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.
439 episodes transcribedThe modern world inundates us with both information and misinformation. What are the forces that conspire to make misinformation so prevalent? Can we...
The study of cognition and sentience would be greatly abetted by the discovery of intelligent alien beings, who presumably developed independently of...
Welcome to the September 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones a...
Over the last year, AI large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated a remarkable ability to carry on human-like conversations in a vari...
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/21/247-samuel-bowles-on-economics-cooperation-and-inequality/ Economic...
You might remember the somewhat bizarre worries that swept through certain circles back in 2012, based on the end of the world being predicted by the...
Welcome to the August 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones aski...
Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fiel...
Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the...
The Earth's atmosphere is good for some things, like providing something to breathe. But it does get in the way of astronomers, who have been successf...
Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what "compl...
Welcome to the July 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking...
Last year's Nobel Prize for experimental tests of Bell's Theorem was the first Nobel in the foundations of quantum mechanics since Max Born in 1954. Q...
It's somewhat amazing that cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, can make any progress at all. But it has, especially so in recent decades....
There is an image, especially in Western cultures, of the rugged, authentic, self-made individual choosing how to navigate the intricacies of the soci...
Welcome to the June 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking...
Modern computers are somewhat more secure against being hacked - either by an inanimate virus or a human interloper - than they used to be. But as our...
The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people a...
Is there a multiverse, and if so, how should we think of ourselves within it? In many modern cosmological models, the universe includes more than one...
Welcome to the May 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking...
