Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Ever wanted to know how music affects your brain, what quantum mechanics really is, or how black hol

Episodes

Total: 355

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old (depending on how we count). So if civilization

Physicists have traditionally simplified systems as much as possible, in order to shed light on fund

It’s easy to foresee that technological progress will change how we live; it’s much harder to antici

We are living, in case you haven’t noticed, in a world full of bullshit. It’s hard to say whether th

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it mea

Someday, most likely, we will encounter life that is not as we know it. We might find it elsewhere i

We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence

Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music

Cooking is art, but it’s also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions

The best chess and Go players in the world aren’t human beings any more; they’re artificially-intell

I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual vir

A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday me

There are some problems for which it’s very hard to find the answer, but very easy to check the answ

Each of us is different, in some way or another, from every other person. But some are more differen

Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetiti

The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the

Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk ab

Artificial intelligence has made great strides of late, in areas as diverse as playing Go and recogn

Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sh

It’s hard doing science when you only have one data point, especially when that data point is subjec