Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Episodes
102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason
22 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The best chess and Go players in the world aren’t human beings any more; they’re artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker pl...
101 | David Baltimore on the Mysteries of Viruses
15 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual viruses, not patients), you could fit them into a buc...
100 | Solo | Life and Its Meaning
08 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday messages and bonus episodes and the like. But this i...
99 | Scott Aaronson on Complexity, Computation, and Quantum Gravity
01 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There are some problems for which it’s very hard to find the answer, but very easy to check the answer if someone gives it to you. At least, we thin...
98 | Olga Khazan on Living and Flourishing While Being Weird
25 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Each of us is different, in some way or another, from every other person. But some are more different than others — and the rest of the world never ...
97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia
18 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines ...
96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is
11 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the Earth is not at the middle of the Solar System, t...
95 | Liam Kofi Bright on Knowledge, Truth, and Science
04 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there —...
94 | Stuart Russell on Making Artificial Intelligence Compatible with Humans
27 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence has made great strides of late, in areas as diverse as playing Go and recognizing pictures of dogs. We still seem to be a ways...
93 | Rae Wynn-Grant on Bears, Humans, and Other Predators
20 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sharks, and more. The top of the food chain is an ...
92 | Kevin Hand on Life Elsewhere in the Solar System
13 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It’s hard doing science when you only have one data point, especially when that data point is subject to an enormous selection bias. That’s the si...
91 | Scott Barry Kaufman on the Psychology of Transcendence
06 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If one of the ambitious goals of philosophy is to determine the meaning of life, one of the ambitious goals of psychology is to tell us how to achieve...
90 | David Kaiser on Science, Money, and Power
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Science costs money. And for a brief, glorious period between the start of the Manhattan Project in 1939 and the cancellation of the Superconducting S...
89 | Lera Boroditsky on Language, Thought, Space, and Time
23 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or th...
Tara Smith on Coronavirus, Pandemics, and What We Can Do
18 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This is a special episode of Mindscape, thrown together quickly. Many thanks to Tara Smith for joining me on short notice. Tara is an epidemiologist, ...
88 | Neil Shubin on Evolution, Genes, and Dramatic Transitions
16 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“What good is half a wing?” That’s the rhetorical question often asked by people who have trouble accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution by na...
87 | Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy
09 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you tell me that one of the world’s leading neuroscientists has developed a theory of how the brain works that also has implications for the orig...
86 | Martin Rees on Threats to Humanity, Prospects for Posthumanity, and Life in the Universe
02 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Anyone who has read histories of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 nuclear false alarm, must be struck...
85 | L.A. Paul on Transformative Experiences and Your Future Selves
24 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It’s hard to make decisions that will change your life. It’s even harder to make a decision if you know that the outcome could change who you...
84 | Suresh Naidu on Capitalism, Monopsony, and Inequality
17 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Nations generally want their economies to be rich, robust, and growing. But it’s also important to person to ensure that wealth doesn’t flow only ...
83 | Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity, Stories, and Cosmopolitanism
10 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Greek statesman Demosthenes is credited with saying “I am a citizen of the world,” and the idea that we should take a cosmopolitan view of our...
82 | Robin Carhart-Harris on Psychedelics and the Brain
03 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs —...
81 | Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity
27 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were dis...
80 | Jenann Ismael on Connecting Physics to the World of Experience
20 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Physics is simple; people are complicated. But even people are ultimately physical systems, made of particles and forces that follow the rules of the&...
79 | Sara Imari Walker on Information and the Origin of Life
13 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We are all alive, but “life” is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a “living organism” from an emergent dynamical syst...
78 | Daniel Dennett on Minds, Patterns, and the Scientific Image
06 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Wilfrid Sellars described the task of philosophy as explaining how things, in the broadest sense of term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the ...
Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books
22 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and...
77 | Azra Raza on The Way We Should Fight Cancer
16 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the United States, more than one in five deaths is caused by cancer. The medical community has put enormous resources into fighting this disea...
76 | Ned Hall on Possible Worlds and the Laws of Nature
09 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It’s too easy to take laws of nature for granted. Sure, gravity is pulling us toward Earth today; but how do we know it won’t be pushing us away t...
75 | Max Tegmark on Reality, Simulation, and the Multiverse
02 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We've talked a lot recently about the Many Worlds of quantum mechanics. That’s one kind of multiverse that physicists often contemplate. There is al...
74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics
25 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature ...
73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae
18 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it eas...
72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe
11 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Maxwell's Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the e...
71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere
04 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It’s hardly surpr...
70 | Katie Mack on How the Universe Will End
28 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Cosmologists are always talking excitedly about the Big Bang and all the cool stuff that happened in the 14 billion years between then and now. But wh...
69 | Cory Doctorow on Technology, Monopoly, and the Future of the Internet
21 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down ...
68 | Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge of Common Sense
14 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence is better than humans at playing chess or go, but still has trouble holding a conversation or driving a car. A simple way to t...
