Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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.
- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 99 minutes
- Episodes
- 391
- Years Active
- 2018 - 2025
29 | Raychelle Burks on the Chemistry of Murder
Sometimes science is asking esoteric questions about the fundamental nature of reality. Other times, it just wants to solve a murder. Today’s guest, Raychelle Burks, is an analytical chemist at St. E…
01:15:26 |
Mon 14 Jan 2019
28 | Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe
Sir Roger Penrose has had a remarkable life. He has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyone since Einstein himself -- Penrose diagrams, sin…
01:35:12 |
Mon 07 Jan 2019
Holiday Message 2018
There won't be any regular episodes of Mindscape this week or next, as we take a holiday break. Regular service will resume on Monday January 7, 2019. In the meantime, here is a special Holiday Messa…
00:44:48 |
Mon 24 Dec 2018
27 | Janna Levin on Black Holes, Chaos, and the Narrative of Science
It's a big universe out there, full of an astonishing variety of questions and puzzles. Today's guest, Janna Levin, is a physicist who has delved into some of the trippiest aspects of cosmology and g…
01:08:30 |
Mon 17 Dec 2018
26 | Ge Wang on Artful Design, Computers, and Music
Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come in particular forms, which may be em…
01:10:52 |
Mon 10 Dec 2018
25 | David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation
The "Easy Problems" of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it into action. The "Hard Problem," on the other hand, is the task of explaining ou…
01:22:19 |
Mon 03 Dec 2018
24 | Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar
I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just started taking data. Comparing where they were to wh…
01:19:55 |
Mon 26 Nov 2018
23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy
Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as …
01:06:59 |
Mon 19 Nov 2018
22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth
There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate change. But perhaps there is a tiny cause for optimis…
01:28:08 |
Mon 12 Nov 2018
21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind
We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply…
01:20:40 |
Mon 05 Nov 2018
20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery
Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he's been quite successful at the latter -- you may know him as the director and co-writer of Marvel's Doc…
01:23:24 |
Mon 29 Oct 2018
19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future
Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it's natural for economists to occasionally wander out into the question of what we should do as we live in th…
00:59:37 |
Mon 22 Oct 2018
18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory
String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework. This doesn't seem like a recipe fo…
01:12:14 |
Mon 15 Oct 2018
17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis
The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of different ways the world could be different from our …
01:11:46 |
Mon 08 Oct 2018
16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future
Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundw…
01:04:10 |
Mon 01 Oct 2018
15 | David Poeppel on Thought, Language, and How to Understand the Brain
Language comes naturally to us, but is also deeply mysterious. On the one hand, it manifests as a collection of sounds or marks on paper. On the other hand, it also conveys meaning – words and senten…
01:24:00 |
Sat 08 Sep 2018
14 | Alta Charo on Bioethics and the Law
To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, scientists tend to focus on whether they can do something, not whether they should. Questions of what we should do tend to wander away from the pristine be…
01:08:42 |
Sat 08 Sep 2018
13 | Neha Narula on Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of the Internet
For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and services. But who decides exactly how many goods/servi…
01:06:44 |
Sat 08 Sep 2018
12 | Wynton Marsalis on Jazz, Time, and America
Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It's played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars, and can feature esoteric harmonic experimentation or good old-fashioned foot-…
01:01:44 |
Tue 04 Sep 2018
11 | Mike Brown on Killing Pluto and Replacing It with Planet 9
Few events in recent astronomical history have had the worldwide emotional resonance as the 2006 announcement that Pluto was no longer considered a planet, at least as far as the International Astron…
01:17:46 |
Mon 27 Aug 2018
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