Hello, everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. We talk about science a lot here at Mindscape

I don't think anyone could avoid getting that impression

But you know we talk about other things too. I do try to let people in on the details the real world details of how science

gets done

It's not always straightforward. It's a little bit less. It's different. Let's say then the

Press release model right like the way that we learn about science is very often because some scientists have done something and then if it's a discovery

Experimentally or like a really cool theory. They will have a press release or there will be newspaper or

Internet articles or whatever or the right to book or have a podcast etc

That's not really how science gets done science is much more incremental. It's much more gradual and

There's a lot of tools that people use so today's

Subject matter is a little bit different. We're talking about cosmology, but we're talking about

Specifically the role of computer simulations in cosmology our guest is Andrew Ponson who is a cosmologist at UC London over there in the UK

He has a new book that just came out called the universe in a box

Simulations and the quest to code the cosmos and I love the topic because he talks a lot about the

Big Bang cosmology inflation dark matter etc

But the central organizing principle is how we use

computer simulations to do this kind of science and

That's both crucially important because these days you can't you know that the theories are so complicated that you can't

Make very good detailed

Predictions with a pencil and paper you really need to use a computer simulation and

And because that act which seems kind of innocent. Let's just put it on a computer and simulate it

Maybe it's not so innocent after all. I mean not I don't mean not innocent in the sense of guilty

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