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

Latest Episodes:

AMA | December 2025 Dec 15, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to the December 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 are about a similar topic.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/15/ama-december-2025/

In the intro I give a plug for the Pods Fight Poverty effort organized by GiveDirectly. Please consider making a donation to help families in Rwanda!

Enjoy!

338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos Dec 08, 2025

Show notes

The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detected. Modern physicists have no such scruples, of course, but more importantly neutrinos turn out to be very detectable, given sufficient resources and experimental technique. I talk with neutrino physicist Ryan Patterson about what current and upcoming experiments teach us about neutrinos themselves, as well as implications for dark matter and why there are more particles than antiparticles in the universe.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/08/228-ryan-patterson-on-the-physics-of-neutrinos/

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Ryan Patterson received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently Professor of Physics at Caltech. His research involves a number of aspects of experimental neutrino physics, including involvement in the NOvA and DUNE experiments.

337 | Kevin Zollman on Game Theory, Signals, and Meaning Dec 01, 2025

Show notes

Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potential rewards. That's a pretty broad class of interesting events, so it is unsurprising that game theory is a useful way of thinking about everything from international relations to the evolution of peacock feathers. I talk with philosopher Kevin Zollman about what game theory is and how it gets used in biology and human interactions. We discuss how thinking in game-theoretic terms can help understand the origin of meaning and intentionality in human language.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/01/337-kevin-zollman-on-game-theory-signals-and-meaning/

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Kevin Zollman received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Irvine. He is currently the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also an associate fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a visiting professor at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He serves as the Director of the Institute for Complex Social Dynamics at CMU. He is the co-author, with Paul Raeburn, of The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting.

336 | Anil Ananthaswamy on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI Nov 24, 2025

Show notes

Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications have been discussed at great length. To understand the origin and nature of this progress, it is useful to dig at least a little bit into the mathematical and algorithmic structures underlying these techniques. Anil Ananthaswamy takes up this challenge in his book Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI. In this conversation we give a brief overview of some of the basic ideas, including the curse of dimensionality, backpropagation, transformer architectures, and more.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/24/336-anil-ananthaswamy-on-the-mathematics-of-neural-nets-and-ai/

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Anil Ananthaswamy received a Masters degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle. He is currently a freelance science writer and feature editor for PNAS Front Matter. He was formerly the deputy news editor for New Scientist, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and journalist-in-residence at the Simon Institute for the Theory of Computing, University of California, Berkeley. He organizes an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences at Bengaluru, India.

AMA | November 2025 Nov 17, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to the November 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 are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with AMA questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/17/ama-november-2025/

In the intro I mentioned a couple of my favorite TV shows of this year. Here is a more thought-out list (no particular order):

Pluribus and Down Cemetery Road also look promising, but too early to tell. (There are a huge number of shows I've never seen, so feel free to add recommendations.)

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335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe Nov 10, 2025

Show notes

Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It can be tempting to think of scientific discoveries as being carefully constructed atop a rock-solid foundation. In reality, scientific progress is tentative and fallible. Scientists propose models, assign them probabilities, and run tests to see whether they succeed or fail. In cosmologist Andrew Jaffe's new book, The Random Universe, he illustrates how models and probability help us make sense of the cosmos.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/10/335-andrew-jaffe-on-models-probability-and-the-universe/

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Andrew Jaffe received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. He is currently a professor of astrophysics and cosmology and Director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology at Imperial College, London. His research lies at the intersection of theoretical and observational cosmology, including the Planck Surveyor, Euclid, LISA, and Simons Observatory collaborations.

334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens Nov 03, 2025

Show notes

The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But the process by which we learn about the universe, and the language with which we talk about it, is extremely human-dependent. Does that mean that aliens would do science differently, and even think differently about physics, even if we all live in the same universe? Physicist Daniel Whiteson has teamed with cartoonist Andy Warner to investigate these questions in their new book Do Aliens Speak Physics?

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/03/334-daniel-whiteson-on-the-physics-of-and-by-aliens/

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Daniel Whiteson received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and recipient of an Emmy nomination. He is the author of several books, often with co-author Jorge Cham. He is the co-host (with Kelly Weinersmith) of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them Oct 27, 2025

Show notes

Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to convince ourselves of something that isn't quite accurate? Or is it something different -- unmotivated reasoning, or "unthinkingness," an unwillingness to do the cognitive work that most of us are actually up to if we try? Gordon Pennycook wants to argue for the latter, and this simple shift has important consequences, including for strategies for getting people to be less susceptible to misinformation and conspiracies.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/10/27/333-gordon-pennycook-on-unthinkingness-conspiracies-and-what-to-do-about-them/

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Gordon Pennycook received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Waterloo. He is currently an associate professor of psychology and Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow at Cornell University as well as an Adjunct Professor at University of Regina's Hill/Levene Schools of Business. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and a 2016 winner of the IgNobel Prize for Peace.

332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music Oct 20, 2025

Show notes

Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathematical properties of the frequencies to which they correspond, an idea that goes back as far as Pythagoras himself. These days we have a much more intricate understanding of these relationships and how to manipulate them. I talk to composer and music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko about how different musical scales are constructed and the math underlying what sounds good.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/10/20/332-dmitri-tymoczko-on-the-mathematics-behind-music/

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Dmitri Tymoczko received a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor of music at Princeton University as well as a composer and performer. He has been the recipient of Rhodes and Guggenheim fellowships. As a composer, his works have been performed by multiple groups, and recorded on several albums.

Personal web site
Princeton web page
Mad Musical Science
Spiral diagrams: rock music, classical music
Google Scholar publications
Amazon author page
Wikipedia
William Sethares's Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale

AMA | October 2025 Oct 13, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to the October 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 are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with AMA questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/10/13/ama-october-2025/

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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