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

The search for a foundational theory of quantum mechanics that all physicists can agree on remains active. Over the last century a number of contenders have emerged, including Many-Worlds, pilot-wave theories, and others, but all of them have aspects that many people object to. Jacob Barandes has taken up the challenge, proposing a new formulation of quantum theory in which there is no wave function, only real de...

When we think of the capacities that distinguish humans from other species, we generally turn to intelligence and its byproducts, including our technological prowess. But our intelligence is highly connected to our ability to use language, which is in turn closely related to our capacities as social creatures. Philosopher Philip Pettit would encourage us to think of those social capacities, as enabled by language, as the p...

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. Some of these puzzles are relatively well-known, while others are less celebrated. David Tong joins us to talk about some of the more interesting and perplexing aspects of quantum field theory. He also discusses his new project to write a series of textbooks covering (all?) impo...

Welcome to the July 2025 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 the...

Our universe started out looking very simple: hot, dense, smooth, rapidly expanding. According to our best current model, it will end up looking simple once again: cold, dark, empty. It's in between -- now, roughly speaking -- that things look complex. I have been working to understand the stages by which complexity comes into existence, thrives, and eventually disappears. Without going into technical details, in this solo...

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 limited his characterization to "the European philosophical tradition." There are other traditions, both ancient and ongoing: Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, Africana philosophy, and various indigenous philosophies. For the most part, these do not get nearly as much attentio...

Economics is seeing an upsurge in the importance of controlled, reproducible empirical studies. One area where this has had a great impact is on development economics, which studies the economies of low- and middle-income societies. Edward Miguel has been at the forefront of both the revolution in empirical methods, and in applying those techniques to alleviating poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

Blog post with t...

The human brain is extremely complicated, but decades of careful neuroscientific research have revealed quite a bit about how it works, including how certain genes affect particular brain behaviors. Nevertheless, this progress has not led to quite as much improvement in the treatment of brain disorders as we might expect. I talk with neuroscientist Nicole Rust about why this is and how to improve the situation, as discusse...

Welcome to the June 2025 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 the...

Einstein's general theory of relativity, plus some reasonable assumptions about the universe and what it's made of, has a remarkable implication: that as we trace cosmic evolution into the far past, we ultimately hit a singularity of infinite density and curvature, the Big Bang. Did that really happen? Einstein's theory is classical, after all, and the world is quantum. And whose to say what assumptions are reasonable? Nia...

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 downward from trees. But how can you really know? After all, tomorrow you might see an apple that falls upward. How is science possible at all? Philosophers, as you might expect, have thought hard about this. Branden Fitelson explains how a better understanding of probabi...

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 more familiar life forms on land and under water, but the operate and survive in ways that are quite different from what we're familiar with. They live off of nutrients that have penetrated from the surface, or sometimes off of pure electrons. Karen Lloyd is a scientist who ha...

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 artificial intelligence in medicine, especially in diagnostics. This is an area that is a perfect match between an important question and the capabilities of machine learning, to the point where AI can out-perform human doctors. And second, our understanding of aging and what ...

Welcome to the May 2025 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...

The germ theory of disease is a crowning achievement of science, up there with modern physics, continental drift, and evolution via natural selection. (Even if there will always be cranky skeptics.) But the road to widespread acceptance isn't always an easy one. Why did it take so long between Anton van Leeuwenhoek seeing "animalcules" in a microscope (1670s) to Louis Pasteur's work on pasteurization and vaccination (...

Questions about consciousness range from the precise and empirical -- what neurons fire when I have some particular experience -- to the deeply profound -- does consciousness emerge from matter, or does matter emerge from consciousness? While it might be straightforward to think that consciousness arises from the collective behavior of atoms in the brain, Annaka Harris and others argue that consciousness could be the funda...

Welcome to the April 2025 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 th...

Cosmologists were, let us be honest, pretty stunned in 1998 when observations revealed that the universe is accelerating. There was an obvious plausible explanation, the cosmological constant proposed by Einstein, which is equivalent to a constant vacuum energy pervading space. But the cosmological constant was known to be enormously smaller than its "natural" value, and it seems fine-tuned for it to be...

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 taking place. A complete understanding of this would be known as the "neural correlates of consciousness." Once we have that, we could hopefully make progress on developing a theoretical picture of what consciousness is and why it happens. Today's guest, Christof Koch, is a lea...