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 Dec 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 Dec 20213h 37min