67 | Kate Jeffery on Entropy, Complexity, and Evolution
07 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Our observable universe started out in a highly non-generic state, one of very low entropy, and disorderliness has been growing ever since. How, then,...
66 | Will Wilkinson on Partisan Polarization and the Urban/Rural Divide
30 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of “red states” and “blue states” burst on the scene during the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections, and has a been a staple of politica...
65 | Michael Mann on Why Our Climate Is Changing and How We Know
23 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We had our fun last week, exploring how progress in renewable energy and electric vehicles may help us combat encroaching climate change. This week we...
64 | Ramez Naam on Renewable Energy and an Optimistic Future
16 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Earth is heating up, and it’s our fault. But human beings are not always complete idiots (occasional contrary evidence notwithstanding), and som...
63 | Solo -- Finding Gravity Within Quantum Mechanics
09 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I suspect most loyal Mindscape listeners have been exposed to the fact that I’ve written a new book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum...
62 | Michele Gelfand on Tight and Loose Societies and People
02 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Physicists study systems that are sufficiently simple that it’s possible to find deep unifying principles applicable to all situations. In psycholog...
61 | Quassim Cassam on Intellectual Vices and What to Do About Them
26 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
All of us have been wrong about things from time to time. But sometimes it was a simple, forgivable mistake, while other times we really should have b...
60 | Lynne Kelly on Memory Palaces, Ancient and Modern
19 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Memory takes different forms. Memories can be encoded in the strength of neural connections in our brains, but there’s a sense in which photographs ...
59 | Adam Becker on the Curious History of Quantum Mechanics
12 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There are many mysteries surrounding quantum mechanics. To me, the biggest mysteries are why physicists haven’t yet agreed on a complete understandi...
58 | Seth MacFarlane on Using Science Fiction to Explore Humanity
05 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Fiction shines a light on the human condition by putting people into imaginary situations and envisioning what might happen. Science fiction...
57 | Astra Taylor on the Promise and Challenge of Democracy
29 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone” — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor’s new book. We all know how democra...
56 | Kate Adamala on Creating Synthetic Life
22 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists can’t quite agree on how to define “life,” but that hasn’t stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying ...
55 | A Conversation with Rob Reid on Quantum Mechanics and Many Worlds
15 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As you may have heard, I have a new book coming out in September, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. To celebrate...
54 | Indre Viskontas on Music and the Brain
08 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It doesn’t mean much to say music affects your brain — everything that happens to you affects your brain. But music affects your brain in certain ...
53 | Solo -- On Morality and Rationality
01 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be a good person? To act ethically and morally in the world? In the old days we might appeal to the instructions we get from God,...
52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games
24 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Games play an important, and arguably increasing, role in human life. We play games on our computers and our phones, watch other people compete in gam...
51 | Anthony Aguirre on Cosmology, Zen, Entropy, and Information
17 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the ...
50 | Patricia Churchland on Conscience, Morality, and the Brain
10 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It’s fun to spend time thinking about how other people should behave, but fortunately we also have an inner voice that keeps offering opinions about...
49 | Nicholas Christakis on Humanity, Biology, and What Makes Us Good
03 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy to be cynical about humanity’s present state and future prospects. But we have made it this far, and in some ways we’re doing better t...
48 | Marq de Villiers on Hell and Damnation
27 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re bad, we are taught, you go to Hell. Who in the world came up with that idea? Some will answer God, but for the purpose of today’s podcas...
47 | Adam Rutherford on Humans, Animals, and Life in General
20 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Most people in the modern world — and the vast majority of Mindscape listeners, I would imagine — agree that humans are part of the animal kingdom...
46 | Kate Darling on Our Connections with Robots
13 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us have no trouble telling the difference between a robot and a living, feeling organism. Nevertheless, our brains often treat robots as if th...
45 | Leonard Susskind on Quantum Information, Quantum Gravity, and Holography
06 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
For decades now physicists have been struggling to reconcile two great ideas from a century ago: general relativity and quantum mechanics. We don’t ...
44 | Antonio Damasio on Feelings, Thoughts, and the Evolution of Humanity
29 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When we talk about the mind, we are constantly talking about consciousness and cognition. Antonio Damasio wants us to talk about our feelings. But ...
43 | Matthew Luczy on the Pleasures of Wine
22 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Some people never drink wine; for others, it’s an indispensable part of an enjoyable meal. Whatever your personal feelings might be, wine seems to e...
42 | Natalya Bailey on Navigating Earth Orbit and Beyond
15 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The space age officially began in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite. But recent years have seen the beginning of a boom in the number of...
41 | Steven Strogatz on Synchronization, Networks, and the Emergence of Complex Behavior
08 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most important insights in the history of science is the fact that complex behavior can arise from the undirected movements of small, simpl...
40 | Adrienne Mayor on Gods and Robots in Ancient Mythology
01 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The modern world is full of technology, and also with anxiety about technology. We worry about robot uprisings and artificial intelligence taking over...
