Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Episodes
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...
185 | Arvid Ågren on the Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution
21 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently “purposeful” or “designed” aspects ...
184 | Gary Marcus on Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense
14 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Deep-learning algorithms are used to classify images, suggest songs to us, and even to drive cars. Bu...
AMA | February 2022
10 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the February 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
183 | Michael Dine on Supersymmetry, Anthropics, and the Future of Particle Physics
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it’s hard to know exactly how to move beyon...
182 | Sally Haslanger on Social Construction and Critical Theory
31 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to...
181 | Peter Dodds on Quantifying the Shape of Stories
24 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on unders...
180 | Camilla Pang on Instructions for Being Human
17 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Being a human is tricky. There are any number of unwritten rules and social cues that we have to learn as we go, but that we ultimately learn to take ...
179 | David Reich on Genetics and Ancient Humanity
10 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Human beings like to divide themselves into groups, and then cooperate, socialize, and reproduce with members of their own group. But they’re not ve...
178 | Jody Azzouni on What Is and Isn't Real
03 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about...
Holiday Message 2021 | On Disciplines & Cocktails
20 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As each December comes to a close, we wrap up another year of podcasts with the Mindscape Holiday Message. Nothing too profound, just some thoughts th...
AMA | December 2021
15 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the December 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
177 | Monika Schleier-Smith on Cold Atoms and Emergent Spacetime
13 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to thinking about quantum mechanics, there are levels. One level is shut-up-and-calculate: find a wave function, square it to get a prob...
176 | Joshua Greene on Morality, Psychology, and Trolley Problems
06 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We all know you can’t derive “ought” from “is.” But it’s equally clear that “is” — how the world actual works — is going to matter...
175 | William Ratcliff on Multicellularity, Physics, and Evolution
29 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve talked about the very origin of life, but certain transitions along its subsequent history were incredibly important. Perhaps none more so tha...
174 | Tai-Danae Bradley on Algebra, Topology, Language, and Entropy
22 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mathematics is often thought of as the pinnacle of crisp precision: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle isn’t “roughly” the sum of ...
AMA | November 2021
17 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the November 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
173 | Sylvia Earle on the Oceans, the Planet, and People
15 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a well-worn cliché that oceans cover seventy percent of the surface of Earth, but we tend to give them secondary consideration when thinking a...
172 | David Goyer on Televising the Fall of the Galactic Empire
08 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Science and storytelling have a long and tumultuous relationship. Scientists sometimes want stories to be just an advertisement for how awesome scienc...
171 | Christopher Mims on Our Interconnected Industrial Ecology
01 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As the holidays approach, we are being reminded of the fragility of the global supply chain. But at the same time, the supply chain itself is a truly ...
170 | Priya Natarajan on Galaxies, Black Holes, and Cosmic Anomalies
25 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There is so much we don’t know about our universe. But our curiosity about the unknown shouldn’t blind us to the incredible progress we have made ...
169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency
18 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Games are everywhere, but why exactly do we play them? It seems counterintuitive, to artificially invent goals and obstacles just so we can struggle t...
AMA | October 2021
14 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the October 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also th...
168 | Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness
11 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is a...
167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility
04 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Traditional physics works within the “Laplacian paradigm”: you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion...
166 | Betül Kaçar on Paleogenomics and Ancient Life
27 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological o...
165 | Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics, Luck, and Fairness
20 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children’s physical and mental characteristic...
AMA | September 2021
16 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also ...
164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality
13 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don’t unders...
163 | Nigel Goldenfeld on Phase Transitions, Criticality, and Biology
06 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Physics is extremely good at describing simple systems with relatively few moving parts. Sadly, the world is not like that; many phenomena of interest...
162 | Leidy Klotz on Our Resistance to Subtractive Change
30 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There is no general theory of problem-solving, or even a reliable set of principles that will usually work. It’s therefore interesting to see how ou...
161 | W. Brian Arthur on Complexity Economics
23 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Economies in the modern world are incredibly complex systems. But when we sit down to think about them in quantitative ways, it’s natural to keep th...
160 | Edward Slingerland on Confucianism, Daoism, and Wu Wei
16 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Plato and Aristotle founded much of what we think of as Western philosophy during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Interestingly, that historical p...
AMA | August 2021
12 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the August 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
159 | Mari Ruti on Lack, Love, and Psychoanalysis
09 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Neuroscience has given us great insights into how our brains work. But there is still room for purely humanistic disciplines to help us think through ...
158 | David Wallace on the Arrow of Time
02 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The arrow of time — all the ways in which the past differs from the future — is a fascinating subject because it connects everyday phenomena (memo...
157 | Elizabeth Strychalski on Synthetic Cells and the Rules of Biology
26 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Natural selection has done a pretty good job at creating a wide variety of living species, but we humans can’t help but wonder whether we could do b...
156 | Catherine D’Ignazio on Data, Objectivity, and Bias
19 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How can data be biased? Isn’t it supposed to be an objective reflection of the real world? We all know that these are somewhat naive rhetorical ques...
155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics
12 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It’s not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It’s even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, p...
AMA | July 2021
09 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the July 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
154 | Reza Aslan on Religion, Metaphor, and Meaning
05 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Religion is an important part of the lives of billions of people around the world, but what religious belief actually amounts to can vary considerably...
153 | John Preskill on Quantum Computers and What They’re Good For
28 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Depending on who you listen to, quantum computers are either the biggest technological change coming down the road or just another overhyped bubble. T...
