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 emotionally or aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. The study of how form and function come together in things is what we call "Design." Today's guest, Ge Wang, is a computer scientist and electronic musician with a new book called Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime. It's incredibly creative in both substance and style, featuring a unique photo-comic layout and many thoughtful ideas about the nature of design, both practical and idealistic.

Ge Wang received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University, and is currently Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. He is the author of the ChucK programming language for musical applications, and co-founder of the mobile-app developer Smule. He has given a well-known TED talk where he demonstrates Ocarina, an app for turning an iPhone into a wind instrument.

• Stanford Web page
• Artful Design home page (and Amazon page)
• TED talk on the DIY Orchestra of the Future
• Stanford Laptop Orchestra
• Smule
• Wikipedia page
• Twitter

 

 

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," on the other hand, is the task of explaining our individual, subjective, first-person experiences of the world. What is it like to be me, rather than someone else? Everyone agrees that the Easy Problems are hard; some people think the Hard Problem is almost impossible, while others think it's pretty easy. Today's guest, David Chalmers, is arguably the leading philosopher of consciousness working today, and the one who coined the phrase "the Hard Problem," as well as proposing the philosophical zombie thought experiment. Recently he has been taking seriously the notion of panpsychism. We talk about these knotty issues (about which we deeply disagree), but also spend some time on the possibility that we live in a computer simulation. Would simulated lives be "real"? (There we agree -- yes they would.)

David Chalmers got his Ph.D. from Indiana University working under Douglas Hoftstadter. He is currently University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his books are The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, The Character of Consciousness, and Constructing the World. He and David Bourget founded the PhilPapers project.

• Web site
• NYU Faculty page
• Wikipedia page
• PhilPapers page
• Amazon author page
• NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
• TED talk: How do you explain consciousness?

I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just started taking data. Comparing where they were to where they needed to get to in terms of sensitivity, the mumblings in the audience after the talk were clear: “They’ll never make it.” Of course we now know that they did, and the 2016 announcement of the detection of gravitational waves led to a 2017 Nobel Prize for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish. So it’s a great pleasure to have Kip Thorne himself as a guest on the podcast. Kip tells us a bit about he LIGO story, and offers some strong opinions about the Nobel Prize. But he’s had a long and colorful career, so we also talk about whether it’s possible to travel backward in time through a wormhole, and what his future movie plans are in the wake of the success of Interstellar.

Kip Thorne received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University, and is now the Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics (Emeritus) at Caltech. Recognized as one of the world’s leading researchers in general relativity, he has done important work on gravitational waves, black holes, wormholes, and relativistic stars. His role in helping found and guide the LIGO experiment was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2017. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including a famously weighty textbook, Gravitation. He was executive producer of the 2014 film Interstellar, which was based on an initial concept by him and Lynda Obst. He’s been awarded too many prizes to list here, and has also been involved in a number of famous bets.

• Caltech page
• Wikipedia page
• Nobel Prize citation
• Nobel Lecture
• Amazon.com author page
• Internet Movie Database page

Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a whole, not just in the cells of the brain. In some sense this is trivially true; our brains interact with the rest of our bodies, taking in signals and giving back instructions. But it seems bold to situate important elements of cognition itself in the actual non-brain parts of the body. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is a psychologist and neuroscientist who uses imaging technologies to study how different parts of the brain and body are involved in different cognitive tasks. We talk a lot about mirror neurons, those brain cells that light up both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see someone else performing the action. Understanding how these cells work could be key to a better view of empathy and interpersonal interactions.

Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is an Associate Professor in the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Department of Occupational Science at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, and has also done research at the University of Parma and the University of California, Berkeley.

• Home page
• USC profile
• Lab home page
• Google Scholar
• Talk on Brain and Body

There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate change. But perhaps there is a tiny cause for optimism -- or at least, the prospect of a new equilibrium, if we can manage to ameliorate our most destructive impulses. Wildlife conservationist Joe Walston argues that -- seemingly paradoxically, but not really -- increasing urbanization provides hope for biodiversity preservation and poverty alleviation moving forward. As one piece of evidence, while our population is still growing, the rate of growth has slowed substantially as people move into cities and new opportunities become available. We discuss these trends, the causes underlying them, and what strategies suggest themselves to bring humans into balance with the environment before it's too late.

