The Rubin Museum of Art’s Brainwave series pairs neuroscientists with artists and visionaries from multiple disciplines for lively discussions about how our minds work and how we perceive the world.

The Rubin Museum of Art’s curator Martin Brauen and astrophysicist Steven Soter co-curated Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe at the museum. Listen as they talk about how  exactly the universe came together.

Bon Mots:

On the Big Bang: “It’s an extraordinary, almost a preposterous idea, that everything in the observable universe, up to the most distant galaxies, was all in the same place at some point in time. But it seems to be consistent with all the things we’ve observed.”

On Western Cosmology: “If the Earth is a planet, then the planets are other Earths…those things were not just lights in the sky…they were worlds, made by the same stuff as Earth.”

On the Unsettling Truth: “The basis of astrology--which began as a Babylonian religion--is it’s not about us.”