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

The Roman Empire was preceded by the Roman Republic, which flourished for a full five centuries. Why, after such a long and prosperous run, would an essentially democratic form of government change — with a good deal of approval from its citizens — into an autocracy? That’s the question I discuss with today’s guest, historian Edward Watts. It’s a fascinating story with many contemporary resonances, especially how reformers choose to balance working within the system to overthrowing it entirely.

Quantum mechanics is our best theory of how reality works at a fundamental level, yet physicists still can’t agree on what the theory actually says. David Albert is one of the leading figures in the foundations of quantum mechanics today, and we discuss the measurement problem and why it’s so puzzling. Then we dive into the Many-Worlds version of quantum mechanics, which is my favorite. It is not David’s favorite, so he presents the case as to why you should be skeptical of Many-Worlds.

Journalist Jessica Yellin has seen the news business from the perspective of both the establishment and the upstart. Working for major news organizations, she witnessed the strange ways in which decisions about what to cover were made, including the constant focus on short-term profits. And now she is spearheading a new online effort to bring people news in a different way. We talk about what the news business is, what it should be, and where it is going.

Paul Bloom is a well-known psychologist and author who wrote the provocatively-titled book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, and is currently writing a book about the nature of cruelty. While I sympathize with parts of his anti-empathy stance, I try to stick up for the importance of empathy in the right circumstances. We have a great discussion about the relationship between reason and emotion.

Is love real? What about the number 5? This is clearly a job for a philosopher, and James Ladyman is one of the world’s acknowledged experts. He and his collaborators have been championing a view known as “structural realism,” in which real things are those that reflect true patterns in the underlying reality. We talk about that, but also about a couple of other subjects in the broad area of philosophy of science: the history and current status of materialism/physicalism, and the nature of complex sys

Naomi Oreskes is a distinguished historian of science who has become, half-reluctantly, the world’s expert on the origin of the climate-denialism movement in the United States. It turns out to be a fascinating story starting with just a handful of scientists who were passionate not only about climate, but also whether smoking causes cancer, and who cared deeply about capitalism, communism, and the Cold War.

Brian Greene is an accomplished string theorist as well as one of the world’s most successful popularizers and advocates for science. We talk about string theory, how it might imply the existence of a cosmological multiverse, and whether that's a good or bad thing.

Once we leave the highly constrained sphere of artificial games and enter the real world of human actions, our artificial intelligences are going to have to make choices about the best course of action in unclear circumstances: they will have to learn to be ethical. I talk to Derek Leben about what this might mean and what kind of ethics our computers should be taught. It’s a wide-ranging discussion involving computer science, philosophy, economics, and game theory.

Raychelle Burks is an analytical chemist at St. Edward’s University. Before becoming an academic, she worked in a crime lab using chemistry to help police, and now she does research on building detectors for use in forensic analyses. We talk about how the real world of forensic investigation differs from the version portrayed on CSI, and how chemists use their tools to help law enforcement agencies. We may even touch on how criminals could use chemical knowledge to get away with their dastardly deeds.

Sir Roger Penrose has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyone since Einstein himself. He has made important contributions to mathematics, and has also made bold conjectures in the notoriously contentious areas of quantum mechanics and the study of consciousness. We concentrate in this discussion on spacetime, black holes, and cosmology, but we made sure to reserve some time to dig into quantum mechanics and the brain by the end.

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 Message. Most likely it will be of interest to very few people -- there's no real substantive content, just me talking about the State of the Podcast and some other things I've been doing. Thanks to everyone for listening, here's looking toward great things in 2019!

Today's guest, Janna Levin, is a physicist who has delved into some of the trippiest aspects of cosmology and gravitation: the topology of the universe, extra dimensions of space, and the appearance of chaos in orbits around black holes. At the same time, she has been a pioneer in talking about science in interesting and innovative ways. We talk about how one shapes an unusual scientific career, and how the practice of science relates to more traditionally humanistic concerns.

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 aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. The study of how form and function come together in things is what we call “Design.” Ge Wang, is a computer scientist and musician with a new book called Artful Design. We talk about what design is, how it can be artful, and how it points us toward the sublime.

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" is the task of explaining our first-person experiences of the world. Today's guest, David Chalmers, is arguably the leading philosopher of consciousness working today. Recently he has been taking seriously the notion of panpsychism. We also spend some time on the possibility that we live in a computer simulation. Would simulated lives be "real"?

After I hosted a talk on gravitational waves about 15 years ago, the mumblings in the audience after the talk were clear: “They’ll never make it.” Of course they did, and the 2016 announcement of the detection of gravitational waves led to a Nobel Prize for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish. So it’s a great pleasure to have Kip Thorne as a guest. Kip tells us a bit about he LIGO story, and we also talk about whether it’s possible to travel backward in time, and what his future movie plans