39 | Malcolm MacIver on Sensing, Consciousness, and Imagination
25 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Consciousness has many aspects, from experience to wakefulness to self-awareness. One aspect is imagination: our minds can conjure up multiple hypothe...
38 | Alan Lightman on Transcendence, Science, and a Naturalist’s Sense of Meaning
18 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you don’t believe in God or the supernatural. Is there still a place for talking about transcendence, the sa...
37 | Edward Watts on the End of the Roman Republic and Lessons for Democracy
11 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When many of us think “Ancient Rome,” we think of the Empire and the Caesars. But the Empire was preceded by the Roman Republic, which flourished ...
36 | David Albert on Quantum Measurement and the Problems with Many-Worlds
04 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Quantum mechanics is our best theory of how reality works at a fundamental level, yet physicists still can’t agree on what the theory actually says....
35 | Jessica Yellin on The Changing Ways We Get Our News
25 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Everything we think about the world outside our immediate senses is shaped by information brought to us by other sources. In the case of what’s curr...
34 | Paul Bloom on Empathy, Rationality, Morality, and Cruelty
18 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Within every person’s mind there is on ongoing battle between reason and emotion. It’s not always a battle, of course; very often the two can work...
33 | James Ladyman on Reality, Metaphysics, and Complexity
11 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Reality is a tricky thing. Is love real? What about the number 5? This is clearly a job for a philosopher, and James Ladyman is one of the world’s a...
32 | Naomi Oreskes on Climate Change and the Distortion of Scientific Facts
04 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Our climate is in the midst of dramatic changes, driven largely by human activity, with potentially enormous consequences for humanity and other speci...
31 | Brian Greene on the Multiverse, Inflation, and the String Theory Landscape
28 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
String theory was originally proposed as a relatively modest attempt to explain some features of strongly-interacting particles, but before too long d...
30 | Derek Leben on Ethics for Robots and Artificial Intelligences
21 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It’s hardly news that computers are exerting ever more influence over our lives. And we’re beginning to see the first glimmers of some kind of art...
29 | Raychelle Burks on the Chemistry of Murder
14 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sometimes science is asking esoteric questions about the fundamental nature of reality. Other times, it just wants to solve a murder. Today’s guest,...
28 | Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe
07 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sir Roger Penrose has had a remarkable life. He has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyon...
Holiday Message 2018
24 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There won't be any regular episodes of Mindscape this week or next, as we take a holiday break. Regular service will resume on Monday January 7, 2019....
27 | Janna Levin on Black Holes, Chaos, and the Narrative of Science
17 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It's a big universe out there, full of an astonishing variety of questions and puzzles. Today's guest, Janna Levin, is a physicist who has delved into...
26 | Ge Wang on Artful Design, Computers, and Music
10 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, th...
25 | David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation
03 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The "Easy Problems" of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it into action. The "Hard Problem,...
24 | Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar
26 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just sta...
23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy
19 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of think...
22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth
12 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate chan...
21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind
05 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "...
20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery
29 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he's been quite successful at the latter -- you may know ...
19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future
22 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it's natural for economists to occasionally wander out into t...
18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechani...
17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis
08 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of diff...
16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future
01 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her...
15 | David Poeppel on Thought, Language, and How to Understand the Brain
08 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Language comes naturally to us, but is also deeply mysterious. On the one hand, it manifests as a collection of sounds or marks on paper. On the other...
14 | Alta Charo on Bioethics and the Law
08 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, scientists tend to focus on whether they can do something, not whether they should. Questions of what we s...
13 | Neha Narula on Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of the Internet
08 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and servi...
12 | Wynton Marsalis on Jazz, Time, and America
04 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It's played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars, and can feature esoteric har...
11 | Mike Brown on Killing Pluto and Replacing It with Planet 9
27 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Few events in recent astronomical history have had the worldwide emotional resonance as the 2006 announcement that Pluto was no longer considered a pl...
10 | Megan Rosenbloom on the Death Positive Movement
20 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We're all going to die. But while we are alive, it's up to us how we understand and deal with that fact. In the United States especially, there is a t...
9 | Solo -- Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?
13 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It's fun to be in the exciting, chaotic, youthful days of the podcast, when anything goes and experimentation is the order of the day. So today's show...
8 | Carl Zimmer on Heredity, DNA, and Editing Genes
06 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Our understanding of heredity and genetics is improving at blinding speed. It was only in the year 2000 that scientists obtained the first rough map o...
7 | Yascha Mounk on Threats to Liberal Democracy
30 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Both words in the phrase "liberal democracy" carry meaning, and both concepts are under attack around the world. "Democracy" means that they people ...
6 | Liv Boeree on Poker, Aliens, and Thinking in Probabilities
23 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Poker, like life, is a game of incomplete information. To do well in such a game, we have to think in terms of probabilities, unpredictable strategies...