Joe Walston is Senior Vice President for Field Conservation the Wildlife Conservation Society. He received his Masters degree in Zoology and Animal Biology from Aberdeen University. Before moving to New York, he spent fifteen years working in on conservation programs in Africa and SouthEast Asia. His work in Cambodia was awarded with that country's highest civilian honor. A species of tube-nosed bat has been named Murina Walston in recognition of his work on protecting bat habitats.

• Wildlife Conservation Society
• ResearchGate Page
• Twitter
• Paper on urbanization and biodiversity (and press release)

We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply an accurate recounting of the facts, but part of it is generally taken to be some kind of explanation about why. How much should we trust these explanations? This is a question with philosophical implications as well as historical ones, and philosopher Alex Rosenberg's new book How History Gets Things Wrong claims that we should basically not trust them at all. It's not that we get the facts wrong, it's that we have wrong ideas about causality and how the human mind works, and we can't help but import these wrong ideas to our beliefs about history. Alex and I dig into how this claim arises naturally from a certain way that naturalists should think about the world.

Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, with secondary appointments in biology and political science. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Lakatos Award for the best book in the philosophy of science. Rosenberg is the author of numerous books and articles on philosophical aspects of various subjects, including biology, cognitive science, economics, history, causation, and atheism. He has also written two novels, The Girl from Krakow and Autumn in Oxford.

• Web site
• Duke home page
• Wikipedia page
• Amazon author page
• Interview at 3:AM
• Interview at What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he's been quite successful at the latter -- you may know him as the director and co-writer of Marvel's Doctor Strange. (When I was younger, Doctor Strange was one of my favorite comic characters, along with Green Lantern. At least one of them got a great movie.) Scott was gracious enough to take time from a very busy schedule to sit down for a chat about a wide number of topics. Using Doctor Strange as a template, we go in some detail through the immensely complicated process of taking a modern blockbuster movie from pitch to screen. But Scott's genre of choice is horror -- his other films include Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose -- and we move on to discussing why certain genres seem universal, before tackling even bigger issues about worldviews (Scott is Christian, I'm a naturalist) and how they affect one's life and work.

Scott Derrickson is an acclaimed director, producer, and screenwriter. He earned his M.A. in film production from the University of Southern California. His films as a director include Hellraiser: Inferno, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sinister, Deliver Us from Evil, and Doctor Strange. He has written or co-written numerous other films, including Land of Plenty (directed by Wim Wenders) and Devil's Knot (directed by Atom Egoyan).

• Wikipedia page
• IMDB page
• Twitter
• Doctor Strange on Wikipedia
• Interview with Scott Myers

Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it's natural for economists to occasionally wander out into the question of what we should do as we live in the world. A very good example of this is a new book by economist Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments. Tyler will be well-known to many listeners for his long-running blog Marginal Revolution (co-created with his colleague Alex Tabarrok) and his many books and articles. Here he offers a surprising new take on how society should arrange itself, based on the simple idea that the welfare of future generations counts for just as much as the welfare of the current one. From that starting point, Tyler concludes that the most moral thing for us to do is to work to maximize economic growth right now, as that's the best way to ensure that future generations are well-off. We talk about this idea, as well as the more general idea of how to think like an economist. (In the second half of the podcast we veer off into talking about quantum mechanics and the multiverse, to everyone's benefit.)

Tyler Cowen is the Holbert C. Harris professor of economics and General Director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is the author of over a dozen books and many journal articles, and writes frequently for the popular press. His blog Marginal Revolution is one of the leading economics blogs on the internet. He is widely recognized for his eclectic interests, from chess to music to ethnic dining.

• Website
• Home page at George Mason
• Mercatus Center web page
• Marginal Revolution
• Marginal Revolution University
• Twitter
• Bloomberg Opinion columns
• Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide
• Wikipedia page
• Amazon books

String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework. This doesn't seem like a recipe for creating a lightning rod of controversy, but somehow string theory has become just that. To get to the bottom of why anyone (indeed, a substantial majority of experts in the field) would think that replacing particles with little loops of string was a promising way forward for theoretical physics, I spoke with expert string theorist Clifford Johnson. We talk about the road string theory has taken from a tentative proposal dealing with the strong interactions, through a number of revolutions, to the point it's at today. Also, where all those extra dimensions might have gone. At the end we touch on Clifford's latest project, a graphic novel that he wrote and illustrated about how science is done.

Clifford Johnson is a Professor of Physics at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics and physics from the University of Southampton. His research area is theoretical physics, focusing on string theory and quantum field theory. He was awarded the Maxwell Medal from the Institute of Physics. Johnson is the author of the technical monograph D-Branes, as well as the graphic novel The Dialogues.

