Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Episodes
262 | Eric Schwitzgebel on the Weirdness of the World
15 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists and philosophers sometimes advocate pretty outrageous-sounding ideas about the fundamental nature of reality. (Arguably I have been guilty ...
261 | Sanjana Curtis on the Origins of the Elements
08 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In mid-20th-century cosmology, there was a debate over the origin of the chemical elements. Some thought that they could be produced in the Big Bang, ...
260 | Ricard Solé on the Space of Cognitions
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Octopuses, artificial intelligence, and advanced alien civilizations: for many reasons, it's interesting to contemplate ways of thinking other than wh...
Holiday Message: Reflections on Immortality
18 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The final Mindscape podcast of each year is devoted to a short, reflective Holiday Message. This year the theme is Immortality: whether it's an attrac...
259 | Adam Frank on What Aliens Might Be Like
11 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It wasn't that long ago that topics like the nature of consciousness, or the foundations of quantum mechanics, or prospects for extraterrestrial life ...
AMA | December 2023
04 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the December 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
258 | Solo: AI Thinks Different
27 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Artificial Intelligence landscape is changing with remarkable speed these days, and the capability of Large Language Models in particular has led ...
257 | Derek Guy on the Theory and Practice of Dressing Well
20 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Putting on clothes is one of the most universal human experiences. Inevitably, this involves choices; maybe you just grab the cheapest and most conven...
256 | Kelly and Zach Weinersmith on Building Cities on the Moon and Mars
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There is an undeniable romance in the idea of traveling to, and even living in, outer space. In recent years, a pragmatic justification has become inc...
AMA | November 2023
06 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the November 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
255 | Michael Muthukrishna on Developing a Theory of Everyone
30 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A "Theory of Everything" is physicists' somewhat tongue-in-cheek phrase for a hypothetical model of all the fundamental physical interactions. Of cour...
254 | William Egginton on Kant, Heisenberg, and Borges
23 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It can be tempting, when first introduced to a deep concept of physics like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to draw grand philosophical conclusion...
253 | David Deutsch on Science, Complexity, and Explanation
16 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David Deutsch is one of the most creative scientific thinkers working today, who has as a goal to understand and explain the natural world as best we ...
AMA | October 2023
09 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the October 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also th...
252 | Hannah Ritchie on Keeping Hope for the Planet Alive
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to improve the situation face a dilemma. On the one hand, ...
251 | Rosemary Braun on Uncovering Patterns in Biological Complexity
25 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Biological organisms are paradigmatic emergent systems. That atoms of which they are made mindlessly obey the local laws of physics; even cells and or...
250 | Brendan Nyhan on Navigating the Information Ecosystem
18 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The modern world inundates us with both information and misinformation. What are the forces that conspire to make misinformation so prevalent? Can we ...
249 | Peter Godfrey-Smith on Sentience and Octopus Minds
11 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The study of cognition and sentience would be greatly abetted by the discovery of intelligent alien beings, who presumably developed independently of ...
AMA | September 2023
04 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the September 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also ...
248 | Yejin Choi on AI and Common Sense
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last year, AI large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated a remarkable ability to carry on human-like conversations...
247 | Samuel Bowles on Economics, Cooperation, and Inequality
21 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/21/247-samuel-bowles-on-economics-cooperation-and-inequality/Economics...
246 | David Stuart on Time and Science in Maya Civilization
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You might remember the somewhat bizarre worries that swept through certain circles back in 2012, based on the end of the world being predicted by the ...
AMA | August 2023
07 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the August 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
245 | Solo: The Crisis in Physics
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fiel...
244 | Katie Elliott on Metaphysics, Chance, and Explanation
24 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the...
243 | Joseph Silk on Science on the Moon
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Earth's atmosphere is good for some things, like providing something to breathe. But it does get in the way of astronomers, who have been successf...
242 | David Krakauer on Complexity, Agency, and Information
10 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what "compl...
AMA | July 2023
03 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the July 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
241 | Tim Maudlin on Locality, Hidden Variables, and Quantum Foundations
26 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Last year's Nobel Prize for experimental tests of Bell's Theorem was the first Nobel in the foundations of quantum mechanics since Max Born in 1954. Q...
240 | Andrew Pontzen on Simulations and the Universe
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's somewhat amazing that cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, can make any progress at all. But it has, especially so in recent decades....
239 | Brian Lowery on the Social Self
12 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There is an image, especially in Western cultures, of the rugged, authentic, self-made individual choosing how to navigate the intricacies of the soci...
AMA | June 2023
05 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the June 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
238 | Scott Shapiro on the Technology and Philosophy of Hacking
29 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Modern computers are somewhat more secure against being hacked - either by an inanimate virus or a human interloper - than they used to be. But as our...
