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

It can be tempting, when first introduced to a deep concept of physics like Heisenberg's uncertainty

David Deutsch is one of the most creative scientific thinkers working today, who has as a goal to un

AMA | October 2023

2023/10/9

Welcome to the October 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funde

Our planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to impro

Biological organisms are paradigmatic emergent systems. That atoms of which they are made mindlessly

The modern world inundates us with both information and misinformation. What are the forces that con

The study of cognition and sentience would be greatly abetted by the discovery of intelligent alien

AMA | September 2023

2023/9/4

Welcome to the September 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are fun

Over the last year, AI large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated a remar

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/21/247-samuel-bowles

You might remember the somewhat bizarre worries that swept through certain circles back in 2012, bas

AMA | August 2023

2023/8/7

Welcome to the August 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually poin

Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of think

The Earth's atmosphere is good for some things, like providing something to breathe. But it does get

Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that

AMA | July 2023

2023/7/3

Welcome to the July 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded b

Last year's Nobel Prize for experimental tests of Bell's Theorem was the first Nobel in the foundati

It's somewhat amazing that cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, can make any progress at

There is an image, especially in Western cultures, of the rugged, authentic, self-made individual ch