• Home page
• Wikipedia page
• Publications
• A talk on The Dialogues
• Asymptotia blog
• Twitter

The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of different ways the world could be different from our actual one. Annalee Newitz has carved out a unique career as a writer and thinker, founding the visionary blog io9 and publishing nonfiction in a number of formats, and is now putting her imagination to work in the realm of fiction. Her recent novel, Autonomous, examines a future in which the right to work is not automatic, rogue drug pirates synthesize compounds to undercut Big Pharma, and sentient robots discover their sexuality. We talk about how science fiction needs more economics, how much of human behavior comes down to dealing with our neuroses, and what it's like to make the transition from writing non-fiction to fiction.

Annalee Newitz is currently an Editor at Large at Ars Technica. She received her Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley. She founded and edited io9, which later merged with Gizmodo, where she also served as editor. She and Charlie Jane Anders host the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, a bi-weekly exploration of the meaning of science fiction.

• Home page
• Wikipedia page
• Amazon author page
• Articles at io9/Gizmodo
• Articles at Ars Technica
• Our Opinions Are Correct podcast

Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundworm, with an eye to extending its lifespan as well as figuring out exactly what processes take place when we age. In this episode we contemplate what scientists have learned about aging, and the prospects for ameliorating its effects -- or curing it altogether? -- even in human beings.

Coleen Murphy received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University, and is currently Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics at Princeton.

• Home page at the Lewis-Sigler Institute
• Lab web page
• Princeton Profile
• Google Scholar publication page
• Twitter

Language comes naturally to us, but is also deeply mysterious. On the one hand, it manifests as a collection of sounds or marks on paper. On the other hand, it also conveys meaning – words and sentences refer to states of affairs in the outside world, or to much more abstract concepts. How do words and meaning come together in the brain? David Poeppel is a leading neuroscientist who works in many areas, with a focus on the relationship between language and thought. We talk about cutting-edge ideas in the science and philosophy of language, and how researchers have just recently climbed out from under a nineteenth-century paradigm for understanding how all this works.

David Poeppel is a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, as well as the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from MIT. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the DaimlerChrysler Berlin Prize in 2004. He is the author, with Greg Hickok, of the dual-stream model of language processing.

To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, scientists tend to focus on whether they can do something, not whether they should. Questions of what we should do tend to wander away from the pristine beauty of science into the messy worlds of ethics and the law. But with the ongoing revolutions in biology, we can’t avoid facing up to some difficult should-questions. Alta Charo is a world expert in a gamut of these issues, working as a law professor and government official specializing in bioethics. We hit all the big questions: designer babies, birth control, abortion, religious exemptions, stem cells, end of life care, and more. This episode will give you the context necessary to think about a host of looming questions from a legal as well as a moral perspective.

Alta Charo is currently the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She earned a B.A. in Biology from Harvard, and went on to receive her J.D. from Columbia University. Charo served as a bioethics advisor on the Obama Administration transition team, as well as working as a senior policy advisor at the Food and Drug Administration. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and was awarded the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at UW-Madison.

For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and services. But who decides exactly how many goods/services a given unit of money can buy? And what maintains the social contract that we all agree to go along with it? Technology is changing what money is and how we use it, and Neha Narula is a leader in thinking about where money is going. One much-hyped aspect is the advent of blockchain technology, which has led to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We talk about what the blockchain really is, how it enables new kinds of currency, and from a wider perspective whether it can help restore a more individualistic, decentralized Web.

Neha Narula is the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. She obtained her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and worked at Google and Digg before joining the faculty there. She is an expert on scalable databases, secure software, cryptocurrencies, and online privacy.

Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It's played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars, and can feature esoteric harmonic experimentation or good old-fashioned foot-stomping swing. Nobody embodies the scope of modern jazz better than Wynton Marsalis. As a trumpet player, bandleader, composer, educator, and ambassador for the music, he has worked tirelessly to keep jazz vibrant and alive. In this bouncy conversation, we talk about various kinds of music, how they might relate to physics, and some of the greater challenges facing the United States today.

(This and the next few podcasts were recorded on the road with headset microphones, and the sound quality isn't quite as good, sorry about that.)

Hailing from an accomplished New Orleans family, Wynton Marsalis was marked as a prodigy from a young age. He played locally before moving to New York and attend Julliard, and played and recorded with artists such as Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock. He has recorded numerous albums as a leader of small ensembles, big bands, and as a soloist with symphony orchestras. He is a multiple-time Grammy winner and the first to win in both jazz and classical categories in the same year, and in 1997 his oratorio Blood on the Fields was the first non-classical work to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. Marsalis founded and continues to lead Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is in residence at Lincoln Center along with such organizations as the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet. He has won the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal, along with numerous other awards and honorary degrees.