237 | Brooke Harrington on Offshore Wealth as a Complex System
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people a...
236 | Thomas Hertog on Quantum Cosmology and Hawking's Final Theory
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is there a multiverse, and if so, how should we think of ourselves within it? In many modern cosmological models, the universe includes more than one ...
AMA | May 2023
08 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the May 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the on...
235 | Andy Clark on the Extended and Predictive Mind
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What is the mind, and what does it try to do? An overly simplified materialist view might be that the mind emerges from physical processes in the brai...
234 | Tobias Warnecke on Cellular Structure and Evolution
24 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Eukaryotic cells manage to pull off a number of remarkable feats. One is packing quite a long DNA molecule, with potentially billions of base pairs, i...
233 | Hugo Mercier on Reasoning and Skepticism
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea o...
232 | Amy Finkelstein on Adverse Selection and Hidden Information
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
If you knew exactly when every person was going to die, or require medical care, you could make a killing buying and selling insurance. Nobody knows t...
Ask Me Anything | April 2023
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the April 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...
231 | Sarah Bakewell on the History of Humanism
27 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Human beings are small compared to the universe, but we're very important to ourselves. Humanism can be thought of as the idea that human beings are t...
230 | Raphaël Millière on How Artificial Intelligence Thinks
20 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to another episode of Sean Carroll's Mindscape. Today, we're joined by Raphaël Millière, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Columbia U...
229 | Nita Farahany on Ethics, Law, and Neurotechnology
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Every time our brain does some thinking, there are associated physical processes. In particular, electric currents and charged particles jump between ...
AMA | March 2023
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the March 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...
228 | Skye Cleary on Existentialism and Authenticity
27 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
God is dead, as Nietzsche’s madman memorably reminded us. So what are we going to do about it? If there is no powerful force out there to guide us a...
227 | Molly Crockett on the Psychology of Morality
20 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us strive to be good, moral people. When we are doing that striving, what is happening in our brains? Some of our moral inclinations seem pret...
226 | Johanna Hoffman on Speculative Futures of Cities
13 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Cities are incredibly important to modern life, and their importance is only growing. As Geoffrey West points out, the world is adding urban...
AMA | February 2023
06 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the February 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
225 | Michael Tomasello on The Social Origins of Cognition and Agency
30 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Human beings have developed wondrous capacities to take in information about the world, mull it over, think about a suite of future implications, and ...
224 | Edward Tufte on Data, Design, and Truth
23 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
So you have some information — how are you going to share it with and present it to the rest of the world? There has been a long history of organizi...
223 | Tania Lombrozo on What Explanations Are
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience d...
222 | Andrew Strominger on Quantum Gravity and the Real World
09 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Quantum gravity research is inspired by experiment — all of the experimental data that supports quantum mechanics, and supports general relativity —...
221 | Adam Bulley on How Mental Time Travel Makes Us Human
02 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember th...
Holiday Message 2022: Thinking Really Slowly
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to that beloved Mindscape annual tradition, the Holiday Message. An opportunity for a quicker and less-well-thought-out solo episode to round ...
220 | Lara Buchak on Risk and Rationality
12 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Life is rich with moments of uncertainty, where we’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen next. We often find ourselves in situations where we...
AMA | December 2022
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the December 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
219 | Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Curiosity
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy enough to proclaim that we are curious creatures, but what does that really mean? What kinds of curiosity are there? And how does curiosit...
218 | Raphael Bousso on Black Holes and the Holographic Universe
21 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen Hawking’s discoveries of black hole radiation, entropy, and the information-loss problem have both taught us an enormous amount about the re...
217 | Margaret Levi on Moral Political Economy
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why do people voluntarily hand over authority to a government? Under what conditions should they do so? These questions are both timeless an...
AMA | November 2022
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the November 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
216 | John Allen Paulos on Numbers, Narratives, and Numeracy
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
People have a complicated relationship to mathematics. We all use it in our everyday lives, from calculating a tip at a restaurant to estimating the p...
215 | Barry Loewer on Physics, Counterfactuals, and the Macroworld
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics c...
214 | Antonio Padilla on Large Numbers and the Scope of the Universe
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a big universe we live in, so it comes as no surprise that big numbers are needed to describe it. There are roughly 10^22 stars in th...
AMA | October 2022
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the October 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also th...
213 | Timiebi Aganaba on Law and Governance in Space
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With communication satellites, weather satellites, GPS, and much more, what happens in space is already important to our lives here on Earth. And the ...
