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9 Nov, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Mindscape Episode 122 | David Eagleman on Tapping Into the Livewired Brain. #MindscapePodcast
preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/1…
Audio player: art19.com/shows/sean-car…
David is a prolific author, inventor, and TV presenter, as well as neuroscientist. His new book is Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain.
indiebound.org/book/978030790…
Oops, should have tagged @davideagleman. And while I do let me again plug the #MindscapePodcast Twitter list: twitter.com/i/lists/103239… Every guest I've had on is listed (if they're on Twitter, which I mean, come on).

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More from @seanmcarroll

Sean Carroll Profile picture
11 Nov
Hugh Everett's birthday! Pioneer of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Let us celebrate by thinking about ontological extravagance. I will do so by way of analogy, because I have found that everyone loves analogies and nobody ever willfully misconstrues them.
We look at the night sky and see photons arriving to us, emitted by distant stars. Let's contrast two different theories about how stars emit photons.
One theory says, we know how stars shine, and our equations predict that they emit photons roughly uniformly in all directions. Call this the "Many-Photons Interpretation" (MPI).
Read 10 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
10 Nov
Most entertaining part of current mess are the folks saying *they’re* not crazy stolen-election conspiracy theorists, but shouldn’t we investigate the crazy claims seriously, because questions have been raised, right?

(Not entertaining at all, actually.)
Hopefully it will count against the credibility of such folks going forward. The naughty pleasure of being an edgy contrarian can be much more gratifying than common sense and clear-eyed evaluation of the evidence.
An infinite number of things could be true. Good judgment entails knowing which are worth taking seriously.
Read 4 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
3 Nov
My rough election-watching algorithm tomorrow:

* If either PA or FL are called for Biden, he'll win.

* If both PA and FL are called for Trump, he'll win.

* If they're both delayed, but Texas is called for Biden, he'll win.

Otherwise we're in for a long night/week/month.
These are far from certainties (T could win both PA and FL but Biden somehow wins both Georgia and North Carolina, for example), but I think a decent calibration of expectations.
Also, scrap the Electoral College, it's absurd.
Read 4 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
2 Nov
Mindscape 121 | Cornel West @CornelWest on What Democracy Is and Should Be. #MindscapePodcast
preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/1…
Audio player: art19.com/shows/sean-car…
Cornel West is of course the author of Race Matters among many other books, one of which is Democracy Matters. There he discusses the role of the Socratic, prophetic, and tragicomic traditions.
indiebound.org/book/978014303…
Read 4 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
6 Oct
Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize for showing that black holes are an almost-unavoidable prediction of classical general relativity. Let's take a peek into what that entailed. 1/n
Einstein wrote down the equation for the dynamics of spacetime in 1915. It was complicated, and he was skeptical that it could be solved exactly. For his own investigation of e.g. the orbit of Mercury, he used approximation methods like any good physicist. 2/
But just a month later Karl Schwarzschild, taking time off between battles in the German army, found an exact solution under the assumption of perfect spherical symmetry. Tragically, Schwarzshild died of pemphigus a year later. 3/
Read 19 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
7 Jul
I firmly believe that the best response to speech that one disagrees with is to offer better arguments in refutation, not to silence people. But an open letter like this one in Harper's is pretty unpersuasive, to the point of being anti-productive. (1/n)
harpers.org/a-letter-on-ju…
In part that's due to the particular group of signatories. Several of them are people I enormously admire. But others have themselves been involved in attempts to silence people they disagree with. And none of them is exactly lacking ways to have their voices be heard. (2/n)
More importantly, the letter declines to engage with substance, instead straw-manning the incidents they object to. We are told, for example, that "professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class." (3/n)
Read 10 tweets

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