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PODCAST

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,

science physics

All Episodes

01:05:36

365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/08/24

Black holes, as Stephen Hawking discovered, do grow old: they emit radiation, lose mass, and eventually evaporate away. But our fascination with black holes never grows old. This is especially true today, as we are seeing a flood of new data and intriguing theoretical ideas, which both tests the limits of Einstein's general relativity and teach us new things about the astrophysical universe. At the Center of Gravity at the University of Copenhagen, they are currently celebrating Black Hole

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01:16:23

364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/08/17

One of the paradoxes of science is that it seeks objectively true understanding of the world, but its methodology is driven by ignorance, failure, and uncertainty. Some phenomena we understand pretty well, but interesting research happens at the boundary of what we do and don't know. And there is no foolproof algorithm for moving in the right direction; we need to make conjectures and test them against the world. Biologist Stuart Firestein has been advocating for a better public understanding

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01:51:36

363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/08/10

Large Language Models display an uncanny ability to construct human-sounding speech, and can synthesize concepts in novel ways. Is this because they are truly thinking like human beings in some way, or have they found a way to be human-like without reproducing the internal mechanisms of human thought? Chandra Sripada argues that LLM cognition is more human-like than we suppose, and offers evidence from the ways that cognitive scientists study actual humans. Blog post with

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03:57:36

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/08/03

Welcome to the August 2026 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! Blog post with questions and full

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01:20:07

362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/07/27

People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relationships between these quantities and city population obey power laws with apparently universal exponents, reminiscent of scaling laws is biological organisms? Luis Bettencourt argues that they can be explained in similar ways, using ideas from complex systems and network theory. Blog post with

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01:15:51

361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/07/20

One of the characteristics of life is that living organisms gather information and put it to use. Even one of the simplest lifeforms, bacteria, are able to sense features of their surroundings and alter their behavior accordingly. Most impressively, they are able to sense the presence of similar bacteria by a process called quorum sensing. Today's guest, Bonnie Bassler, is a leader in this field, and explains how quorum sensing allows groups of bacteria to do things (including in our bodies)

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04:03:28

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/07/13

Welcome to the July 2026 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! Blog post with transcript:

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01:29:40

360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/07/06

Modern life has, in many ways, removed us from the environments in which our ancestors lived and adapted. Not only do we spend time looking at screens, but we spend time indoors, or outdoors but in urban spaces. How does this affect how we think and feel? Psychologist Marc Berman is a pioneer of "environmental neuroscience." In his recent book, Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being, he presents evidence that spending time in nature

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01:56:11

359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/06/29

The cosmological constant, as discussed last episode, provides a perfectly good (thus far) explanation for why we observe the universe to be accelerating. But it might not be the right explanation, and demonstrating that would be yet another foundational discovery. In this episode I discuss what is required to invent a plausible theory of dynamical dark energy, This includes considerations from particle physics, possible experimental tests, and the option that we should modify gravity rather than

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01:59:50

358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/06/22

The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the acceleration of the universe, announced in 1998. The most straightforward explanation for these observations is a positive cosmological constant, or vacuum energy. I talk about the origin of the idea with Einstein, how quantum physicists started to think about it and understand the "cosmological constant problem," as well as how its discovery also raised the "coincidence problem." This is the

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01:19:51

357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/06/15

Messenger RNA (mRNA) plays a literally central role in the functioning of life as we know it, shuttling information back and forth between the DNA where it is stored to the ribosome where it is used to produce proteins. RNA may even have been the first molecule to kick-start the origin of life. Today, scientists are learning how to manipulate mRNA to cure and prevent diseases, whether through vaccination or literally editing one's DNA. Jeff Coller explains how it all works and how mRNA is

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01:17:13

356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature,...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/06/08

All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people were exploring new conceptions of nature, humanity, and the self. Andrea Wulf is a writer of narrative histories, examining the origins of ideas through the lives of the people who explored them. In this episode we discuss three of her books: The Invention of Nature, about Alexander von Humboldt and environmentalism; Magnificent Rebels, about

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03:57:29

AMA | June 2026

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/06/01

Welcome to the June 2026 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! Blog post with AMA questions and transcript:

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01:44:25

355 | Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/05/24

One of the major obstacles to understanding quantum mechanics is the difficulty we have in simply accepting what the theory itself is telling us. The problem is that we know what the everyday world looks like -- stuff, arranged in space, evolving through time. So we can't resist the temptation to impose that picture on the quantum description, even if it's not actually there. In this solo episode I talk about what it means to take quantum mechanics at face value, and the difficult work

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01:26:42

354 | Christian List on Free Will and Levels of Reality

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/05/18

Did I have any freedom in choosing this particular podcast guest? At the level of particles, fields, and the fundamental laws of physics; no. At the level of human agents navigating the world, yes. Today's guest, Christian List, is a philosopher and political scientist who has arguably done the most to articulate the "compatibilist" perspective on free will, according to which the freedom of rational agents is entirely compatible with underlying mechanistic laws. The reconciliation depends on

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01:11:44

353 | Alvin Roth on the Economics of Morally...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/05/11

Economic markets are efficient ways of deciding fair prices, at least in ideal circumstances of perfect competition, information, and choice. But there is more to life than fair prices. Two people might decide on a fair price to carry out a contract killing, but society generally frowns on the idea. Many examples of morally contestable markets feature less consensus than that one: sex work, drugs, selling organs, adopting children. In his new book Moral Economics, economist Alvin Roth

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01:14:10

352 | Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/04/27

The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important step to understanding how brains work, but a long way from the final answer. A big next step is understanding how neuronal circuits connect to and guide bodily behavior. Very recent work on mapping the fruit-fly connectome has brought us closer to that goal. I talk with neuroscientist Bing Brunton about the connectome, how we can study it to

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01:25:33

349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/03/30

There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory of general relativity with the framework of quantum mechanics. But a number of intriguing ideas have arisen along the way, including black hole radiation, the wave function of the universe, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and the role of quantum information theory. Theoretical physicist Daniel Harlow has made significant contributions to our understanding

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03:53:23

AMA | March 2026

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/03/02

Welcome to the March 2026 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! Get twenty percent off your first purchase

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01:34:44

345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large...

Sean Carroll"s Mindscape: Science, Society,... ·

2026/02/23

Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain about the way the world is, but we can also be uncertain about our place within the world. This kind of situation arises in cosmology (where the relevant world can extend very far in space or time), and also in quantum mechanics (where new worlds might be created at any measurement), but also when we are simply unsure about the future history of

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423 results

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