212 | Chiara Mingarelli on Searching for Black Holes with Pulsars
26 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The detection of gravitational waves from inspiraling black holes by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations was rightly celebrated as a landmark achievemen...
211 | Solo: Secrets of Einstein's Equation
19 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
My little pandemic-lockdown contribution to the world was a series of videos called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. The idea was to ...
210 | Randall Munroe on Imagining What If...?
12 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the fastest way to get a human being around a racetrack, if we ignore all the rules of racing? How many pages would you have to read to absor...
209 | Brad DeLong on Why the 20th Century Fell Short of Utopia
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
People throughout history have imagined ideal societies of various sorts. As the twentieth century dawned, advances in manufacturing and communication...
AMA | September 2022
29 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the September 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also ...
208 | Rick Beato on the Theory of Popular Music
22 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There is no human endeavor that does not have a theory of it — a set of ideas about what makes it work and how to do it well. Music is no exception,...
207 | William MacAskill on Maximizing Good in the Present and Future
15 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It’s always a little humbling to think about what affects your words and actions might have on other people, not only right now but potentially well...
206 | Simon Conway Morris on Evolution, Convergence, and Theism
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Evolution by natural selection is one of the rare scientific theories that resonates within the wider culture as much as it does within science. But a...
AMA | August 2022
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the August 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
205 | John Quiggin on Interest Rates and the Information Economy
25 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of an “interest rate” might seem mundane and practical, in comparison to our usual topics around here, but there is a profound philosophi...
204 | John Asher Johnson on Hunting for Exoplanets
18 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recent years have seen a revolution in the study of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the Sun (or don’t orbit stars at all). After a f...
203 | N.J. Enfield on Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Not Scientists
11 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We describe the world using language — we can’t help it. And we all know that ordinary language is an imperfect way of communicating rigorous scie...
AMA | July 2022
04 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the July 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
202 | Andrew Papachristos on the Network Theory of Gun Violence
27 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The United States is suffering from an epidemic of tragic gun violence. While a political debate rages around the topic of gun control, it remains imp...
201 | Ed Yong on How Animals Sense the World
20 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
All of us construct models of the world, and update them on the basis of evidence brought to us by our senses. Scientists try to be more rigorous abou...
AMA | June 2022
13 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the June 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! We are inaugurating a slightly different publication schedule, in which these monthly A...
200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse
06 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The 200th episode of Mindscape! Thanks to everyone for sticking around for this long. To celebrate, a solo episode discussing a set of issues naturall...
199 | Elizabeth Cohen on Time and Other Political Values
30 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Time is everywhere, pervading each aspect of intellectual inquiry — from physics to philosophy to biology to psychology, and all the way up to polit...
198 | Nick Lane on Powering Biology
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The origin of life here on Earth was an important and fascinating event, but it was also a long time ago and hasn’t left many pieces of direct evide...
197 | Catherine Brinkley on the Science of Cities
16 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The concept of the city is a crucial one for human civilization: people living in proximity, bringing in resources from outside, separated from the la...
AMA | May 2022
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the May 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the on...
196 | Judea Pearl on Cause and Effect
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
To say that event A causes event B is to not only make a claim about our actual world, but about other possible worlds — in worl...
195 | Richard Dawkins on Flight and Other Evolutionary Achievements
02 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. B...
194 | Frans de Waal on Culture and Gender in Primates
25 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Humans are related to all other species here on Earth, but some are closer relatives than others. Primates, a group that includes apes, monkeys, lemur...
193 | Daniels on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
18 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Every time we make an important decision, it’s hard not to wonder how things would have turned out had we chosen differently. The set of all those h...
AMA | April 2022
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the April 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...
192 | Nicole Yunger Halpern on Quantum Steampunk Thermodynamics
11 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Randomness and probability are central to modern physics. In statistical mechanics this is because we don’t know everything about the distribution o...
191 | Jane McGonigal on How to Imagine the Future
04 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The future grows out of the present, but it manages to consistently surprise us. How can we get better at anticipating and preparing for what the futu...
190 | Lea Goentoro on Regrowing Limbs
28 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Biological organisms are pretty good at healing themselves, but their abilities fall short in crucial ways. Planaria can be cut into pieces,...
189 | Brian Klaas on Power and the Temptation of Corruption
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
All societies grant more power to some citizens, and there is always a temptation to use that power for the benefit of themselves rather than for the ...
AMA | March 2022
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the March 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...
188 | Arik Kershenbaum on What Aliens Will Be Like
14 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have tr...
187 | Andrew Leigh on the Politics of Looming Disasters
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We’re pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren’t naturally equipped for dealing w...
186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity
28 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Advances in technology have gradually been extending the human self beyond its biological extent, as we augment who we are with a variety of interconn...