Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory of general relativity with the framework of quantum mechanics. But a number of intriguing ideas have arisen along the way, including black hole radiation, the wave function of the universe, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and the role of quantum information theory. Theoretical physicist Daniel Harlow has made significant contributions to our understanding of information loss in black holes; in this conversation we turn those insights onto quantum cosmology, with potentially significant implications for how quantum mechanics itself works.





Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/30/349-daniel-harlow-on-what-quantum-gravity-teaches-us-about-quantum-mechanics/
 
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Daniel Harlow received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his awards are a Packard Fellowship and the New Horizons in Physics Prize.
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"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e.g., becoming stronger through exercise) that would then be inherited by its descendants. This is a different story than the one ultimately told by the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, according to which inheritance passes through our genome (which doesn't know that we've been working out). In her book The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, historian of science Jessica Riskin argues that this picture is too simple, and that Lamarck made contributions we should still pay attention to: most significantly, the idea that organisms have a creative agency of their own, in addition to the influences of the outside world.





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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/23/348-jessica-riskin-on-jean-baptiste-lamarck-and-life-as-creative-agency/







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Jessica Riskin received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University. Among her awards are the Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science and the J. Russell Major Award for French history. Her books include The Restless Clock and Genesis Redux, and she is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.
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In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single prison guard. Although his original idea was never built, the word has come to indicate any system of social control through constant surveillance. Nowadays, we are close to creating such a system, not for prisons, but for our everyday lives. The data about our whereabouts and doings is collected by our smart devices, and available for search by the authorities. I talk with law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson about the new reality, as discussed in his book Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.





Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/16/347-andrew-guthrie-ferguson-on-how-your-data-will-be-used-against-you/







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Andrew Guthrie Ferguson received his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an LL.M. from Georgetown University. He is currently a professor of law at George Washington University Law School. He is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI) and was an Advisor to the ALI Principles of the Law, Policing Project. He previously worked as a supervising attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.
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Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what numbers actually mean. One window on the ways that species differ is how they play amongst themselves. I talk with anthropologist and cognitive scientist Erica Cartmill about modes of play and other social behaviors among various species, and what they reveal about the ways we all think.
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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/09/346-erica-cartmill-on-how-human-and-animal-minds-think-and-play/






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Erica Cartmill received her Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from the University of St. Andrews. She is Professor of Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Animal Behavior, Psychology, and Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the co-chair of the EVOLANG conferences and the co-director of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. She is co-director of the Possible Minds lab at IU, and also manages the Observing Animals project, which asks for public input on how animals interact with each other.
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Welcome to the March 2026 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 Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!
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Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/02/ama-march-2026/



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