335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2025
⏱️ 78 minutes
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Summary
Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It can be tempting to think of scientific discoveries as being carefully constructed atop a rock-solid foundation. In reality, scientific progress is tentative and fallible. Scientists propose models, assign them probabilities, and run tests to see whether they succeed or fail. In cosmologist Andrew Jaffe's new book, The Random Universe, he illustrates how models and probability help us make sense of the cosmos.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/10/335-andrew-jaffe-on-models-probability-and-the-universe/
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Andrew Jaffe received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. He is currently a professor of astrophysics and cosmology and Director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology at Imperial College, London. His research lies at the intersection of theoretical and observational cosmology, including the Planck Surveyor, Euclid, LISA, and Simons Observatory collaborations.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the ideas that |
| 0:05.2 | has been very common in intellectual history, at least the parts of intellectual history that I know |
| 0:10.5 | about in the world, is the search for certainty in knowledge, rock bottom, 100% reliable |
| 0:18.8 | knowledge of something along the lines of a proof in geometry or logic |
| 0:23.7 | or other areas of mathematics. It turns out, it took the human race a long time to learn |
| 0:29.6 | this lesson, but it turns out that scientific knowledge, empirical knowledge about the |
| 0:35.0 | actual world in which we live, is not like that. That's not achievable |
| 0:40.4 | in the world of the scientific exploration of the world because there's a lot of different |
| 0:45.9 | ideas you might have about the world. There's no a priori way to reason your way into figuring |
| 0:51.8 | out which one is the right one. And what you have to do is |
| 0:55.1 | propose lots of different possibilities and sift through them, trying to fit them through the |
| 0:59.8 | data and understanding that some of them fit better, some of them fit worse, some of them don't |
| 1:04.3 | fit yet but still have a chance, and all that messy reality of the situation. We call these |
| 1:10.2 | theories, if you want to be a little bit less grandiose about it, models of the situation. We call these theories, if you want to be a little bit less |
| 1:11.7 | grandiose about it, models of the world. And scientists use models all the time, but it's not |
| 1:17.0 | something you need to be grown up, sophisticated scientists to do. Little children model the world |
| 1:22.2 | almost as soon as they're born. We mentioned this both in the podcast with Alison Gopnik and with Judea |
| 1:28.8 | Pearl. Little kids touch things and try to build a causal map of the world around them. |
| 1:34.5 | Scientists just do the same thing in a more sophisticated way. But like many things, the |
| 1:39.7 | philosophical underpinnings of an idea, like the fact that scientific knowledge is provisional |
| 1:46.2 | and probabilistic rather than certain and foundational means that we can update our way of |
| 1:53.1 | thinking about it, our actual technical tools that we use to derive scientific ideas |
... |
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