The New York Public Library Podcast features your favorite writers, artists, and thinkers in smart talks and provocative conversations. Listen to some of our most engaging programs, discover new ideas, and celebrate the best of today’s culture.

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On this week's podcast, a hilarious, confounding, perplexing, and thoroughly engrossing conversation between theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss and actor Alan Alda. They came to the LIVE from the NYPL stage to discuss Krauss’s new book, The Greatest Story Ever Told…So Far: Why Are We Here?

It’s an insane and wonderful book that unravels our very understanding of what reality is, suggesting—at least as I took it from their conversation—that the entirety of our existence is: a) a giant cosmic accident, and b) not at all what we perceive it to be. If you’re feeling confused, don’t worry, it gets worse.

Fortunately Krauss had Alan Alda to guide us through these extremely complicated and befuddling subjects. Alan Alda everyone knows from M*A*S*H and The West Wing (or from 30 Rock or my personal favorite Flirting with Disaster). But possibly not everyone knows he is also a world-renowned science fanatic. He hosted the PBS show Scientific American Frontiers for 12 years and has lectured on science communication so much that he actually helped create a whole center for it at Stonybrook University, the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.

Lawrence Krauss researches, among other things, the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics. He has taught at Yale, Case Western Reserve, and is now the Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics at Arizona State University. He’s also the director of ASU’s Origins Project, which is a national center for research on broad questions about origins—everything from the origins of the universe to humans to consciousness to culture. All of which is to say, there are likely few people who are better suited to help us understand where it is we come from and why it is we’re here.

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