Welcome to the After-On Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Reed.

And this is a series of conversations with thinkers, founders, and scientists.

Take a little time and stretch out because these talks are unhurried and meant to bring

you to a top percentile understanding of something important.

So whether you're in to start-ups or ideas, a techie or a lit major, take your time, engage

your mind, and you'll be glad you did it.

Especially this week when we'll be talking to Sean Carroll.

Sean is a research theoretical physicist at Caltech who is also a popularizer and accessible

izer of tough scientific concepts.

He is a fellow podcaster in this role, and I'll tell you a lot more about his podcast

toward the end of today's episode.

He's also written four books that sufficiently ambitious non-scientists should be able

to navigate, including the New York Times bestseller, The Big Picture, and an upcoming

book called Something Deeply Hidden, which will be published on September 10.

That new book concerns the subject of today's conversation, which is the bizarre and

ethereal world of quantum mechanics, virtually nothing that we equate with modern life,

computing, the internet, mobile phones, or anything else involving a transistor would

be possible without the wildly successful equations and predictions that we derive from

quantum mechanics.

However, you'll notice I didn't say anything about our understanding of quantum mechanics

because we don't have one.

And I mean that literally.

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