Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas18 Jan 2021

130 | Frank Wilczek on the Present and Future of Fundamental Physics

What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What counts as fundamental is somewhat contestable, but it includes our best understanding of matter and energy, space and time, and dynamical laws, as well as complex emergent structures and the sweep of the cosmos. Few people are better positioned to talk about fundamental physics than Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Laureate who has made significant contributions to our understanding of the strong interactions, dark matter, black holes, and condensed matter, as well as proposing the existence of time crystals. We talk about what we currently know about fundamental physics, but also the directions in which it is heading, for better and for worse.

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Frank Wilczek received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at the MIT; Founding Director of the T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University; and Professor at Stockholm University. Among his numerous awards are the MacArthur Fellowship, the Nobel Prize in Physics (2004, for asymptotic freedom), membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

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Episoder(427)

183 | Michael Dine on Supersymmetry, Anthropics, and the Future of Particle Physics

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it's hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet...

7 Feb 20221h 39min

182 | Sally Haslanger on Social Construction and Critical Theory

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it...

31 Jan 20221h 37min

181 | Peter Dodds on Quantifying the Shape of Stories

A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on understanding the structure of stories and other strings...

24 Jan 20221h 16min

180 | Camilla Pang on Instructions for Being Human

Being a human is tricky. There are any number of unwritten rules and social cues that we have to learn as we go, but that we ultimately learn to take for granted. Camilla Pang, who was diagnosed with ...

17 Jan 20221h 3min

179 | David Reich on Genetics and Ancient Humanity

Human beings like to divide themselves into groups, and then cooperate, socialize, and reproduce with members of their own group. But they're not very absolutist about it; groups tend to gradually (or...

10 Jan 20221h 13min

178 | Jody Azzouni on What Is and Isn't Real

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can't kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There's surely a kind of reality th...

3 Jan 20221h 14min

Holiday Message 2021 | On Disciplines & Cocktails

As each December comes to a close, we wrap up another year of podcasts with the Mindscape Holiday Message. Nothing too profound, just some thoughts that wouldn't fit easily into a regular podcast. Thi...

20 Des 202159min

AMA | December 2021

Welcome to the December 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of qu...

15 Des 20213h 37min