Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Episodes
338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hy...
337 | Kevin Zollman on Game Theory, Signals, and Meaning
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potent...
336 | Anil Ananthaswamy on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications...
AMA | November 2025
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe
10 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It ca...
334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music
20 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
AMA | October 2025
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also th...
331 | Solo: Fine-Tuning, God, and the Multiverse
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
330 | Petter Törnberg on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not s...
329 | Steven Pinker on Rationality and Common Knowledge
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
328 | Mary Roach on Replacing Parts of Our Bodies
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Like any machine, bodies occasionally break down, and it's natural to go in search of a replacement part. Ancient societies featured simple prosthetic...
AMA | September 2025
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the September 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also ...
327 | Cass Sunstein on Liberalism
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"Liberalism," divorced from its particular connotations in this or that modern political context, refers broadly to a philosophy of individual rights,...
326 | Natalie Batalha on What We Know and Will Learn About Exoplanets
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
325 | Alvy Ray Smith on Pixar, Pixels, and the Great Digital Convergence
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The world is becoming pixelated. As computers and other digital devices become ubiquitous, human knowledge and communication and information is gradua...
324 | Elizabeth Mynatt on Universities and the Importance of Basic Research
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is not manifestly obvious that universities should be where most scholarly research is performed. One could imagine systems that separated out the ...
AMA | August 2025
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the August 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
323 | Jacob Barandes on Indivisible Stochastic Quantum Mechanics
28 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
322 | Philip Pettit on Language, Agency, Politics, and Freedom
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When we think of the capacities that distinguish humans from other species, we generally turn to intelligence and its byproducts, including our techno...
321 | David Tong on Open Questions in Quantum Field Theory
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
AMA | July 2025
07 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the July 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe
30 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our universe started out looking very simple: hot, dense, smooth, rapidly expanding. According to our best current model, it will end up looking simpl...
319 | Bryan Van Norden on Philosophy From the Rest of the World
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is common to refer to philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." But in the original quote, Alfred North Whitehead was more careful: he limite...
318 | Edward Miguel on the Developing Practice of Development Economics
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Economics is seeing an upsurge in the importance of controlled, reproducible empirical studies. One area where this has had a great impact is on devel...
317 | Nicole Rust on Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The human brain is extremely complicated, but decades of careful neuroscientific research have revealed quite a bit about how it works, including how ...
AMA | June 2025
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the June 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
316 | Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper
26 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Einstein's general theory of relativity, plus some reasonable assumptions about the universe and what it's made of, has a remarkable implication: that...
315 | Branden Fitelson on the Logic and Use of Probability
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every time you see an apple spontaneously break away from a tree, it falls downward. You therefore claim that there is a law of physics: apples fall d...
314 | Karen Lloyd on the Deep Underground Biosphere
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There are living creatures dwelling deep below the surface of the Earth, as deep as we are able to drill. These hearty microorganisms are related to m...
313 | Eric Topol on the Changing Face of Medicine and Aging
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Medical science is advancing at an astonishing rate. Today we talk with leading expert Eric Topol about two aspects of this story. First, the use of a...
AMA | May 2025
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the May 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the on...
312 | Thomas Levenson on the Mutual History of Humans and Germs
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The germ theory of disease is a crowning achievement of science, up there with modern physics, continental drift, and evolution via natural selection....
311 | Annaka Harris on Whether Consciousness is Fundamental
14 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Questions about consciousness range from the precise and empirical -- what neurons fire when I have some particular experience -- to the deeply profou...
AMA | April 2025
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the April 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...
310 | Marc Kamionkowski on Dark Energy and Cosmic Anomalies
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Cosmologists were, let us be honest, pretty stunned in 1998 when observations revealed that the universe is accelerating. There was an obvious pl...
309 | Christof Koch on Consciousness and Integrated Information
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Consciousness is easier to possess than to define. One thing we can do is to look into the brain and see what lights up when conscious awareness is ta...
308 | Alison Gopnik on Children, AI, and Modes of Thinking
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We often study cognition in other species, in part to learn about modes of thinking that are different from our own. Today's guest, psychologist/philo...
AMA | March 2025
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the March 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...
307 | Kevin Peterson on the Theory of Cocktails
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A lot of science goes into crafting the perfect cocktail. Balancing sweet and bitter notes, providing the right amount of aeration and dilution, getti...
306 | Helen Czerski on Our Energetic Oceans
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is commonplace to refer to the Earth's oceans as vast and largely unexplored. But we do understand some aspects, and improving that understanding i...
