Ever wanted to know how music affects your brain, what quantum mechanics really is, or how black holes work? Do you wonder why you get emotional each time you see a certain movie, or how on earth video games are designed? Then you've come to the right place. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more.
412 episodes transcribedA 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...
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...
Human beings like to divide themselves into groups, and then cooperate, socialize, and reproduce with members of their own group. But they're not very...
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 t...
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...
Welcome to the December 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...
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...
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 for "ought" — our m...
We've talked about the very origin of life, but certain transitions along its subsequent history were incredibly important. Perhaps none more so than...
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 the sq...
Welcome to the November 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...
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 abou...
Science and storytelling have a long and tumultuous relationship. Scientists sometimes want stories to be just an advertisement for how awesome scienc...
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...
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 in c...
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...
Welcome to the October 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones ask...
Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent...
Traditional physics works within the "Laplacian paradigm": you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, th...
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...
