AMA | August 2025
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2025
⏱️ 221 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the August 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!
Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/08/04/ama-august-2025/
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Transcript
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| 0:36.4 | Hi, it's Helen Pidd here, one of the hosts of the Guardian's award-winning daily news podcast today in focus. |
| 0:43.0 | We go beyond the headlines all over the world, talking to the people at the heart of the action, bringing you stories that matter every weekday. |
| 0:50.9 | Listen wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:56.1 | Hello everyone. Welcome to the August 2025. Ask Me Anything Edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your |
| 1:01.6 | host, Sean Carroll. Not a lot of news to report since the last AMA a month ago. The life |
| 1:08.6 | in the summertime of a college professor trying to get papers written |
| 1:12.2 | and books written does not really create a lot of adventures to relate, but that's okay. Sometimes |
| 1:17.8 | the adventures are in the mind. That's important also. There was a fun article that came out |
| 1:22.7 | in nature. They tried to figure out what physicists really think about the foundations of quantum mechanics. |
| 1:30.3 | This is something that happens every so often that, you know, we try to take a poll of a bunch of physicists and ask them what they really think. |
| 1:36.3 | The problem is with that kind of approach that it's going to be very, very biased depending on who exactly you are polling. |
| 1:43.3 | You're polling your friends. You're polling the people on who exactly you are polling. You're polling your friends, |
| 1:45.2 | you're polling the people whose emails you happen to have, you're polling people at a certain |
| 1:49.3 | kind of conference. Those sets of people might be very different in the kinds of quantum |
| 1:54.2 | mechanics that they like. So I actually consulted a little bit with the authors of the piece |
| 2:00.7 | to try to figure out how to get |
| 2:02.0 | the largest cross-section of physicists. They went through people who had published on |
... |
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