Few events in recent astronomical history have had the worldwide emotional resonance as the 2006 announcement that Pluto was no longer considered a planet, at least as far as the International Astronomical Union was concerned. The decision was a long time coming, but no person deserves more credit/blame for forcing the astronomical community's hand than Caltech astronomer Michael Brown. He and his team discovered a number of objects in the outer Solar System -- Eris, Haumea, Sedna, and others -- any of which was just as deserving of planetary status as Pluto. Rather than letting the planetary family proliferate without bound, astronomers decided that none of these objects dominated the orbits in which they moved, so none of them should be planets. Now Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin have found indirect evidence that there is another real planet far beyond Pluto's orbit -- which they have dubbed Planet Nine just to remind you that there are currently only eight. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/mike-brown.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Mike Brown received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from U.C. Berkeley in 1994, and is currently the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at Caltech. He shared the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics in 2012 for his discovery of major new objects in the outer Solar System, and in 2007 won Caltech's annual Feynman Teaching Prize.

• Home page
• Wikipedia page
• Blog
• Twitter
• How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
• Online course, The Science of the Solar System

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We're all going to die. But while we are alive, it's up to us how we understand and deal with that fact. In the United States especially, there is a tendency to not face up to the reality of death, and to assume that our goal should be to struggle at all costs to squeeze every last minute out of life. The Death Positive movement aims to change that, helping people to both face up to death on a personal and cultural level, and to give themselves more control over the manner of their own deaths. One of the leaders in this movement is today's guest, Megan Rosenbloom, who works as a medical librarian by day. We talk about attitudes toward death around the world, the differences between dying at home and in a hospital, the importance of autonomy in old age, and how individuals and societies can cope with the ultimate inevitability that comes with being alive. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/megan-rosenbloom.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Megan Rosenbloom received a Masters from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008, and is currently Associate Director for Instruction Services at the Norris Medical Library of the University of Southern California. In 2016 she won a Mover & Shaker award from Library Journal. She is active in the Death Positive movement, serving as the co-founder and director of the Death Salon. She is currently working on a book about the history of books bound with human skin.

• Home page
• Norris Medical Library page
• Order of the Good Death
• Death Salon
• Anthropodermic Book Project
• Talk sponsored by USC's Office of Religious Life
• Twitter

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It's fun to be in the exciting, chaotic, youthful days of the podcast, when anything goes and experimentation is the order of the day. So today's show is something different: a solo effort, featuring just me talking without any guests to cramp my style. This won't be the usual format, but I suspect it will happen from time to time. Feel free to chime in below on how often you think alternative formats should be part of the mix. The topic today is "Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?", or equivalently "Why Does the Universe Exist at All?" Heady stuff, but we're not going to back away from the challenge. What I have to say will roughly follow my recent paper on the subject, although in a more chatty and accessible style. It concerns ideas at the intersection of physics, philosophy, and theology, so tune in if you're into that sort of thing. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/something-nothing.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Big news! After a number of people have asked, I have finally opened a Patreon account for people who would like to support Mindscape in some way. You can sign up to kick in a dollar or more per podcast episode, and in return you get 1) access to occasional Ask Me Anything episodes done exclusively for patrons, and 2) my undying gratitude. If the Patreon route is successful enough, I'll forego having ads on the podcast -- we'll see how it goes. Download Episode

Our understanding of heredity and genetics is improving at blinding speed. It was only in the year 2000 that scientists obtained the first rough map of the human genome: 3 billion base pairs of DNA with about 20,000 functional genes. Today, you can send a bit of your DNA to companies such as 23andMe and get a report on your personal genome (ancestry, health risks) for about $200. Technologies like CRISPR are allowing scientists to edit genes, not just map them. Science writer Carl Zimmer has been following these advances for years, and has recently written a comprehensive book about heredity: She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. We talk about how our understanding of heredity has changed over the years, how there is much more to inheritance than simply listing all the information we pass down in our DNA, and what the future might hold in a world where genetic manipulation becomes widespread. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/carl-zimmer.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Carl Zimmer is a leading science writer whose work regularly appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. He is the author of thirteen books, including a university-level textbook on evolutionary biology. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. He teaches as an adjunct professor at Yale University.

