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 transcribedMachine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications...
Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...
Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It ca...
The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But...
Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to...
Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathematical pro...
Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones ask...
Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs...
A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not s...
Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it's not enough that we all know what the rules a...
Like any machine, bodies occasionally break down, and it's natural to go in search of a replacement part. Ancient societies featured simple prosthetic...
Welcome to the September 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones a...
"Liberalism," divorced from its particular connotations in this or that modern political context, refers broadly to a philosophy of individual rights,...
In a relatively short period of time, exoplanets (planets around stars other than our Sun) have gone from an intriguing conjecture to an active field...
The world is becoming pixelated. As computers and other digital devices become ubiquitous, human knowledge and communication and information is gradua...
It is not manifestly obvious that universities should be where most scholarly research is performed. One could imagine systems that separated out the...
Welcome to the August 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones aski...
The search for a foundational theory of quantum mechanics that all physicists can agree on remains active. Over the last century a number of contender...
When we think of the capacities that distinguish humans from other species, we generally turn to intelligence and its byproducts, including our techno...
Quantum field theory is the basis for our most successful theories of fundamental physics. And yet, there are things we don't understand about it. Som...
