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 transcribedThere are many mysteries surrounding quantum mechanics. To me, the biggest mysteries are why physicists haven't yet agreed on a complete understanding...
Fiction shines a light on the human condition by putting people into imaginary situations and envisioning what might happen. Science fiction expands t...
"Democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone" — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor's new book. We all know how democracy falls sho...
Scientists can't quite agree on how to define "life," but that hasn't stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to creat...
As you may have heard, I have a new book coming out in September, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. To celebrate...
It doesn't mean much to say music affects your brain — everything that happens to you affects your brain. But music affects your brain in certain spec...
What does it mean to be a good person? To act ethically and morally in the world? In the old days we might appeal to the instructions we get from God,...
Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the...
It's fun to spend time thinking about how other people should behave, but fortunately we also have an inner voice that keeps offering opinions about h...
It's easy to be cynical about humanity's present state and future prospects. But we have made it this far, and in some ways we're doing better than we...
Most people in the modern world — and the vast majority of Mindscape listeners, I would imagine — agree that humans are part of the animal kingdom, an...
Most of us have no trouble telling the difference between a robot and a living, feeling organism. Nevertheless, our brains often treat robots as if th...
For decades now physicists have been struggling to reconcile two great ideas from a century ago: general relativity and quantum mechanics. We don't ye...
When we talk about the mind, we are constantly talking about consciousness and cognition. Antonio Damasio wants us to talk about our feelings. But it'...
Some people never drink wine; for others, it's an indispensable part of an enjoyable meal. Whatever your personal feelings might be, wine seems to exh...
The space age officially began in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite. But recent years have seen the beginning of a boom in the number of...
One of the most important insights in the history of science is the fact that complex behavior can arise from the undirected movements of small, simpl...
The modern world is full of technology, and also with anxiety about technology. We worry about robot uprisings and artificial intelligence taking over...
Everything we think about the world outside our immediate senses is shaped by information brought to us by other sources. In the case of what's curren...
Our climate is in the midst of dramatic changes, driven largely by human activity, with potentially enormous consequences for humanity and other speci...
