasses" of properly tuned lasers and magnetic fields, the prize winners have been able to bring atomic temperatures to within a few millionths of a degree of absolute zero. Cooling atoms to that point slows them to speeds of under a kilometer an hour, a much easier speed at which to study them. The work by these three researchers was crucial to the formation of the Bose-Einstein condensate (a bizarre new form of matter imagined by Einstein but only recently observed), and may have other applications, like making more accurate atomic clocks, tinier electronics, atomic lasers, and tools to measure gravitational forces with extreme precision..

In this segment of Science Friday, join host Ira Flatow as he talks to Bill Phillips and Steven Chu, two of the co-winners of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics.

Listen to this program in RealAudio!

Guests:

Steven Pinker
Professor of Psychology
Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Boston, MA

Steven Chu
Professor of Physics and Applied Physics
Stanford University
Stanford, CA

Bill Phillips
Fellow
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD

Books/Articles Discussed:

"How the Mind Works," by Steven Pinker. W.W. Norton and Co, 1997.

Related links:
Pinker's Home Page

The Nobel Prize Announcement

More background on the award

Other groups involved in atom trapping