Released: 6 February 2018

Duration: 24 minutes, 48 seconds

A hundred years ago cosmologists were struggling to understand the nature and structure of the universe, and at the heart of this struggle was the island universe hypothesis. Today we find ourselves confronted with a similar question posed at a far greater scale. In order to resolve our cosmic archipelago problem we will have to attempt to reconstruct a history of our universe as a part of a far larger cosmological system, and to do this we will have to extend cosmology beyond the observable universe -- but what, exactly, is the observable universe?

Links:

The Cosmic Archipelago, Part I
The Cosmic Archipelago, Part II

Normal science

The Snapshot Effect
Radio Technology and Existential Risk
Boyajian's Star (KIC 8462852)

Supernova iPTF14hls
Przybylski's Star

Scientific Historiography: Past, Present, and Future
The Face of the Past The Face of the Past, Part Two  

Credits:

Writer and Host: Nick Nielsen

Producer and Announcer: Paul Carr

Music: by kind permission of the artist, Jason Robinson

The Wow! Signal is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.