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

For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don't give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central to human life, and how we go about the process of creating and consuming it — from agriculture to distribution to cooking to dining — touches the most mundane aspects of our daily routines as well as large-scale questions of geopolitics and culture. Ra...

Welcome to the May 2021 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 some...

"A way that math can make the world a better place is by making it a more interesting place to be a conscious being." So says mathematician Emily Riehl near the start of this episode, and it's a good summary of what's to come. Emily works in realms of topology and category theory that are far away from practical applications, or even to some non-practical areas of theoretical physics. But they hel...

The world has gone through a tough time with the COVID-19 pandemic. Every catastrophic event is unique, but there are certain commonalities to how such crises play out in our modern interconnected world. Historian Niall Ferguson wrote a book from a couple of years ago,  The Square and the Tower , that considered how an interplay between networks and hierarchies has shaped the history of the world....

I've been a professional physicist since the 1980's, and not once over the course of my career has a particle-physics experiment produced a completely surprising new result. We've discovered particles (top quark, Higgs boson) and even phenomena (neutrino masses), but nothing we hadn't either predicted or could easily accommodate within the Standard Model of particle physics. That  might  have chan...

Mom, apple pie, and rationality — all things that are unquestionably good, right? But rationality, as much as we might value it, is easier to aspire to than to achieve. And there are more than a few hot takes on the market suggesting that we shouldn't even  want  to be rational — that it's inefficient or maladaptive. Julia Galef is here to both stand up for the value of being rational, and to expl...

Welcome to the April 2021 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 so...

Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn't think we could be a fairly competent novelist, if we just bothered to take the time? But storytelling is a craft like any other, with its own secret techniques and best practices. Charlie Jane Anders is a multiple-award-winning novelist and story writer, but also someone wh...

In a world flooded with information, everybody necessarily makes choices about what we pay attention to. This basic fact can be manipulated in any number of ways, from advertisers micro-targeting specific groups to repressive governments flooding social media with misinformation, or for that matter well-meaning people passing along news from sketchy sources. Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist who stu...

"Time" and "the brain" are two of those things that are somewhat mysterious, but it would be hard for us to live without. So just imagine how much fun it is to bring them together. Dean Buonomano is one of the leading neuroscientists studying how our brains perceive time, which is part of the bigger issue of how we construct models of the physical world around us. We talk about how the brain tells...

Imagine two people with exactly the same innate abilities, but one is born into a wealthy family and the other is born into poverty. Or two people born into similar circumstances, but one is paralyzed in a freak accident in childhood while the other grows up in perfect health. Is this fair? We live in a society that values some kind of "equality" — "All men are created equal" — without ever quite...

You might think that human beings, exhausted by competing for resources and rewards in the real world, would take it easy and stick to cooperation in their spare time. But no; we are fascinated by competition, and invent games and sports to create artificial competition just for fun. These competitions turn out to be wonderful laboratories for exploring concepts like optimization, resource allocat...

Welcome to the March 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by  Patreon supporters  (who are also the ones asking the questions). With an expanding number of questions, it's become a bit impractical for me to try to rush through and answer them all. So instead, this time I have picked out certain questions to tackle, and grouped some together if they were related. I tried to p...

On a spectrum of philosophical topics, one might be tempted to put mathematics and morality on opposite ends. Math is one of the most pristine and rigorously-developed areas of human thought, while morality is notoriously contentious and resistant to consensus. But the more you dig into the depths, the more alike these two fields appear to be. Justin Clarke-Doane argues that they are very much ali...

The internet has made it so much easier for people to talk to each other, in a literal sense. But it hasn't necessarily made it easier to have rewarding, productive, good-faith conversations. Here I talk with sociologist Rod Graham about what kinds of conversations the internet does enable, and should enable, and how we can work to make them better. We discuss both how social media are used for ne...

In our postmodern world, studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem quaint at best, downright repressive at worst. (We are talking about works by dead white men, after all.) Do we still have things to learn from classical philosophy, drama, and poetry? Shadi Bartsch offers a vigorous affirmative to this question in two new books coming from different directions. First, she has newly...

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 shal...

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There's no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestsell...

It's a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are drastically limited; we only see a narrow spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and we only hear a narrow band of sound. We don't feel neutrinos or dark matter at all, even as they pass through our bodies, and we can't perceive microscopic objects. While...

Here is a special bonus  punishment  treat for Mindscape listeners: an interview of me, by David Zierler of the American Institute of Physics's Oral History project. This is a fantastic project that collects interviews with influential physicists of all ages, and apparently sometimes less-influential physicists. So if you'd like to hear my (academic) life story boiled down to a mere four hours, he...

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, computer science, and information theory to the usual biological toolkit. One of the big areas of study in this burgeoning field is the relationship between the basic bioinformatic building blocks (genes and proteins) to the macroscopic organism that eventually results. That rela...

The possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — not just alien microbes, but cultures as advanced (or much more) than our own — is one of the most provocative questions in modern science. So provocative that it's difficult to talk about the idea in a rational, dispassionate way; there are those who loudly insist that the probability of advanced alien cultures ex...

What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What counts as fundamental is somewhat contestable, but it includes our best understanding of matter and energy, space and time, and dynamical laws, as well as complex emergent structures and the sweep of the cosmos. Few people are better positioned to t...

The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you're probably aware of, including a riotous mob storming the US Capitol. The situation has spurred me to take the unusual step of doing a solo podcast in response to current events. But never fear, I'm not actually trying to analyze current events for their own sakes. Rather, I'm using...

We all know stereotypes about people from different countries; but we also recognize that there really are broad cultural differences between people who grow up in different societies. This raises a challenge when most psychological research is performed on a narrow and unrepresentative slice of the world's population — a subset that has accurately been labeled as  WEIRD  (Western, Educated, Indus...