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

320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe

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

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.84.4K 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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:11.2

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0:16.7

This Good Morning America Book Club pick launches readers into the fascinating world of 1980s NASA,

0:23.7

where one woman's astronomical dreams collide with unexpected love.

0:28.9

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0:34.8

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0:40.5

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0:47.6

and get your first audiobook free at audible.com slash wonder why UK.

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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