0:00:00.5: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. In the last AMA, the last Ask Me Anything episode, we touched on an issue that has talked about a lot in the set of online discourse involving people who care about physics and people who care about science, which is the rate of progress in physics. Are we making progress as fast as we should or in science more generally? Personally, I think that in science more generally, or even in physics, outside fun...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.4 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Podcasting, like the subject of today's episode, is a complex system. Many things happen. You cannot always know what is going on. Sometimes the schedule kind of gets away from you and you decide that this would be the right time for a solo episode. This is a fancy way of saying that I'm behind on actually recording episodes because of various things that happened. So why not just do it...| Sean Carroll
0:00:01.4 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Back when I was writing "The Big Picture" The book, one of the motivations there was to provide kind of an apologia for naturalism. An apologia not being, you say you're sorry, you apologize. It's when you defend a position, mostly coming from theology. Apologetics in theology, is you're trying to defend the existence of God. So I was doing the opposite, or at least the flip side, defen...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.3 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the downsides, there aren't that many, but one of the downsides of being a cosmologist is that sometimes when your fellow cosmologists try to explain the important ideas of your field to the rest of the world, they cut corners now and then, or they take shortcuts, use different jargon words in specific ways, and not everything always becomes clear. A classic example of this is the phr...| Sean Carroll
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, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast, I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Colonialism is an idea that is bandied about in the discourse these days, usually with the subtext that colonialism is bad. It is bad for the powerful, rich country to impose its will on some smaller, less well-equipped-to-defend-itself part of the world. But it wasn't always thus that colonialism was thought of as bad, maybe in the United States it has a bad rep.| 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
0:00:00.5 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. Human beings have a tough time being rational sometimes. We all know that, right? There are various sorts of cognitive biases from wishful thinking to confirmation bias. There's a whole long list, you can look it up on the internet. But we human beings, we evolved over biological time to survive under certain conditions. Sometimes sitting down and thinking things through perfectly rational...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Most of you probably know that I love science of all sorts, but my favorite kind of science questions are the ones that become slightly existential, right? That sort of bump up into issues of meaning and reality at a super deep level. And some such questions are straightforwardly physics or cosmology, right? You know, where did the universe come from? Why is there a universe at all? What...| 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
0:00:00.4 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Mathematics has always been the intellectual subject that has a reputation of being the most precise and rigorous and well formulated and completely grounded. You have axioms and then you prove things with 100% rigor, ideally anyway. But starting in the 1800s, there were these events that kind of might shake your faith in the ability of mathematics to be perfectly precise and clear and under...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.8 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Sometimes now, as a card carrying philosopher, I'm a member of a philosophy department as well as a physics department. People will say either in some natural conversation or just blurting it out because they've been meaning to, Philosophy is kind of useless, it's silly. It doesn't address problems that are real and important. It doesn't take into account data and experiment and things l...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You know that artificial intelligence is in the news. We've talked about AI in various different ways here on the podcast, especially over the last couple years where ChatGPT and other large language models have really become an enormous study of interest to many people for financial reasons, for intellectual reasons. They're becoming everywhere, right? Google has put them on the first pa...| Sean Carroll
0:00:00.5 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Those of you who were old enough, are old enough to have been paying attention to physics blogs and magazines and books in the early part of the 21st century, in the 2000s, might remember the string wars, there was a slightly public debate about the status of string theory. One of the most popular ways of trying to get a quantum theory of gravity. String theory was born in the late '60s, ear...| 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
