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 transcribedWilfrid Sellars described the task of philosophy as explaining how things, in the broadest sense of term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the...
Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and...
In the United States, more than one in five deaths is caused by cancer. The medical community has put enormous resources into fighting this disease, y...
It's too easy to take laws of nature for granted. Sure, gravity is pulling us toward Earth today; but how do we know it won't be pushing us away tomor...
We've talked a lot recently about the Many Worlds of quantum mechanics. That's one kind of multiverse that physicists often contemplate. There is also...
An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature...
Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it eas...
Maxwell's Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the e...
The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It's hardly surpris...
Cosmologists are always talking excitedly about the Big Bang and all the cool stuff that happened in the 14 billion years between then and now. But wh...
Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down...
Artificial intelligence is better than humans at playing chess or go, but still has trouble holding a conversation or driving a car. A simple way to t...
Our observable universe started out in a highly non-generic state, one of very low entropy, and disorderliness has been growing ever since. How, then,...
The idea of "red states" and "blue states" burst on the scene during the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections, and has a been a staple of political commen...
We had our fun last week, exploring how progress in renewable energy and electric vehicles may help us combat encroaching climate change. This week we...
The Earth is heating up, and it's our fault. But human beings are not always complete idiots (occasional contrary evidence notwithstanding), and somet...
I suspect most loyal Mindscape listeners have been exposed to the fact that I've written a new book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the E...
Physicists study systems that are sufficiently simple that it's possible to find deep unifying principles applicable to all situations. In psychology...
All of us have been wrong about things from time to time. But sometimes it was a simple, forgivable mistake, while other times we really should have b...
Memory takes different forms. Memories can be encoded in the strength of neural connections in our brains, but there's a sense in which photographs an...
