320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 136 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our universe started out looking very simple: hot, dense, smooth, rapidly expanding. According to our best current model, it will end up looking simple once again: cold, dark, empty. It's in between -- now, roughly speaking -- that things look complex. I have been working to understand the stages by which complexity comes into existence, thrives, and eventually disappears. Without going into technical details, in this solo episode I give an overview of the general picture and the clues we are looking at to better understand the process of complexogenesis.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/06/30/320-solo-complexity-and-the-universe/
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The Santa Fe Institute has recently published a four-volume set of classic papers on complexity. David Krakauer provided a comprehensive introduction that has been published as a standalone book.
Transcript
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| 0:58.8 | In the 90s, my friend and fellow journalist Dom Phillips was at the centre of the UK's dance music explosion. |
| 1:03.5 | By 2022, he had mysteriously disappeared |
| 1:07.0 | in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon jungle, |
| 1:10.4 | with his friend Bruno Pereira. |
| 1:12.8 | In 2025, so many questions remain. |
| 1:17.4 | I'm Tom Phillips, the Guardian's Latin America correspondent. |
| 1:21.3 | Listen to missing in the Amazon wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:25.1 | Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. |
| 1:28.5 | I'm your host, Sean Carroll. |
| 1:36.1 | Podcasting, like the subject of today's episode, is a complex system. Many things happen. |
| 1:41.5 | You cannot always know what is going on. Sometimes the schedule kind of gets away from you, and you decide that this would be the right time for a solo episode. |
| 1:46.7 | This is a fancy way of saying that I'm behind on actually recording episodes because of various things that happened. |
| 1:52.4 | So why not? Just do it myself. That's always a strategy that is available to us. |
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