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 transcribedEvolution is a messy business, involving as it does selection pressures, mutations, genetic drift, and the effects of random external interventions. S...
How can, and should, we talk to each other, especially to people with whom we disagree? "Free speech" is rightfully entrenched as an important value i...
Stephen Hawking made a number of memorable contributions to physics, but perhaps his greatest was a puzzle: what happens to information that falls int...
Sexuality is, and always has been, a topic that is endlessly fascinating but also contentious. You might think that asexuality would be more straightf...
You can't always get what you want, as a wise person once said. But we do try, even when someone else wants the same thing. Our lives as people, and t...
Not too long ago nobody carried a mobile phone; now almost everybody does. That's the kind of rate of rapid progress we're seeing with our ability to...
Human civilization is only a few thousand years old (depending on how we count). So if civilization will ultimately last for millions of years, it cou...
Physicists have traditionally simplified systems as much as possible, in order to shed light on fundamental properties. But small, simple parts build...
It's easy to foresee that technological progress will change how we live; it's much harder to anticipate exactly how. Self-driving cars represent an e...
We are living, in case you haven't noticed, in a world full of bullshit. It's hard to say whether the amount is truly increasing, but it seems that ev...
Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There's muc...
Someday, most likely, we will encounter life that is not as we know it. We might find it elsewhere in the universe, we might find it right here on Ear...
We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence to construct an image of the world in our minds....
Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine w...
Cooking is art, but it's also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-bal...
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 player...
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...
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...
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 think...
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 st...
