0:00:00.5 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things that I always like to say about science and how it gets done is that science never proves things. This is something that is an important feature of science, especially in the modern world, where what science does, how it reaches conclusions, how trustworthy it is, these are all under contestation by different parts of society. So it's important to understand what scien...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. Today's podcast has a good news, bad news situation. The bad news is there will be bad language in this podcast. Not because we're getting especially salty or profane or anything like that, but because we're going to be talking about computer simulations that were written and run using a language called Brainfuck. Sorry about that if you have sensitive ears, but this is a very real compute...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As I'm recording this, I recently saw a tweet that tagged me by Gary Marcus, previous Mindscape guest, where he is retweeting a little clip of an interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the AI company responsible for GPT and other various services, in which Altman says he doesn't make a firm prediction, but he asks us to imagine a day coming soon, when you can just go to the comput...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.3 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the problems with reality, as I see it, is that there's a bunch of puzzles, questions, problems, if you like, that are hard to solve. And I'm not even thinking about, moral or political or social problems. I mean, just mathematical problems or at least problems that you can state rigorously and quantitatively. There are problems that in principle, you can find an algorithm for providi...| Sean Carroll
I’m on record as predicting that we’ll understand what happened at the Big Bang within fifty years. Not just the “Big Bang model” — the paradigm of a nearly-homogeneous universe expanding from an early hot, dense, state, which has been established beyond reasonable doubt — but the Bang itself, that moment at the very beginning. So now is as good a time as any to contemplate what we already think we do and do not understand. (Also, I’ll be talking about it Saturday night on Co...| Sean Carroll
