Hello everyone and welcome to the February 2022

Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

It's been a while since we've done an AMA since I do them every month except for January.

So the last one we did was the beginning of December.

And things have happened, right? I was in Boston last time we were doing an AMA and now I'm back

in Los Angeles. I have handed in the draft menu script for my next book, which will be volume one

of the biggest ideas in the universe series. Volume one is going to be called space, time, and motion

and that's basically classical physics, broadly construed. So for those of you who don't know,

the biggest idea is gimmick is I'm going to be teaching what I consider to be the biggest ideas

in physics even though I say it's in the universe. It's mostly physics we're talking about,

a little bit of math in there. And the gimmick is that you aren't supposed to know any math or

physics coming in. It is for a very broad audience, but I will teach you the math. So this is going

to be a textbook that not a textbook. Sorry, certainly not a textbook, a book, a trade book, a

popular book that is not afraid of doing the equations. And the trick there is that I'm not trying

to teach you how to be a physicist. I'm not teaching you how to solve the equations like a working

physicist or mathematician would have to do. I just want you to understand what the equations

are saying. And that's actually enormously easier as it turns out. So I will teach you what a

derivative is and what an integral is and what vectors are and what tensors are. And with that,

we'll go pretty far. We go through Newtonian mechanics, of course, but also Hamiltonian mechanics,

Lagrangian mechanics, and the principle of least action, a special relativity, general relativity,

Einstein's equation, black holes, the short shield solution, with the equations there. So you have

to be a little bit interested, a little bit motivated to do it, but I've been trying really,

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