305 | Lilliana Mason on Polarization and Political Psychology
17 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Political outcomes would be relatively simple to predict and understand if only people were well-informed, entirely rational, and perfectly self-inter...
Bonus | Cuts to Science Funding and Why They Matter
12 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Trump administration, led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, has proposed sweeping cuts to spending on science re...
304 | James Evans on Innovation, Consolidation, and the Science of Science
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is a feature of many human activities - sports, cooking, music, interpersonal relations - that being able to do them well doesn't necessarily mean ...
303 | AMA | February 2025
03 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the February 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
303 | James P. Allison on Fighting Cancer with the Immune System
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A typical human lifespan is approximately three billion heartbeats in duration. Lasting that long requires not only intrinsic stability, but an impres...
302 | Chris Kempes on the Biophysics of Evolution
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Randomness plays an important role in the evolution of life (as my evil twin will tell you). But random doesn't mean arbitrary. Biological o...
301 | Tina Eliassi-Rad on Al, Networks, and Epistemic Instability
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Big data is ruling, or at least deeply infiltrating, all of modern existence. Unprecedented capacity for collecting and analyzing large amounts of dat...
300 | Solo: Does Time Exist?
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new year, and a new centennial -- 300 (regularly-numbered) episodes of Mindscape! Our tradition is to have a solo episode, and what better topic tha...
Holiday Message | Hits and Misses
23 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's the end of the year, and time for our annual holiday break here at Mindscape. But as usual, we wrap up with a Holiday Message. This year, inspire...
299 | Michael Wong on Information, Function, and the Origin of Life
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Living organisms seem exquisitely organized and complex, with features clearly adapted to serving certain functions needed to survive and procreate. N...
298 | Jeff Lichtman on the Wiring Diagram of the Brain
09 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The number of neurons in the human brain is comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Unlike the stars, however, in the case of neuro...
AMA | December 2024
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the December 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
297 | Emily Wilson on Homer, Poetry, and Translation
25 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Not too long ago, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana starred in a (loose) adaptation of Homer's epic poem The Iliad; next month, Ralph Fiennes and...
296 | Brandon Ogbunu on Fitness Seascapes and the Course of Evolution
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Biological evolution via natural selection is a simple idea that becomes enormously complicated in its realization. Populations of organisms are drive...
295 | Solo: Emergence and Layers of Reality
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Emergence is a centrally important concept in science and philosophy. Indeed, the existence of higher-level emergent properties helps render the ...
AMA | November 2024
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the November 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Erwin Schrödinger said that the important characteristic of life is that it "goes on doing something... for a much longer period than we would expect...
293 | Doyne Farmer on Chaos, Crashes, and Economic Complexity
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A large economy is one of the best examples we have of complex dynamics. There are multiple components arranged in complicated overlapping hierarchies...
292 | Jonathan Birch on Animal Sentience
14 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's not immoral to kick a rock; it is immoral to kick a baby. At what point do we start saying that it is wrong to cause pain to something? This ques...
AMA | October 2024
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the October 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also th...
291 | Venki Ramakrishnan on the Biology of Death and Aging
30 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Aging and death happen to the best of us, but there are increasing efforts to do something about it. That effort requires that we have some reasonable...
290 | Hahrie Han on Making Multicultural Democracy Work
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's a wonder democracy works at all -- a collection of people with potentially different interests have to agree to abide by majority vote even when ...
289 | Cari Cesarotti on the Next Generation of Particle Experiments
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As an experimental facility, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva has been extraordinarily successful, discovering the Higgs boson and measurin...
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
09 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It wasn't that long ago, historically speaking, that you might put on your tuxedo or floor-length evening gown to go out and hear a live opera or symp...
AMA | September 2024
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the September 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also ...
287 | Jean-Paul Faguet on Institutions and the Legacy of History
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One common feature of complex systems is sensitive dependence on initial conditions: a small change in how systems begin evolving can lead to large di...
286 | Blaise Agüera y Arcas on the Emergence of Replication and Computation
19 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Understanding how life began on Earth involves questions of chemistry, geology, planetary science, physics, and more. But the question of how random p...
285 | Nate Silver on Prediction, Risk, and Rationality
12 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Being rational necessarily involves engagement with probability. Given two possible courses of action, it can be rational to prefer the one that could...
AMA | August 2024
05 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the August 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
284 | Doris Tsao on How the Brain Turns Vision Into the World
29 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The human brain does a pretty amazing job of taking in a huge amount of data from multiple sensory modalities -- vision, hearing, smell, etc. -- and c...
