Zero Hunters

Some discoveries alter our perception so fundamentally that they create a void where certainty once stood. Moments when the fabric of our understanding tears open, revealing something that was always there but impossible to see.

Like the discovery of the number zero itself these breakthroughs reveal concepts that were always there, hiding in plain sight.

These Zeros are not mere improvements or refinements. They are ruptures in our perception of reality. The realization that light behaves both as wave and particle. Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The Pythagorean discovery of irrational numbers. Bell's inequality. Bitcoin.

Each Zero renders the world strange again, making us see with new eyes what we thought we knew.

In these conversations, we explore:

• The nature of breakthrough discoveries and why they've become increasingly elusive.
• The systems that both enable and constrain fundamental research.
• Zeros currently hiding in plain sight.
• Deep dives into known Zeros - unpacking famous paradigm shifts to reveal their hidden connections and what they can teach us about future breakthroughs.

This is not a celebration of innovation or disruption. It is an attempt to understand the conditions under which paradigm-shifiting knowledge becomes possible, and why such knowledge seems to resist our modern attempts to manufacture it.

Each episode is a careful exploration with thinkers who have devoted themselves to understanding how humans push beyond the boundaries of what they know into territory that is, by definition, impossible to anticipate.

Listen on:
Spotify | Apple Podcasts

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