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

369 | Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will

The worry about debates over free will is that they degenerate into semantics -- what do you mean by "free will," really? But there are important substantive issues that

368 | Elizabeth Alexander on Why Democracy Needs Imagination

In all sorts of ways, the modern world makes it difficult to nurture our individual humanity and connect with the humanity of others. The disciplines that try to do so ar

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | September 2026

Welcome to the September 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions)

367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders

The course of history is affected by many things, including the political and social situations of large groups of people, their biological and physical abilities, and th

366 | Jim Al-Khalili on Time, Quantum, Biology, and Cosmology

Everyone lives through time, but we continue to struggle to fully understand it. We remain unsure whether time is fundamental or emergent, why it has an arrow pointing fr

365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special

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 o

364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure

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 p

363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins

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 li

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026

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). W

362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

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

361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

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

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

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

360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass

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

359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy

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 no

358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant

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 straigh

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

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 t

356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity

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

AMA | June 2026

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

355 | Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball

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 k

354 | Christian List on Free Will and Levels of Reality

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