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The thing about Cosmology is that lots of us are really interested in it, but very few are actually patient and smart enough to do the measurements and the maths necessary to figure out where the heck we might fit in the universe.

Luckily there are people like Brian Greene to do the maths and then explain it to the rest of us “normal” humans. He’s director of the Institute of Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, with a DPhil from Oxford.

I’ve been listening to a conversation Greene held with Robert Krulwich from WNYC’s Radiolab recently as part of a science lecture series organised by the YMCA in New York.

Brian and Rob explore the multiverse theory, swiss cheese, free will, bubble baths and the probability that our universe is a giant simulation being run by super-smart ubergeeks from the planet Xantar.

50 minutes of brain-expanding talk, and pretty funny too. There’s an mp3 to download or it’s listenable on the Radiolab website.