219 | Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Curiosity
It's easy enough to proclaim that we are curious creatures, but what does that really mean? What kinds of curiosity are there? And how does curiosity arise in our brains? Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett a...
28 Nov 20221h 2min
218 | Raphael Bousso on Black Holes and the Holographic Universe
Stephen Hawking's discoveries of black hole radiation, entropy, and the information-loss problem have both taught us an enormous amount about the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity, an...
21 Nov 20221h 21min
217 | Margaret Levi on Moral Political Economy
Why do people voluntarily hand over authority to a government? Under what conditions should they do so? These questions are both timeless and extremely timely, as modern democratic governments struggl...
14 Nov 20221h 21min
AMA | November 2022
Welcome to the November 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...
7 Nov 20223h
216 | John Allen Paulos on Numbers, Narratives, and Numeracy
People have a complicated relationship to mathematics. We all use it in our everyday lives, from calculating a tip at a restaurant to estimating the probability of some future event. But many people f...
31 Okt 20221h 10min
215 | Barry Loewer on Physics, Counterfactuals, and the Macroworld
The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microsc...
24 Okt 20221h 34min
214 | Antonio Padilla on Large Numbers and the Scope of the Universe
It's a big universe we live in, so it comes as no surprise that big numbers are needed to describe it. There are roughly 10^22 stars in the observable universe, and about 10^88 particles altogether. B...
17 Okt 20221h 15min
AMA | October 2022
Welcome to the October 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pat...
10 Okt 20223h 1min
