Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Episodes
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...
5 | Geoffrey West on Networks, Scaling, and the Pace of Life
16 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If you scale up an animal to twice its height, keeping everything else proportionate, its volume and weight become eight times as much. Such a scaling...
4 | Anthony Pinn on Humanism, Theology, and the Black Community
12 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
According to atheism, God does not exist. But religions have traditionally done much more than simply proclaim God's existence: they have provided com...
3 | Alice Dreger on Sexuality, Truth, and Justice
11 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The human mind loves nothing more than to build mental boxes -- categories -- and put things into them, then refuse to accept it when something doesn'...
2 | Carlo Rovelli on Quantum Mechanics, Spacetime, and Reality
10 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Quantum mechanics and general relativity are the two great triumphs of twentieth-century theoretical physics. Unfortunately, they don't play well toge...
1 | Carol Tavris on Mistakes, Justification, and Cognitive Dissonance
04 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For the first full episode of Mindscape, it's an honor to welcome social psychologist Carol Tavris. Her book with co-author Eliot Aronson, Mistakes W...
Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast!
01 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I've decided to officially take the plunge into the world of podcasting. The new show will be called Mindscape, and will mostly consist of me talking ...