Among the major figures who have tried to understand it “all” is Joel Primack, physicist at the University of California. He helped discover the “dark matter” of which 25 percent of the  universe is  composed. He and his wife, Nancy Abrams, joined us in this 2006 conversation to discuss their book, “The View From The Center of the Universe.” Among the less-than-trivial questions addressed are: how did the universe begin? How is it structured? What purpose, if any, does it reveal? What does it suggest about a transcendent power or powers? Does it have any neighbor universes? Once again we find that the best way to stretch the mind is through cosmology.

Psychologists have argued for a century or more over these questions: What is intelligence? How is it distributed within varied populations? Is it genetically determined? Can it be affected by education, by personality, mood and, for that matter, diet?  Social psychologist Richard Nisbet joined us to give his research-based answers to those and other questions in this 2009 conversation.

John Cornwell, a British historian focused on Germany before and during the war, joined us in 2003 to discuss his challenging book , “Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact.” After all Jewish scientists were fired and left Germany, only two out of thousands of remaining scientists protested. Some others left but, in the main, the many thousands pursued their work seeking not only truth but public reward and either imbibing or privately resisting the Nazi ideology. The worst part of the story, as we discuss it with Cornwell, concerns those scientists – some of international reputation – who used their “sciences” to confirm, rationalize and advance Nazism. Names are named and dreadful stories told.

That burden was nothing less than mental disease which kept Sherwin Nuland in a mental hospital for over a year. A distinguished Professor Of Surgery at Yale, he is also the celebrated author of many finely-wrought books drawn from medical science and culture, among them “How We Die” and “The Wisdom of the Body.” Though I had known him for years, I was stunned by what he revealed in this conversation in 2003 and in his then-new book “Lost in America.”

That is the number of galaxies – on average, each containing a hundred billion suns – that we used to think composed the total universe. In this 2001 conversation we learn that that is merely the number for the “visible universe,” but that there is much more out there. Even more exciting there are quite likely many other universes – perhaps an infinity of them.