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 transcribedHumans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines...
The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the Earth is not at the middle of the Solar System, t...
Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can...
Artificial intelligence has made great strides of late, in areas as diverse as playing Go and recognizing pictures of dogs. We still seem to be a ways...
Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sharks, and more. The top of the food chain is an in...
It's hard doing science when you only have one data point, especially when that data point is subject to an enormous selection bias. That's the situat...
If one of the ambitious goals of philosophy is to determine the meaning of life, one of the ambitious goals of psychology is to tell us how to achieve...
Science costs money. And for a brief, glorious period between the start of the Manhattan Project in 1939 and the cancellation of the Superconducting S...
What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or th...
This is a special episode of Mindscape, thrown together quickly. Many thanks to Tara Smith for joining me on short notice. Tara is an epidemiologist,...
"What good is half a wing?" That's the rhetorical question often asked by people who have trouble accepting Darwin's theory of evolution by natural se...
If you tell me that one of the world's leading neuroscientists has developed a theory of how the brain works that also has implications for the origin...
Anyone who has read histories of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 nuclear false alarm, must be struck by how incredibly c...
It's hard to make decisions that will change your life. It's even harder to make a decision if you know that the outcome could change who you are. Our...
Nations generally want their economies to be rich, robust, and growing. But it's also important to person to ensure that wealth doesn't flow only to a...
The Greek statesman Demosthenes is credited with saying "I am a citizen of the world," and the idea that we should take a cosmopolitan view of our com...
The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs — not only...
People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were dis...
Physics is simple; people are complicated. But even people are ultimately physical systems, made of particles and forces that follow the rules of the ...
We are all alive, but "life" is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a "living organism" from an emergent dynamical system like...
