Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

For decades now physicists have been struggling to reconcile two great ideas from a century ago: general relativity and ... Read more

This is a special episode of Mindscape, thrown together quickly. Many thanks to Tara Smith for joining me on short notic... Read more

Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It's played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars... Read more

String theory was originally proposed as a relatively modest attempt to explain some features of strongly-interacting pa... Read more

Time! It doesn’t stop, psychological effects of being under lockdown notwithstanding. How we experience time depends on ... Read more

It’s hard doing science when you only have one data point, especially when that data point is subject to an enormous sel... Read more

The "Easy Problems" of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it i... Read more

As a semi-outsider, it’s fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, ... Read more

As you may have heard, I have a new book coming out in September, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emerge... Read more

We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence to construct an ima... Read more

Cosmologists are always talking excitedly about the Big Bang and all the cool stuff that happened in the 14 billion year... Read more

Artificial intelligence has made great strides of late, in areas as diverse as playing Go and recognizing pictures of do... Read more

I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave o... Read more

I suspect most loyal Mindscape listeners have been exposed to the fact that I’ve written a new book, Something Deeply Hi... Read more

Erwin Schrödinger’s famous book What Is Life? highlighted the connections between physics, and thermodynamics in particu... Read more

Astronomers rocked the cosmological world with the 1998 discovery that the universe is accelerating. Well-deserved Nobel... Read more

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old (depending on how we count). So if civilization will ultimately last... Read more

The possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — not just alien microbes, but culture... Read more

The best chess and Go players in the world aren’t human beings any more; they’re artificially-intelligent computer progr... Read more

In our postmodern world, studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem quaint at best, downright repressive ... Read more