• Home page
• Matter column in The New York Times
• Yale home page
• Wikipedia page
• Amazon author page
• Talk on Science, Journalism, and Democracy
• Twitter

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 Both words in the phrase "liberal democracy" carry meaning, and both concepts are under attack around the world. "Democracy" means that they people rule, while "liberal" (in this sense) means that the rights of individuals are protected, even if they're not part of the majority. Recent years have seen the rise of an authoritarian/populist political movement in many Western democracies, one that scapegoats minorities in the name of the true "will of the people." Yascha Mounk is someone who has been outspoken from the start about the dangers posed by this movement, and what those of us who support the ideals of liberal democracy can do about it. Among other things, we discuss how likely it is that liberal democracy could ultimately fail even in as stable a country as the United States.

Yascha Mounk received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. He is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard, a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America, and Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. His most recent book is The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It.

Poker, like life, is a game of incomplete information. To do well in such a game, we have to think in terms of probabilities, unpredictable strategies, and Bayesian inference. These are ideas that play a central role in physics and rationality as well as in poker, which makes Liv Boeree such a great person to talk about them. Liv is a professional poker player who studied physics as a university student, and maintains an active interest in science generally and astrophysics in particular. We talk about poker, probability, the likelihood that aliens exist elsewhere in the universe, and how to be rational when it comes to charitable giving. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/liv-boeree.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Liv Boeree earned a First Class Honours degree in Physics from the University of Manchester, before becoming a professional poker player. She has won well over $3 million on the poker circuit, including taking First Place at the 2010 European Poker Tour Main Event in San Remo, Italy. She is the co-founder of the charity organization Raising for Effective Giving, which has raised millions of dollars (largely from fellow poker players) for good causes.

• Home page
• Wikipedia page
• TEDx talk on probabilities
• Vox article on the Fermi paradox
• Raising for Effective Giving
• Twitter

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If you scale up an animal to twice its height, keeping everything else proportionate, its volume and weight become eight times as much. Such a scaling relation was used by J.B.S. Haldane in his famous essay, "On Being the Right Size," to help explain certain features of living organisms. But scaling relations go much deeper than that, and they are often much more subtle than the volume going as the cube of the length. Geoffrey West is a particle physicist turned complexity theorist, who studies how features from metabolism to lifespan change as we adjust the size of an organism -- or of other complex systems, from cities to computer networks. His insights have important implications for innovation, sustainability, and the best ways to organize life here on Earth. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/geoffrey-west.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Geoffrey West received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he served as President from 2005 to 2009. He has been listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.

• Home page
• Wikipedia page
• Amazon page
• TED talk on "The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations"
• Google Scholar publications

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According to atheism, God does not exist. But religions have traditionally done much more than simply proclaim God's existence: they have provided communities, promoted the arts, handed down moral guidance, and so on. Can atheism, or perhaps humanism, replicate these roles? Anthony Pinn grew up as a devout Methodist, but became a humanist when he felt that religion wasn't really helping the communities that he cared about. Today he is a professor of religion who works to bring together atheism and the black community. We talk about humanism, identity politics, and the way forward. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/anthony-pinn.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Anthony Pinn received his Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University, and is currently the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, where he was the first African-American to hold an endowed chair at the university. He is the Founding Director of The Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning at Rice University, and Director of Research,The Institute for Humanist Studies. Among his many books are Writing God's Obituary: How a Good Methodist Became a Better Atheist and When Colorblindness Isn't the Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race

• Home page
• Faculty page at Rice
• Wikipedia page
• Amazon.com page
• Online course at edX: Religion and Hip Hop Culture
• Talk on How a Good Methodist Became a Better Atheist
• Twitter

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The human mind loves nothing more than to build mental boxes -- categories -- and put things into them, then refuse to accept it when something doesn't fit. Nowhere is this more clear than in the idea that there are men, and there are women, and that's it. Alice Dreger is an historian of science, specializing in intersexuality and the relationship between bodies and identities. She is also a successful activist, working to change the way that doctors deal with newborn children who are born intersex. We talk about human sexuality and a number of other hot-button topics, and ruminate on the challenges of being both an intellectual (devoted to truth) and an activist (seeking justice). [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/alice-dreger.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Alice Dreger received her Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University. She has worked as a faculty member at Michigan State University and Northwestern University. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and was the Founding Board Chair of the Intersex Society of North America. She is the author of a number of books, including Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice, and most recently The Talk: Helping Your Kids Navigate Sex in the Real World.