283 | Daron Acemoglu on Technology, Inequality, and Power
22 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Change is scary. But sometimes it can all work out for the best. There's no guarantee of that, however, even when the change in question involves the ...
282 | Joel David Hamkins on Puzzles of Reality and Infinity
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The philosophy of mathematics would be so much easier if it weren't for infinity. The concept seems natural, but taking it seriously opens the door to...
Ask Me Anything | July 2024
08 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the July 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
281 | Samir Okasha on the Philosophy of Agency and Evolution
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Just like with physics, in biology it is perfectly possible to do most respectable work without thinking much about philosophy, but there are unmistak...
280 | François Chollet on Deep Learning and the Meaning of Intelligence
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Which is more intelligent, ChatGPT or a 3-year old? Of course this depends on what we mean by "intelligence." A modern LLM is certainly able to a...
279 | Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and the Body
17 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For those of us who are not dualists, the mind arises from our physical bodies -- mostly the brain, but the rest of the body has a role to play. And y...
278 | Kieran Healy on the Technology of Ranking People
10 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We claim to love all of our children, friends, and students equally. But perhaps deep down you assign a ranking to them, from favorite to not-so-favor...
AMA | June 2024
03 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the June 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
277 | Cumrun Vafa on the Universe According to String Theory
27 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
String theory, the current leading candidate for a theory of quantum gravity as well as other particles and forces, doesn't connect directly to the wo...
276 | Gavin Schmidt on Measuring, Predicting, and Protecting Our Climate
20 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Earth's climate keeps changing, largely due to the effects of human activity, and we haven't been doing enough to slow things down. Indeed, over t...
275 | Solo: Quantum Fields, Particles, Forces, and Symmetries
13 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Publication week! Say hello to Quanta and Fields, the second volume of the planned three-volume series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Th...
AMA | May 2024
06 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the May 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the on...
274 | Gizem Gumuskaya on Building Robots from Human Cells
29 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Modern biology is advancing by leaps and bounds, not only in understanding how organisms work, but in learning how to modify them in interesting ways....
273 | Stefanos Geroulanos on the Invention of Prehistory
22 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Humanity itself might be the hardest thing for scientists to study fairly and accurately. Not only do we come to the subject with certain inevitable p...
272 | Leslie Valiant on Learning and Educability in Computers and People
15 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Science is enabled by the fact that the natural world exhibits predictability and regularity, at least to some extent. Scientists collect data about w...
AMA | April 2024
08 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the April 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...
271 | Claudia de Rham on Modifying General Relativity
01 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Einstein's theory of general relativity has been our best understanding of gravity for over a century, withstanding a variety of experimental challeng...
270 | Solo: The Coming Transition in How Humanity Lives
25 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Technology is changing the world, in good and bad ways. Artificial intelligence, internet connectivity, biological engineering, and climate change are...
269 | Sahar Heydari Fard on Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics
18 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to social change, two questions immediately present themselves: What kind of change do we want to see happen? And, how do we bring it ab...
AMA | March 2024
11 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the March 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones askin...
268 | Matt Strassler on Relativity, Fields, and the Language of Reality
04 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell argued that light was a wave of electric and magnetic fields. But it took over four decades for physicists to put to...
267 | Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and Utopia
26 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The twentieth century was something, wasn't it? Margaret Mead, as well as her onetime-husband Gregory Bateson, managed to play roles in seve...
266 | Christoph Adami on How Information Makes Sense of Biology
19 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Evolution is sometimes described -- not precisely, but with some justification -- as being about the "survival of the fittest." But that idea doesn't ...
AMA | February 2024
12 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the February 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
265 | John Skrentny on How the Economy Mistreats STEM Workers
05 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Universities and their students are constantly being encouraged to produce more graduates majoring in STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering,...
264 | Sabine Stanley on What's Inside Planets
29 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The radius of the Earth is over 6,000 kilometers, but the deepest we've ever dug below the surface is only about 12 km. Yet we have a q...
263 | Chris Quigg on Symmetry and the Birth of the Standard Model
22 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Einstein's theory of general relativity is distinguished by its singular simplicity and beauty. The Standard Model of Particle Physics, by contrast, i...
262 | Eric Schwitzgebel on the Weirdness of the World
15 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists and philosophers sometimes advocate pretty outrageous-sounding ideas about the fundamental nature of reality. (Arguably I have been guilty ...