152 | Charis Kubrin on Criminology, Incarceration, and Hip-Hop
21 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It’s all well and good to talk abstractly about morality and justice, but at some point you have to sit down and figure out what to do about people ...
151 | Jordan Ellenberg on the Mathematics of Political Boundaries
14 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Any system in which politicians represent geographical districts with boundaries chosen by the politicians themselves is vulnerable to gerrymandering:...
AMA | June 2021
10 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the June 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
150 | Simon DeDeo on How Explanations Work and Why They Sometimes Fail
07 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You observe a phenomenon, and come up with an explanation for it. That’s true for scientists, but also for literally every person. (Why won’t my c...
149 | Lee Smolin on Time, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality
31 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The challenge to a theoretical physicist pushing beyond our best current theories is that there are too many ways to go. What parts of the existing pa...
148 | Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism
24 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of ex...
147 | Rachel Laudan on Cuisine, Culture, and Empire
17 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don’t give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central ...
AMA | May 2021
13 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the May 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the on...
146 | Emily Riehl on Topology, Categories, and the Future of Mathematics
10 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“A way that math can make the world a better place is by making it a more interesting place to be a conscious being.” So says mathematician Emily ...
145 | Niall Ferguson on Histories, Networks, and Catastrophes
03 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The world has gone through a tough time with the COVID-19 pandemic. Every catastrophic event is unique, but there are certain commonalities to how suc...
144 | Solo: Are We Moving Beyond the Standard Model?
26 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
I’ve been a professional physicist since the 1980’s, and not once over the course of my career has a particle-physics experiment produced a comple...
143 | Julia Galef on Openness, Bias, and Rationality
19 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mom, apple pie, and rationality — all things that are unquestionably good, right? But rationality, as much as we might value it, is easier to aspire...
AMA | April 2021
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the April 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...
142 | Charlie Jane Anders on Stories and How to Write Them
12 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn’t think we could be a fa...
141 | Zeynep Tufekci on Information and Attention in a Networked World
05 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In a world flooded with information, everybody necessarily makes choices about what we pay attention to. This basic fact can be manipulated in any num...
140 | Dean Buonomano on Time, Reality, and the Brain
29 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Time” and “the brain” are two of those things that are somewhat mysterious, but it would be hard for us to live without. So just imagine how ...
139 | Elizabeth Anderson on Equality, Work, and Ideology
22 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine two people with exactly the same innate abilities, but one is born into a wealthy family and the other is born into poverty. Or two people bor...
138 | Daryl Morey on Analytics, Psychology, and Basketball
15 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You might think that human beings, exhausted by competing for resources and rewards in the real world, would take it easy and stick to cooperation in ...
AMA | March 2021
10 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the March 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the que...
137 | Justin Clarke-Doane on Mathematics, Morality, Objectivity, and Reality
08 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On a spectrum of philosophical topics, one might be tempted to put mathematics and morality on opposite ends. Math is one of the most pristine and rig...
136 | Roderick Graham on Cyberspace, Race, and Cultural Conservatism
01 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The internet has made it so much easier for people to talk to each other, in a literal sense. But it hasn’t necessarily made it easier to have rewar...
135 | Shadi Bartsch on Plato, Vergil, Confucius, and Modernity
22 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In our postmodern world, studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem quaint at best, downright repressive at worst. (We are talking abou...
AMA | February 2021
17 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the February 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the ...
134 | Robert Sapolsky on Why We Behave the Way We Do
15 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those facto...
133 | Ziya Tong on Realities We Don't See
08 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are ...
Bonus | AIP Oral History Interview
04 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Here is a special bonus punishment treat for Mindscape listeners: an interview of me, by David Zierler of the American Institute of Physics’...
132 | Michael Levin on Growth, Form, Information, and the Self
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As a semi-outsider, it’s fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and inform...
131 | Avi Loeb on Taking Aliens Seriously
25 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — not just alien microbes, but cultures as advanced (or much more)...
130 | Frank Wilczek on the Present and Future of Fundamental Physics
18 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What...
129 | Solo: Democracy in America
11 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you’re probably aware of, including ...
128 | Joseph Henrich on the Weirdness of the West
04 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We all know stereotypes about people from different countries; but we also recognize that there really are broad cultural differences between people w...
Holiday Message 2020 | The Screwy Universe
21 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the third annual Mindscape Holiday Message! Just a chance for me to be a little more chatty and informal than usual, although as it turned ...
127 | Erich Jarvis on Language, Birds, and People
14 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Many characteristics go into making human beings special — brain size, opposable thumbs, etc. Surely one of the most important is language, and in p...
AMA | December 2020
09 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Getting into the swing of things here with monthly Ask Me Anything episodes. If you missed the explanation last month, there is a Patreon page&nb...
126 | David Stasavage on the Origin and History of Democracy
07 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Those of us living in democracies tend to take the idea for granted. We forget what an audacious, radical idea it is to put government power into the ...
125 | David Haig on the Evolution of Meaning from Darwin to Derrida
30 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Aristotle conceived of the world in terms of teleological “final causes”; Darwin, or so the story goes, erased purpose and meaning from the world,...
124 | Solo: How Time Travel Could and Should Work
23 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Time! It doesn’t stop, psychological effects of being under lockdown notwithstanding. How we experience time depends on our situation, but time itse...
AMA | November 2020
20 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As you have likely heard me mention before, I have an account on Patreon, where people can sign up to donate a dollar or two per episode of Minds...
123 | Lisa Feldman Barrett on Emotions, Actions, and the Brain
16 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Emotions are at the same time utterly central to who we are — where would we be without them? — and also seemingly peripheral to the “real” wo...