• Home page
• Wikipedia page
• Publications
• TED Talk: Is Anatomy Destiny?
• Twitter

Quantum mechanics and general relativity are the two great triumphs of twentieth-century theoretical physics. Unfortunately, they don't play well together -- despite years of effort, we currently lack a completely successful quantum theory of gravity, although there are some promising ideas out there. Carlo Rovelli is a pioneer of one of those ideas, loop quantum gravity, as well as the bestselling author of such books as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and the recent The Order of Time. We talk about how to make progress on this knotty problem, including whether string theory will play a role (Carlo thinks not). [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/rovelli.mp3" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Carlo Rovelli is a professor of theoretical physics at the Centre de Physique Théorique de Luminy of Aix-Marseille University in France. In 1988, he and Abhay Ashtekar and Lee Smolin introduced the idea of loop quantum gravity. He is also the author of the "relational" interpretation of quantum mechanics.

• Home page
• Wikipedia page
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon.com author page
• Talk on The Physics and Philosophy of Time
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For the first full episode of Mindscape, it's an honor to welcome social psychologist Carol Tavris. Her book with co-author Eliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), explores the effect that cognitive dissonance has on how we think. We talk about the fascinating process by which people justify the mistakes that they make, and how that leads to everything from false memories to political polarization. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/carol-tavris.mp3" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Carol Tavris received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan. She is the author of numerous books, covering topics such as gender, biology, and emotion, and is a frequent contributor to a variety of newspapers and magazines. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

• Carol Tavris on Wikipedia
• Social Psychology Network profile
• Amazon.com author page
• A lecture on "Dissent and Dissonance: The Science and Art of Argument."

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I've decided to officially take the plunge into the world of podcasting. The new show will be called Mindscape, and will mostly consist of me talking to smart people about interesting ideas. (Occasionally it will be me talking by myself about ideas of questionable merit.) I'm a grizzled veteran at appearing on other podcasts, and it's past time I sat in the director's chair here. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/episode-zero-audio.mp3" artist="Sean Carroll" social_gplus="false" social_email="true" tweet_text="Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast, Episode 0: Welcome!" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Today I'm just releasing a short teaser podcast, in both audio (bottom of this post) and video (right here) form. Next week will be a more official launch, with several real episodes, all of which I had enormous fun recording. FAQ:

• It won't just be about physics, although physics will naturally appear. Indeed, the opportunity to talk about things other than physics is a large part of my motivation here. I have plans/hopes to talk to historians, psychologists, biologists, philosophers, artists, filmmakers, neuroscientists, economists, writers, theologians, political scientists, musicians, and more.
• The video above is just to lure you in. Almost all episodes will be audio-only.
• I don't have a strict release schedule, that will depend on other obligations. I would guess one every two weeks, perhaps weekly if things start going super-well. (So if you want more episodes, encourage others to subscribe!) Typical episodes will be an hour long, at least to start, though don't hold me to that.
• Right now you can both subscribe to the RSS feed, and/or to an email list, both available on the sidebar to the right. If you join the email list, you can choose to either get just the episodes as they are released, or just special announcements relevant to the podcast, or both.
• Soon I hope to be available on iTunes and Google Play and various other platforms, but I'm not sure how quickly that happens.
• There won't be any ads to start, but I am planning to monetize it if things go well. These microphones don't pay for themselves. I'm not really in it for the money, but if money starts rolling in, my incentive to keep going will be correspondingly boosted.
• Feel free to leave comments and discuss individual episodes as they appear. There is also a subreddit which might make a good conversation spot.
• Like everything else I do that isn't physics research, this is a hobby, and might have to take a temporary back seat if things get busy. But so far it's been a lot of fun, and I'm excited to see where it will go.

Show notes for this episode: I mention a study of the different ways in which artists and regular people look at images, which you can read about here. And we're ready to go! Thanks to everyone who has helped me set this up, including Gia Mora (web and technical help), Julian Morris (prodding), Cara Santa Maria (podcasting wisdom), Jason Torchinsky (art), Ted Pyne (music), Robert Alexander (gear), and Jennifer Ouellette (patience, support, wine). Comment here if you have suggestions, for good ideas to talk about, good people to talk to, or format/technical wisdom. (As always, demands that I not talk about this or that will be summarily deleted; those are my choices to make, not anybody else's.) Still very new at this, mistakes both technical and judgmental are practically guaranteed to happen, but I'm optimistic that it should be a fun ride. Download Episode [smart_podcast_player permalink="https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ]