Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
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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.
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Top 10 Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
149 | Lee Smolin on Time, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
05/31/21 • 89 min
The challenge to a theoretical physicist pushing beyond our best current theories is that there are too many ways to go. What parts of the existing paradigm do you keep, which do you discard, and why make those choices? Among today’s theorists, Lee Smolin is unusually reflective about what principles should guide us in the construction of new theories. And he is happy to suggest radical revisions to well-established ideas, in areas from the nature of time to the workings of quantum mechanics. We talk about time, the universe, the role of philosophy, a new picture of spacetime, and the future of physics.
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Lee Smolin received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. He is currently on the faculty of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, where he was a founding member. Among his awards are the Majorana Prize, the Klopsteg Memorial Award, and the Buchalter Cosmology Prize. He is the author of several books, most recently Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum.
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200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
06/06/22 • 134 min
The 200th episode of Mindscape! Thanks to everyone for sticking around for this long. To celebrate, a solo episode discussing a set of issues naturally arising at the intersection of philosophy and physics: how to think about probabilities and expectations in a multiverse. Here I am more about explaining the issues than offering correct answers, although I try to do a bit of that as well.
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References:
- Guth, “Inflation and Eternal Inflation“
- Weinberg, “Living In the Multiverse“
- Susskind, “The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory“
- Carroll, Johnson, and Randall, “Dynamical Compactification from De Sitter Space“
- Sebens and Carroll, “Self-Locating Uncertainty and the Origin of Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics“
- Wald, “Asymptotic behavior of homogeneous cosmological models in the presence of a positive cosmological constant“
- Gibbons and Hawking, “Cosmological Event Horizons, Thermodynamics, and Particle Creation“
- Carroll and Chatwin-Davies, “Cosmic Equilibration: A Holographic No-Hair Theorem from the Generalized Second Law“
- Dyson, Kleban, and Susskind, “Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant“
- Albrecht and Sorbo, “Can the Universe Afford Inflation?“
- Boddy, Carroll, and Pollack, “De Sitter Space Without Dynamical Quantum Fluctuations“
- Carroll, “Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad“
- Aguirre, Carroll, and Johnson, “Out of Equilibrium: Understanding Cosmological Evolution to Lower-Entropy States“
- Carroll, “Beyond Falsifiabiliy: Normal Science in a Multiverse“
- Carter and McCrea, “The Anthropic Principle and its Implications for Biological Evolution“
- Leslie, “Doomsday Revisited“
- Gott, “Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects“
- Bostrom, Anthropic Bias
- Vilenkin, “The Principle of Mediocrity“
- Olum, “Conflict Between Anthropic Reasoning and Observation“
- Elga, “Self-Locating Belief and the Sleeping Beauty Problem“
- Lewis, “Sleeping Beauty: Reply to Elga“
- Hartle and Srednicki, “Are We Typical?“
- Hartle and Srednicki, “Science in a Very Large Universe“
- Neal, “Puzzles of Anthropic Reasoning Resolved Using Fully Non-Indexical Conditioning“
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269 | Sahar Heydari Fard on Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
03/18/24 • 71 min
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 about? These questions are distinct but related; there's not much point in spending all of our time wanting change that won't possibly happen, or working for change that wouldn't actually be good. Addressing such issues lies at the intersection of philosophy, political science, and social dynamics. Sahar Heydari Fard looks at all of these issues through the lens of complex systems theory, to better understand how the world works and how it might be improved.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/03/18/269-sahar-heydari-fard-on-complexity-justice-and-social-dynamics/
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Sahar Heydari Fard received a Masters in applied economics and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Cincinnati. She is currently an assistant professor in philosophy at the Ohio State University. Her research lies at the intersection of social and behavioral sciences, social and political philosophy, and ethics, using tools from complex systems theory.
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268 | Matt Strassler on Relativity, Fields, and the Language of Reality
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
03/04/24 • 90 min
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 together the theory of special relativity, which correctly describes the symmetries underlying Maxwell's theory. The delay came in part from the difficulty in accepting that light was a wave, but not a wave in any underlying "aether." Today our most basic view of fundamental physics is found in quantum field theory, which posits that everything around us is a quantum version of a relativistic wave. I talk with physicist Matt Strassler about how we go from these interesting-but-intimidating concepts to the everyday world of tables, chairs, and ourselves.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/03/04/267-matt-strassler-on-relativity-fields-and-the-language-of-reality/
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Matt Strassler received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently a writer and a visiting researcher in physics at Harvard University. His research has ranged over a number of topics in theoretical high-energy physics, from the phenomenology of dark matter and the Higgs boson to dualities in gauge theory and string theory. He blogs at Of Particular Significance, and his new book is Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean.
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174 | Tai-Danae Bradley on Algebra, Topology, Language, and Entropy
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
11/22/21 • 81 min
Mathematics is often thought of as the pinnacle of crisp precision: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle isn’t “roughly” the sum of the squares of the other two sides, it’s exactly that. But we live in a world of messy imprecision, and increasingly we need sophisticated techniques to quantify and deal with approximate statistical relations rather than perfect ones. Modern mathematicians have noticed, and are taking up the challenge. Tai-Danae Bradley is a mathematician who employs very high-level ideas — category theory, topology, quantum probability theory — to analyze real-world phenomena like the structure of natural-language speech. We explore a number of cool ideas and what kinds of places they are leading us to.
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Tai-Danae Bradley received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently a research mathematician at Alphabet, visiting research professor of mathematics at The Master’s University, and executive director of the Math3ma Institute. She hosts an explanatory mathematics blog, Math3ma. She is the co-author of the graduate-level textbook Topology: A Categorical Approach.
- Web site
- Google Scholar publications
- Video introduction to “At the Interface of Algebra and Statistics” Ph.D. thesis
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262 | Eric Schwitzgebel on the Weirdness of the World
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
01/15/24 • 80 min
Scientists and philosophers sometimes advocate pretty outrageous-sounding ideas about the fundamental nature of reality. (Arguably I have been guilty of this.) It shouldn't be surprising that reality, in regimes far away from our everyday experience, fails to conform to common sense. But it's also okay to maintain a bit of skepticism in the face of bizarre claims. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel wants us to face up to the weirdness of the world. He claims that there are no non-weird ways to explain some of the most important features of reality, from quantum mechanics to consciousness.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/01/15/262-eric-schwitzgebel-on-the-weirdness-of-the-world/
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Eric Schwitzgebel received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of several books, including the new The Weirdness of the World.
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AMA | March 2022
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
03/17/22 • 198 min
Welcome to the March 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!
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253 | David Deutsch on Science, Complexity, and Explanation
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
10/16/23 • 102 min
David Deutsch is one of the most creative scientific thinkers working today, who has as a goal to understand and explain the natural world as best we can. He was a pioneer in quantum computing, and has long been an advocate of the Everett interpretation of quantum theory. He is also the inventor of constructor theory, a new way of conceptualizing physics and science more broadly. But he also has a strong interest in philosophy and epistemology, championing a Popperian explanation-based approach over a rival Bayesian epistemology. We talk about all of these things and more, including his recent work on the Popper-Miller theorem, which specifies limitations on inductive approaches to knowledge and probability.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/16/253-david-deutsch-on-science-complexity-and-explanation/
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David Deutsch received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford. He is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at Oxford. He is a pioneer in quantum computation as well as initiating constructor theory. His books include The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. Among his awards including the Dirac Prize, the Dirac Medal, the Edge of Computation Science Prize, the Isaac Newton Medal, the Breakthrough Physics Prize, and a Royal Society Fellowship.
- Web site
- Oxford web page
- Google Scholar publications
- Amazon author page
- Wikipedia
- TED talk: After Billions of Years of Monotony, the Universe is Waking Up
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AMA | March 2023
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
03/06/23 • 181 min
Welcome to the March 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!
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AMA | February 2021
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
02/17/21 • 173 min
Welcome to the February 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). This month is in what has been the conventional format, where I just try my best to answer every question. But it’s growing a bit unwieldy, so going forward I might just try to pick my favorite questions and answer them in greater detail. We shall see.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas have?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas currently has 355 episodes available.
What topics does Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas cover?
The podcast is about Ideas, Society & Culture, Society, Podcasts, Science, Philosophy and Physics.
What is the most popular episode on Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas?
The episode title '149 | Lee Smolin on Time, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas?
The average episode length on Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas is 96 minutes.
How often are episodes of Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas released?
Episodes of Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas are typically released every 6 days, 23 hours.
When was the first episode of Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas?
The first episode of Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas was released on Jul 1, 2018.
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